Iran's water crisis: Cultural, political, and ethical dimensions

By the summer of 2001, most of Iran had been suffering a three-year drought, the worst in recent history. Water rationing was in place in Tehran and other cities, and large proportions of the country's crops and livestock were perishing. Yet many academics and other experts in Iran insist that the water crisis is only partly drought-related, and claim that mismanagement of water resources is the more significant cause. Underlying this discussion is a complex of overlapping yet often conflicting ethical systems - Iranian, Islamic, and modernist/industrialist - which are available to inform water policy in Iran. A review of the various arguments about the nature of the crisis and the range of solutions that have been proposed, including precedents from traditional Iranian water management and the ethics of water use in Islamic law, suggests that Iran's own cultural heritage provides alternatives to wholesale adoption of Western models.