The Role of Moral Norms in Participatory Management of Water Resources in Toshan of Golestan Province

Recognizing the moral norms is necessary to understand water crisis and have water protection behavior in today’s society. The aim of this research was to develop the theory of planned behavior and quantification of its components in order to assess the moral norms governing the participatory management of water resources. A questionnaire was used to collect information from Toshan and Galand villages. Descriptive-inferential statistics of the research were analyzed by SPSS and SmartPLS softwares and One-Sample Wilcoxon Nonparametric test. Then model components were ranked using Friedman test. At the end, the uncertainties of the components of the Modified Theory of Planned Behavior (MTPB) were calculated by the bootstrap technique. The results showed that adding the moral norm component to the theory is important for promoting participatory behaviors of water conservation. According to the boxplot graphs and model path coefficients, most respondents had a high moral commitment to participate in water conservation, which shows that they consider themselves responsible for local water resources. Also, the level of social acceptance of the respondents to the policy option of participatory exploitation of water resources was above the middle level and uncertainty band of social acceptance for the research components indicated the intra-level coordination towards the adoption of the policy option of participatory exploitation of water. The results of the structural model showed that the MTPB variables, respectively, explain 70.1%, 75.9%, 81% and 79.2% of the variance of the participatory behaviors of water conservation of stakeholders of Toshan drinking, Galand drinking, Toshan agriculture and Galand agriculture.