Social networks and management of water resources for agriculture in Rio Caia catchment (Portugal)

• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigues, Luís
• Data de Publicação: 2006
• Outros Autores: Russo Machado, Carlos, Lourenço, Nelson
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10884/362
• topic: Water management; Social networks; Irrigated agriculture; Governance

The involvement of local people in the management of scarce resources, such as water available for agriculture, is a desirable approach to address some of the difficulties in the decision-making processes. This paper reports the experience of a research team of sociologists and geographers involved in the MULINO project (Multi-sectoral, Integrated and Operational decision support system for sustainable use of water resources at the catchment scale). In the framework of this international and interdisciplinary project, a social network analysis was developed in a catchment of south Portugal. This analysis was structured in five fundamental steps: Stakeholder Identification; Data Collection; Data Treatment; Network Visualisation; and Local Network Analysis. The information was gathered mainly through a questionnaire, bibliographic references, statistical inputs and field observations. In order to obtain a typology of stakeholders and their interactions, a factorial analysis of multiple correspondences and a cluster analysis were applied.