Introducing the social participation concept in water management in Serbia, and related decision-making issues

This paper presents results obtained during recent studies of legal, financial, and organizational prerequisites to establish the water user associations (WUAs) in Vojvodina Province in Serbia. A procedure for launching a small-scale WUA is also proposed based on field data about two-fold irrigation and drainage systems. At a proof-of-concept level, the decision-making process is simulated by assuming the water users' assembly as a group of representatives. By combining a multi-criteria method analytic hierarchy process with a social choice (voting) Borda method count, it was shown that a convincing decision-making framework is possible to establish and produce good final solutions (decisions).