水保所知识产出(1956---)知识库

In recent decades, due to the water shortage around the world and the importance of groundwater in agriculture,
the role of Water User Associations (WUAs) – well-known farmer associations that manage collective irrigation in
agricultural districts – in groundwater management has received much attention. To ensure sustainable
groundwater management in these organizations, it is imperative to analyze the effects of the driving mecha-
nisms, such as the “legal and institutional”, “socio-cultural”, “social capital”, “economic”, “infrastructure” and
“farmers’ participation” factors, on the collective management of agricultural water. This study proposes a
theoretical framework to analyze how and to what extent these factors influence agricultural water management
in a case study of WUAs of Tafresh County (Iran), where irrigated agriculture strongly relies on groundwater. To
validate this framework, questionnaires with 53 questions/indicators related to these factors have been supplied
to 264 associated farmers and then statistically processed using Partial Least Squares – Structural Equation
Modeling (PLS-SEM) methods. The measurement model has confirmed the validity of the questionnaire. The
structural model has demonstrated that all the identified factors are significantly effective in driving the WUAs
performance. This effectiveness was shown by the high indexes of reliability (over 0.821 against an acceptance
limit of 0.7) and convergent validity (over 0.511 against a limit of 0.5). Socio-cultural and social capital factors
had a higher impact (confirmed by path coefficients of about 0.80), while the economic factors played a lower
effect on groundwater management (path coefficient of 0.534). Moreover, the Pearson matrix showed statisti-
cally significant (p < 0.01) and positive (R 2 = from 0.238 to 0.804) correlations among all the evaluated factors.
Based on this framework, some actions for improving the groundwater management at the collective level are
suggested, such as: (i) the implementation of new water management technologies to increase the efficiency in
extraction, distribution, and consumption of irrigation water; ii) strengthening the importance of social and
cultural participation in the management of WUAs, in order to create formal and informal contexts for enhancing
individual participation in the short and long-term; iii) designing appropriate financing factors and diversifi-
cation of the sources of revenue to execute projects on shared water resources.