Author(s)

M. Ghorbani & H. Moradi

Abstract

Water is a natural resource, fundamental to life, livelihood, food security and sustainable development. With a growing population and rising needs of a fast developing nation as well as the given indications of the impact of climate change, availability of utilizable water will be under further strain in the future with the possibility of deepening water conflicts among different user groups. In addition, there are inequities in distribution and lack of a unified perspective in planning, management and the use of water resources among stakeholders’ relation to water governance. Rapid growth in demand for water due to population growth, urbanization and changing lifestyle poses serious challenges to water security. In order to successfully achieve water governance in arid regions, we should implicate an integrated approach in water policy making. Generally, in water governance present different actors (multiple actors), as social and institutional networks, that have various relations together in different scales. Planning, development and management of water resources need to be governed by a common integrated perspective considering local, regional, State and national context, having an environmentally sound basis, keeping in view the human, social and economic needs. In this project, our attempt, by using social network analysis, is showing the relationships between all the stakeholders in security and governance of water in several case studies. The analysis of a social network structure can be useful to analyze relations among actors in natural resources management. Keywords: social network, policy network, water governance, social network analysis, stakeholders.

Keywords

social network, policy network, water governance, social network analysis, stakeholders