Managing Trans-Jurisdictional Water Scarcity Conflicts Using a Decision-Making Method Combining Fairness and Stability Concerns

Managing trans-jurisdictional water scarcity conflicts is a thorny task, as it is usually challenged by multiple institutionally independent decision-making agents, which requires developing cooperative and self-enforcing solutions. This study proposed a decision-making method that combines fairness and stability concerns to solve trans-jurisdictional water allocation conflicts under scarcity. Based on the water allocation alternatives yielded by seven bankruptcy rules, the Gini coefficient and Shapley–Shubik power index were used to separately quantify their fairness and stability criteria from distributive justice and individual-level acceptability, and then game theory was employed to integrate the quantitative results of the two criteria to make final water allocation decisions. The decision-making method was applied to the Hanjiang River Basin of Hubei Province in China under two water scarcity scenarios, which is shared by ten city-level jurisdictions. Numerical results indicate that bankruptcy rules are considered practical for performing trans-jurisdictional water allocations under scarcity, but their realistic eligibility should be investigated before implementation. An apparent trade-off between fairness and stability exists among the water allocation alternatives, and there exists room for identifying compromise alternatives; the constrained equal losses and adjusted proportional rules are identified as the preferred rule by the proposed decision-making method for allocating water resources in the Hanjiang River Basin of Hubei Province, respectively, in dry and extremely dry years. The findings highlight the necessity and significance of balancing fairness and stability criteria in managing trans-jurisdictional water scarcity conflicts, and the proposed method has proved to be an effective decision-making tool to facilitate negotiation over trans-jurisdictional water allocations under scarcity.