Evaluating the agricultural water resources resilience through good governance approach; case of south west of Iran

One of the main ultimate goals of creating an exploitation system and its functions is to increase farmers' resilience to sudden changes, the purpose of this study is to measure the resilience of agricultural water exploitation systems in irrigation and drainage networks of Khuzestan province. In this regard, indicators of water governance principles were extracted based on the views of 32 soil and water experts in Khuzestan using the Delphi method and the weight of each of these indices was calculated using a special vector model. Then, the resilience score of each of the five agricultural water exploitation systems was calculated using the decision matrix. Finally, applying the SAW model, the researchers evaluated the resilience status of each of these systems using the technique of standard deviation difference from average. Based on the results of the study, 16 indicators were extracted as indicators representing the water governance principles. Another finding showed that the agricultural water exploitation system of private companies with a score of 0.958 achieved the highest resilience and cooperatives achieved the lowest resilience. On the other hand, in the agricultural water exploitation systems under study, state-owned exploitation companies, farming joint-stock companies, and production co-operatives showed average resilience scores of 0.871, 0.827, and 0.805, respectively.