Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Seyed Ahmad Hosseini ¹
• mohamad rostami ²
• masoud akbari ²
• roohangiz akhtari ²
• mehrnaz baniamam ²
• mohammadreza gharibreza ²
• nezam asgharipour ²

¹ SCWMRI

² scwmri

Abstract

The Fair Water Distribution Act, enacted in 1982 with the aim of establishing public ownership over water resources, preventing excessive abstraction, and ensuring reasonable consumption, introduced instruments such as exploitation permits, water-meter installation, designation of forbidden zones, and local commissions. At the time, the Act provided a relatively comprehensive and progressive framework with a shared legal language for integrated management of both surface and groundwater resources. Four decades later, despite its enduring strengths, the Act faces profound structural and implementation challenges and lacks a holistic perspective. Severe weaknesses in enforcement, excessive centralization, exclusion of stakeholders from decision-making, disregard for environmental water rights, incompatibility with climate change and land subsidence, insufficient digitalization, ambiguities in the concepts of justice and reasonable use, and the absence of participatory basin-level governance have all emerged. Iran’s current water crisis stems less from the absence of legislation and more from the inadequacy of this Act in confronting twenty-first-century realities and from its ineffective implementation. Addressing this crisis requires, in the short term, rigorous and intelligent enforcement of the existing law, followed by, in the medium term, a complete re-drafting of the Act with an integrated, participatory, environmentally oriented, data-driven, and climate-adaptive approach to basin management.

Keywords

• Fair Water Distribution Act
• water governance
• legal reform
• environmental justice