Harnessing indigenous knowledge for climate change-resilient water management – lessons from an ethnographic case study in Iran

Abstract

Through an in-depth ethnographic case study, we explore water management practices within the Jiroft County province in Iran and discuss the applicability of indigenous knowledge of regional water management to the resource governance of arid regions across the world. We explore, through qualitative analysis, the relationship between community social structure, indigenous knowledge, water management technologies and practices, and water governance rules under conditions of anthropogenic climate change. From participant observational and interview data (n = 32), we find that historically-dependent community roles establish a social contract for water distribution. Cultural conventions establish linked hierarchies of water ownership, profit-sharing and social responsibility; collectively they construct an equitable system of role-sharing, social benefit distribution, socioecological resilience and adaptive capacity in the face of climate change-induced drought. We conclude that the combination of hierarchical land ownership-based water distribution and what we term 'bilateral compensatory mutual assistance' for the lowest-profit agricultural water users, provides a model of spontaneous common pool resource management that bolsters community drought resilience. We use this case to proffer recommendations for adapting other centralized, grey infrastructure and regulatory models of water management from lessons learned from this spontaneous adaptive management case.

Legal culture and climate change adaptation: An agenda for research

“…As such, our scoping review excludes research that examines the significance of nonlegal normativity (conventionally speaking) for climate change adaptation. There is, of course, great richness and significance in climate change adaptation research that focuses on nonlegal social norms (Adger et al, 2009), including work relating to gender (e.g., Cohen et al, 2016), social hierarchies (Ghorbani et al, 2021), identity and place (Neef et al, 2018) and traditional knowledge (e.g., Granderson, 2017). However, the assertion of this article is that within this broader corpus of work, there is a relative neglect of a specific focus on legal culture, approached through the perspectives and actions of those facing climate change risks.…”

A Systematic Literature Review of Infrastructure Governance: Cross-sectoral Lessons for Transformative Governance Approaches

“…Some papers also outline a range of bottom-up approaches to infrastructure planning and delivery to improve social legitimacy, including more active citizen planning, co-production, community-driven infrastructure, and infrastructure commons (Becker, Naumann, and Moss 2017; Dalakoglou 2016; Frantzeskaki 2019; Hall et al 2019). There are also several calls to expand more attentive research into social interactions with existing fragmented infrastructure approaches, such as developing understandings of forms of ‘contractual’ public accountability (Taşan-Kok, Atkinson, and Martins 2020), and using the lenses of social and democratic welfare (Rutherford 2008), or alternative citizen-led approaches (Becker, Naumann, and Moss 2017) as critiques of the relationship between states and capital.…”

“…Social legitimacy is discussed as necessary for successful infrastructure implementation (Levenda 2016), particularly where communities can obstruct projects (Birkinshaw 2017), where citizen involvement in decision-making is shallow (van de Meene, Bettini, and Head 2020), or where local governments need to lobby state governments for support (Furlong et al 2017). There are few claims within the literature of successfully gained public mandates, but these cases involve successful community activism (Triyanti and Chu 2018), or legitimacy fostered through historically-developed First Nations relations of provision, based on profit-sharing and social responsibility (Ghorbani et al 2021;Heinelt 2019). Cosens et al (2018) for example suggest that natural infrastructure (such as water systems and ecosystems) can serve as a grounding for reconciliation and Treaty negotiations.…”

Governance of Agricultural Water Management: How Does the EPSI Model Explain Iranian Farmers' Satisfaction? An Experience from Northwestern Iran

“…In developing countries (Bjornlund, 2014), including Iran (Ghorbani et al, 2021), agricultural water management has been the responsibility of governments (top-down approach) in previous decades, and efforts to reform its allocation and management have achieved very little. However, the progress of societal perception and irrigation governance has constructed consecutive waves of reforms over the past four decades (Playán et al, 2018).…”