Modeling for Weighting the Most Effective Evaluated Criteria of Indigenous Knowledge Using the BWM Method in the Management and Planning of Water Resources in Yazd Province

Proper management and planning of water resources in their operation, distribution, and revitalization play an important role in sustainable development. This issue is of much higher importance in countries located in the arid and semi-arid regions of the world, such as Iran. Because it is inevitable to return and use indigenous technologies and knowledge and update them alongside modern technologies to achieve sustainable development, this research utilizes an extensive study of literature from internal and external sources and exploratory factor analysis to identify and assess the most important criteria or applicable factors of indigenous knowledge relevant to water resources planning and management in Yazd Province. Due to the high importance of the issue, attempts were made to use experienced and relevant faculty members from certain universities, as well as experts and specialists from all relevant organizations in Yazd Province. The results showed that six criteria—protection and stability, integrated management, holistic (comprehensive) approach, cost-effectiveness, compatibility, and dynamism—are found to be more important than others for the area. In the second step of this research, by means of BWM and creating a linear programming model, six principal factors were weighted, and their optimal weights were obtained. The integrated management criterion has the highest weight (0.413), and the holistic approach criterion has the lowest weight (0.048). Moreover, the protection and stability criteria and the cost-effectiveness criteria jointly rank second with a weight of 0.168, and the criteria of compatibility (0.119) and dynamism (0.084), respectively, rank third and fourth.