Feasibility of Establishing Water Association Cooperatives in Guilan Province

The present study has done with the purpose of feasibility of establishing water association cooperatives in Guilan province using Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP). The research method was descriptive and the data were collected by survey technique using purposive sampling method. Considering the background of participatory organization and systems three of them; traditional system, production cooperative and rural cooperative were used as competitor options using library research and paying attention to data analysis technique and selecting the best option for participatory irrigation systems, three main criteria were recognized as social, economic and attitudinal of exploiters. In addition, four sub-criteria were recognized for each of mentioned criteria. After that the hierarchical structure of the research was drawn and according to that three types of questionnaire were complied. In the next step, a list of experts and connoisseurs (connoisseur and harbinger experts) who had educations or occupational experience related to the research topic was made and among them 22 people were selected for filling out the questionnaire. Finally the results analysis was done by Super Decision software. The results showed that due to all of the studied criteria and sub-criteria in the research production cooperative system with the final weight of 0.421 had the highest priority so was considered as the best option for planning of the participatory irrigation system in order to form water association. Next to that traditional system with the final weight of 0.306 had the second priority and rural cooperative with the final weight of 0.273 had the 3rd priority. On the other hand, social sub-criteria had the most effect on traditional system and economic and attitudinal sub-criteria had the most effect on production cooperative.