State-centric water governance and ineffective coordination: developing a context-sensitive assessment in Iran’s rentier state

ABSTRACT

Water reforms fail mainly because stubborn contextual constraints are not effectively considered. This study proposes a context-sensitive water governance assessment by designing a comparative approach within a case study and making inductive analytic generalizations. The framework is applied empirically to the Zayandeh Rud basin in the rentier state of Iran. The results indicate that the rentier-weak state context has led to centralized rent-seeking governance and limited implementation capacity – characteristics of the entire country, not just the water sector. Water issues will, therefore, require context-sensitive, problem-driven analysis beyond addressing water governance challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• State capacity
• water governance
• rent-seeking
• analytic generalization
• diagnostic approach

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Ines Dombrowsky, Andrea Lenschow, Jenny Tröltzsch, Christy Bennett and Taha Loghmani for providing feedback on an earlier draft, as well as the interview partners for their time and input.

Author contribution statement

Ali Yousefi: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Review & editing, Funding acquisition, Christian Knieper: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing – Review & editing, Claudia Pahl-Wostl: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing – Review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2024.2310817

Notes

1. The countries include: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain.

2. This research was built upon developing the Zayandeh Rud case study in the STEER project. STEER conducted transdisciplinary research on six in-depth case studies in Germany, Spain, South Africa, Mongolia and Iran. The rentier state characteristic is unique to Iran’s case study. Given this distinctive attribute and the low levels of democracy, state capacity and economic development, this case study can provide valuable insights into the complex interplay between water governance and contextual factors.

3. For consistency with the STEER protocol, the numbering of variables (e.g., P1, G9) has been retained. For some variables, the symbol ‘~’ is added to refer to the negation of a STEER variable (e.g., ~G3 indicates the dominance of a certain governance mode in formal provisions, whereas the original STEER variable G3 refers to no dominance).

Additional information

Funding

The conceptual design work for this paper has been prepared as part of the project “Increasing Good Governance for Achieving the Objectives of Integrated Water Resources Management” (STEER) [grant number 02WGR1425C] funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF) under the funding measure GRoW. A collaboration with the Iranian partner led to the inclusion of the Zayandeh Rud Basin as the sixth in-depth study in the STEER project. To conduct research on the Zayandeh Rud, Isfahan University of Technology and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) provided funding. The funders did not influence the study design, the collection, analysis and interpretation of data, and the decision to submit the article for publication.