Selecting Sustainable Development Criteria for Effective Watershed Governance: Study Area of Kashafrud Watershed

Abstract

In recent years, inappropriate governance within the watersheds has caused to qualitative and quantitative degradation of water resources and unbalanced allocation of resources amongst the beneficiaries. Therefore, one of the most important challenges for stakeholders is the selection of final sustainable development criteria, which affects the planning and management for water supply scenarios and leads to effective watershed governance. Selection of final criteria depends on the stakeholders’ preferences and the decision-making risk attitudes. The risk attitudes related to the importance of viewpoints associated with stakeholders’ number within the watershed. This paper has developed a comprehensive approach based on the risk analysis to calculate the group weights and the group consensus measurements of criteria, which leads to selecting final decision-making criteria. Accordingly, in the first step, the initial criteria are determined by the group of DMs. In the second step, the group criteria weights have been calculated and in the third step, the group consensus measurements of criteria have been measured in several risk attitudes using the Hybrid Weighted Averaging (HWA) operator and the distance-based group consensus method. Finally, the most important criteria have been selected from the initial criteria based on the group consensus measurements, compared with an acceptable threshold level. This approach has been developed for the Kashafrud watershed, to select the final sustainable criteria in 2040. The results showed that the number of the final criteria depends on the risk attitudes of decision-making. Development of this method is recommended for watershed governance in the world.