Using system archetypes for problem framing and a qualitative analysis: A case study in Iranian water resource management

Sustainable decision making about water resources needs contextual understanding and analysis of water resources systems. A systemic approach provides a holistic understanding of issues and facilitates conceptualizing of the problems. Applying the archetype lenses to look into water resource problems in Gorganroud-Gharesu basin, we found out the overall dynamics of the problem can be explained using some archetypes, mainly: limits to growth, attractiveness principle, fixes that fail and shifting the burden. The Gorganroud-Gharesu Basin is located in Iran in the eastern part of the southern Caspian Sea (Figure 1). The climate is mild and the annual precipitation ranges from 250 to 450 mm, with easterly regions receiving the most rain. The basin area is 13935 Km², 60 percent of it is mountainous and the rest is plains (Samareh Hashemi et al., 2014). The main economic sectors in Gorganroud-Gharesu are agriculture, services and industry. The Gorganroud-Gharesu Basin has several problems and each of them has different socioeconomic and environmental impacts. The main problem faced by the Gorganroud-Gharesu Basin is the lack of an integrated management in the face of growing demand. Water management in the basin is based on short-term responses to the problem without paying attention to the consequences. In other words, despite building four large dams and thousands of wells to meet water demands, the problem comes back more intense each time after a while of meeting previous demand. Also, the number of floods and their damage increased dramatically in the past decades. By investigating the Gorganroud-Gharesu basin’s issues and problems, its systemic archetypes were recognized based on facts and data. The story of archetypes started when the growth of industrial, agriculture and services sectors is threated or limited by not having enough water, this fail has been fixed by making dams and wells and provide more water, unfortunately more supply gives the wrong message to consumers of having sufficient water and lead to encouraging more consumption and problems will continue. The first step to breaking the dynamics of an archetype is to recognize them, their causes and consequences. The system archetypes serve as the means for gaining insights into the underlying system structures from which the archetypal behaviours emerge. This research facilitates conceptualization the model and developing the preliminary dynamic hypothesis for the next step.