System Dynamic Modelling for conflicts analysis in groundwater management

In most Mediterranean countries groundwater is the primary sources for irrigation. Nowadays, water scarcity is a limiting factor for sustainable growth. Designing and implementing effective groundwater protection policies is of outmost importance. Many times the best efforts to solve water management problem actually make it worse due to unanticipated side effects. Avoiding policy resistance requires to expand the boundaries of the system model, so that to incorporate the different actors and their problem definitions. Ambiguity is considered in this work as a distinct type of uncertainty that results from the simultaneous presence of multiple valid and sometimes conflicting ways of framing a problem. In this work, a method based on System Dynamic Modeling (SDM) to simulate conflicts in groundwater management through the analysis of ambiguity in problem framing is described. The aim is to investigate in which conditions ambiguity could lead to conflict.