Ranking supply oriented policies of water management policies from institutional stakeholders' political views A Delphi survey on irrigation water in the Júcar basin area

Abstract

[EN] This paper is a case study concerning water policies to be established for the Júcar basin in Mediterranean Spain. The objective of the research is to provide reliable information on the institutional stakeholders¿ judgements and values about these potential policies in the basin. This is relevant to water authorities whose decisions should be made by testing if the policies proposed by planners are acceptable to institutional stakeholders in the area. We consider only supply oriented policies, as demand oriented policies (although interesting) require paying strong subsidies to be acceptable to farmers. Information is collected by a Delphi survey, which was taken by a representative sample of institutional stakeholders. They evaluated twenty potential policies of irrigation water from eight economic, environmental, social and political criteria. The assessments were aggregated by multicriteria analysis, leading to a political ranking of policies. As the main results, the top ranked and the second ranked policies are ¿desalination combined with higher water prices and even with interbasin water transfer¿ and ¿groundwater control combined with interbasin water transfer¿, respectively.