Investigation of Policy Structure in Legal Authorities of Institutions Related to Water Policy Making and Management in Iran through Network Analysis

The Codified development documents of Iran indicate that the planned objectives in water section have not been successfully operated. Therefore, the present research has tried to find the basic reasons of such failure. The study explored the power structure in legal network of formal institutions connected with water management in the framework of "New Institutionalism Theory". Network of legal authorities of formal institutions related to water resources in national level was delineated with "Network Analysis" through UCINET and Net draw Software\´s. The data have been analyzed using the different indices in network analysis such as centrality, degree, power, and cut point. The results show that there is no good power distribution among water section institutions and no firm relationship among administrative and authoritative institutions in this section. Moreover, nongovernmental institutions do not profit from an appropriate position in these documents. So, it is necessary for policy makers to pay more attention to a balanced power distribution among institutions in national and provincial levels.