A Content Analysis of Water Allocation Mechanisms

The growing number of areas facing water scarcity necessitates adaptive water management strategies beyond traditional water supply and demand management methods, which are becoming increasingly difficult in many regions. Water reallocation offers a flexible water management approach to mitigate water scarcity under changing socioeconomic, climatic, and environmental conditions. Water allocation can take many forms that vary in duration, spatial scale, complexity, and institutional structure required, which are important for understanding the water allocation functions. In this regards, the main purpose of this study was to explain the water allocation functions from the perspective of four mechanism including administrative allocation, collective negotiations, market driven allocation and robust allocation. For this purpose, 45 reviewed and empirical papers based on these mechanism, were selected by snowball sampling technique and analyzed by qualitative method. A qualitative content analysis based on inductive approach was conducted as the analytical process. In this approach, after selecting the analysis unit and meaning units, explanatory themes including “developing the pricing system and sharing the benefits of allocation”, “developing the governance of institutional actors” and “utilization of dynamic planning and efforts to maintain environmental resources” in the water allocation were identified. The results showed that most of these mechanisms have a one-dimensional perspective and only one mechanism has a comprehensive perspective, and also focused on some categories such as Legal pluralism and diversity of mechanisms. Ultimately, Robust Allocation is the only mechanism in allocation that considers the issues of efficiency and justice in a mixed and balanced way.