Social appraisal of Groundwater Governance Scenarios

One of the factors of the water resources crisis is the lack of attention to the social dimension of water governance. This paper investigates the social assessment of groundwater governance scenarios. For this purpose, in the first step, the modified scenarios of groundwater governance were defined to empower players’ role and the water, food, energy nexus. Then, the performance of groundwater governance scenarios from the social perspective was assessed using criteria-based appraisal. For this purpose, social acceptance, social justice and social participation were defined as social criteria and their values were calculated by using questionnaire and social network analysis. The groundwater governance scenarios were ranked socially applying a compromise-programming algorithm to combine the criteria. The results showed that developing cohesive region-specific cropping pattern and enforcing cropping pattern by chain value management scenario had the highest score and modifying regulation to seal all unauthorized wells scenario had the lowest score in terms of social impact in comparison with the other groundwater governance scenarios. Therefore, the social assessment of groundwater governance scenarios enables policymakers to assess the impact of scenario implementation on society to formulate a better policy.