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This paper addresses strategic planning of water resources in an arid region based on sustainable development criteria (SDC). Three multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) models, simple additive weighting (SAW), the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), were used for detailed ranking of the strategies and assessing the result of the Quantitative Strategic Planning Matrix (QSPM). The results of the MCDM models were not identical, so we used aggregation approaches including mean rank, Borda count and Copeland's methods to integrate rankings. The results of sensitivity analysis revealed that all MCDM models were sensitive to the social and environmental criteria. The SAW and AHP models were also less sensitive to changes in criterion weights than the TOPSIS model. The results showed the priority of the MCDM models over QSPM analysis in incorporating SDC in detailed evaluation of the strategies. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]