Constraints on the Adoption of Adaptive Water Management Principles: the Case of Greater Tehran

Farideh Delavari Edalat () and Megersa Abdi

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2015, vol. 29, issue 15, 5569-5591

Abstract: Adaptive Water Management (AWM) could provide a sustainable route to address the existing complex problems of urban water management such as continued water shortage and flooding through the future. The AWM application could be a new alternative path in water management especially in developing countries which suffer from common weakening features such as unreliable infrastructure and poor institutional organisations. The AWM distinguishing characteristics such as polycentric governance, organisational flexibility and public participation are considered for feasibility study of the AWM implementation. The paper investigates whether AWM could be applied to a developing-country city in order to deal with future uncertainties of water supply/demand. The required data was collected from the water professionals of Tehran Province Water and Wastewater Company (TPWW Company), which is in charge of water supply and management of 12 million people of the Province. The key elements of AWM performance are transformed to a multi criteria decision model of Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) in order to facilitate quantification of the influence of corresponding qualitative elements derived from semi-structured interviews held in the Company, and for further analysis of urban water managers’ views in a structured way. The research findings show that despite the lack of structural adaptability there are positive attitudes towards inter departmental communication and linking to the external decisive actors such as the Company’s consumers. As a generalising result, the AWM concept would be applicable to the similar developing-country cities particularly located in the Middle-East region while simultaneously promoting technical and institutional performances. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Adaptive water management principles; Polycentric governance; Organisational flexibility; Public participation; Sustainability; Iran water management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11269-015-1135-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:waterr:v:29:y:2015:i:15:p:5569-5591

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-015-1135-3

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().