Stakeholder analysis in cooperative management of water resources in Qazvin plain: Investigation of powerful stakeholder’s impact

Stakeholder analysis is one of the key factors in success of management policies in all fields. This tool represents suitable information about the individuals that are effectively participate in water management plans implementation. The obtained information from stakeholder analysis can be considered as model input in researches in order to schedule the plans and evaluate success of water resources policies. Recently, researchers have tried to use participatory management methods for application of water management plans to investigate the level of cooperation of stakeholders. Often, the results indicate a lack of confidence and poor participation in this field. It has been observed that stakeholder participation is in correlation with stakeholders’ interests and power (importance). However, no model has been developed to simulate stakeholder power and importance. The purpose of this study is to represent a framework to accurate and ease stakeholder analysis process in primary studies in water management policies or plans. In this research, a novel model is proposed for simulation of stakeholders’ importance to analyze management policies in the field of water resources management. Qazvin irrigation network is chosen as a case study for this research. Lack of trust between all the stakeholders for implementation of plans and policies and failures of first attempts of creating and organizing groups of stakeholders, resulted in ineffective operation and maintenance of the irrigation network. These failures are often because of planning without complete knowledge about stakeholders and neglecting their interests and importance. In order to gather primary information and analyze input data for the stakeholder characteristic model, questioners and interviews with key stakeholders were performed. Key stakeholder groups were chosen using expert choice and analytic hierarchy process. On the other hand, stakeholder’s power and importance were evaluated using stakeholder characteristic modeling and calibration to compare its result with other stakeholder analysis frameworks. Genetic algorithm was used to calibrate stakeholder characteristic model as well as to estimate the model parameters. It is observed that the model is able to simulate the importance of stakeholders in an acceptable level with mean absolute error of 0.487. The results showed that there is correlations between knowledge level, resources, leadership, power and importance of stakeholders. One of the results of this study is that the hidden interactions between the stakeholders were defined using stakeholder analysis framework. This research was done to help managers and decision makers of Qazvin irrigation network to observe consequences of powerful stakeholder’s effect on excessive water withdrawals. It is concluded that using stakeholder analysis can help to better define stakeholder relationships and to recognize potential opportunities in management strategies.