Analysis of the Structural Pattern of Institutional Relations in the Governance of Agricultural Water Resources (case: the County of Rasht)

The concept of institutional cooperation and coordination as one of the key elements to participatory resource management has always been emphasized. This study aims to determine the structural pattern of institutional relations of 28 organizations associated with the implementation of participatory management of agricultural water resources in Rasht county . For this purpose, the method of social network analysis with indicators of size, density, centrality of the whole network, the reciprocity, the transitivity and the shortest distance between two actors at the macro level has been used. The results based on determined indices show that from the number of 756 possible links that could be formed in this network, only 227 cases (about a third) occurred. The network density of information exchange and cooperation among the surveyed organizations is 30%, according to the density and centralization of the measured values, it can be concluded that the institutional cohesion among governmental and nongovernmental studied organizations is weak. Accordingly, strengthen the institutional coherence by studing the role of individual actors in the network can be recommended. On the other hand, network connections reciprocity is 23.37 %,which represents the network centralization and the need to strengthen the two-way flow of information and interaction between these organizations .