A novel framework for planning policy and responsible stakeholders in industrial wastewater reuse projects: a case study in Iran

Industrial wastewater recycling projects are mainly used for alleviation of both water scarcity and contamination of freshwater bodies. These projects mainly address major challenges related to technological and economic aspects rather than stakeholders’ responsibility. Hence, little is known for the role of responsible stakeholders as a major part of planning policy, which requires recognition of their crucial role and integration into associated procedures. This paper presents a new decision support framework to identify responsible stakeholders and reveals the role of their motivations. The approach integrates qualitative and frequency analysis methods into a comprehensive framework to identify the problems over the project lifetime from visible to their roots and link them together with stakeholders through deep mapping. The planning policy framework is applied to a real-world case study of industrial parks in Iran. The results of the case study show that visible economic, social, and technological problems are caused by responsible stakeholders with no direct role in those projects. Additionally, deep mapping analysis shows various deep roots caused by the government and industry are linked to visible problems across all project phases that are related to the role of stakeholders, their behaviour, and deep beliefs.