Public and Private Compromises in Agricultural Water Management

Agricultural water management is a complex decision-making problem involving multiple criteria of different nature as well as multiple decision agents with different interests. To handle this multiplicity of objectives and interests a pragmatic approach based on compromise programming is proposed in this paper. The methodology is applied to an agricultural water management problem in Tauste, Spain. Public, environmentalist and private decision makers are considered. The approach proposed reveals itself as a pragmatic alternative to other approaches based on aggregate utility functions with very sound theoretical underpinnings but with few possibilities of actually being put into practice.