Prioritizing Water Resources Development Projects Using a Systemic Approach

A main challenge in the Iranian water management system concerns the discrepancy between the needs and the potential for ensuring funds needed for projects. The growing financial load of large projects, particularly water resources development projects, on the government has made the public budget practically inadequate to meet the financial needs of significant infrastructural plans. The lack of transparency in the process of decision making in water management and especially a disregard for priorities in the selection of plans and projects for study or implementation have caused the number of ongoing plans to increase and the allocated funds to be inadequate for their timely implementation. This state of affairs no doubt means projects of too long durations, execution and management problems, and cost overruns of the plans. Prioritization of water resources development plans has been considered since 1984 as an important measure to facilitate the process of decision making in the national water management system. This article reviews the previous methods of water plan prioritization, highlights the weaknesses and strengths of each method, and introduces the most appropriate one for practice today. The proposed method consists of four subsystems: 1) Projects evaluation; 2) Computation of economic, financial, social, and environmental measures; 3) Multi-criteria prioritization; and 4) Coordination. Once the model is developed, one can expect to find uncertainties in the system and to use fuzzy logic to prioritize water resources development plans