Analysis of perspectives and effective social factors in the Implementation of Productivity-oriented Cropping Pattern with using Q methodology(Case study: Qazvin Plain Irrigation Network)

The large share of the agricultural sector in the consumed water resources shows the importance of agriculture water productivity improvement for coping with the water shortage crisis. Cropping pattern modification has been proposed as a key solution in this improvement. The efforts to implement cropping pattern modification policies have been largely unsuccessful. One of the most important reasons for failure to implement the cropping pattern is the uneconomical nature of the proposed model and the lack of required attention to stakeholders. In the Qazvin plain irrigation network, the concern is that the cropping pattern is not implemented by the stakeholders for the optimum use of the available water resources. In this research, based on previous studies review, the questionnaire survey was designed based on the Likert scale. Then, the stakeholders were sampled by purposive sampling using the Q methodology and the top 25 statements were selected as Q sets. The collected data were analyzed using KADE desktop software. The results showed that there are four dominant perspectives among the stakeholders those explain cumulative variations by 45 percentages. The identified perspectives were classified as follows: «Economy oriented and technical perspective», «perspective of socio-technical dissatisfaction and in favor with policy making», «perspective of agreement with technical, social and environmental issues and low attention to policy making» and «perspective of focus on policy making and paying little attention to social and technical issues». All perspectives had a reliability higher than 0.95, which shows perspectives have good reliability and validity.