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

Today, water resources in many parts of the world are under increasing pressure from irrigation-based food supply, increasing urban water demands, and industrial growth especially in semi-arid and arid areas where water plays a vital role for their development, national economic growth, and the environment (Cossio et al., 2020). Among all water users, providing industrial water is crucial as lack of access to water resources may stop valuable economical productions. Furthermore, industrial wastewater is another major concern due to the contamination of untreated wastewater discharged into receiving water bodies (Piadeh et al., 2014). Therefore, recycling industrial wastewater is a practical sustainable solution that can both provide accessible water and prevent contaminating freshwater bodies (Piadeh et al., 2018a).

Nowadays, combining advanced treatment units (ATUs) with conventional treatment processes can result in less contamination in treated effluent (Naghedi et al., 2020). Despite benefits of integrating these advanced technologies, stakeholders are sometimes reluctant to develop these units based on their own preferences and due to the complexity and uncertainty of reliability assessment in these ATUs and hence, overlook this scheme within the planning phases. As planning any wastewater reuse scheme needs active engagement of relevant stakeholders, the lack of appropriate involvement or having negative views on decision-making, design, construction, and operation phases may lead to a failure of these schemes over a long-term period (Salgot & Folch, 2018).

Several studies investigated the stakeholders’ behaviour and their motives for being against the ATU development. For example, Ba-Alawi et al. (2020) analysed man-made incidents and faults in the ATU equipment. Piadeh et al., (2018b) also analysed consultants’ faults for design and contractors’ failure in construction. For studies analysing environmental and economic risks, stakeholders were considered only as investees or investors (Hernández-Chover et al., 2018). Some studies limited the role of stakeholders in end-users views to support recycled wastewater or willingness to pay tariffs (Dalhat Mu'azu et al., 2020). Additionally, some studies only analysed the role of policymakers in strategic decisions such as increasing tariffs or environmental regulations to motivate ATU developments (Buzuku et al., 2015). Some studies also analysed the role of stakeholders as public acceptance, number of stakeholders participating in the development, number of new jobs created and health risk in sustainability assessment criteria (Cossio et al., 2020). In relevant studies including abovementioned ones, the role of vital stakeholders was almost neglected and consequently, the main intention of interruption due to the stakeholders involvement were not studied properly. Hence, the main objective of this paper is to develop a new framework to analyse the role of relevant stakeholders and their motives for reusing treated industrial wastewater, which is raised from the following three research questions (RQs): (RQ1) Which associated responsible stakeholders influence ATU projects and how they can be identified? (RQ2) What type of visible problems are caused by responsible stakeholders and how these problems can be distributed among the different processes of ATU projects? (RQ3) Is there any connection between deep beliefs of responsible stakeholders and associated problems?

To address these questions, the framework in this study aims to analyse stakeholders, futurology techniques and deep mapping as qualitative analysis to (1) identify relevant stakeholders and their role in different phases in an ATU project, (2) determine responsible stakeholders for relevant system failure and identify their motivations, and (3) map all levels of problems across the different phases of the project. Furthermore, frequency analysis is used to provide quantitative analysis. A comprehensive analysis developed in this study compares all identified problems, associated stakeholders. Additionally, the framework provides a vertical comparison between the connection of problems with responsible stakeholders and links all these analyses together through deep mapping. The next section describes the proposed methodology followed by its demonstration to the real-world case study. The results are then discussed, and key findings are finally summarised.

The aim of this step is to specify the distribution of stakeholders across different project phases as the input of next steps and form a map to show how stakeholders with their roles are connected to core phases over the project lifetime. This needs different phases are clarified over the project lifetime (in Section 2.1.1) and then the stakeholders are associated with each phase (in Section 2.1.2).

Core phases defined in a project based on the primary goals can be recommended in four parts of ‘planning’, ‘design’, ‘construction’, and ‘operation’ (PMI, 2017). Core phases are compiled from official documents such as project charts, procurement documents, organisational process assets, regulation and laws, or internal instructions (Lalmi et al., 2021).

This step entails identifying people, groups, experts, and organisations that could impact or be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of the project (Alcon et al., 2014). Stakeholders here are classified as primary and secondary categories based on the stakeholder theory widely used in the literature (Gherghel et al., 2020). The primary stakeholders are identified as those in the institutional positions with relevant roles dedicated across core phases based on official documents or administrative procedures. The secondary stakeholders with their roles can also be identified by the judgment of experts, i.e. primary stakeholders (Bendtsen et al., 2021).

The visible problem layer is based on the problems identified through questionnaires/interviews by selected responders and strengthened by evidences from the project documents or site visits. All identified stakeholders in step 1 should introduce a representative called a responder to participate in an interview. The major problems can be classified under more sub-classes for better analysis. This classification is based on how decision-makers and experts are familiar to. However, the PEST framework is recommended here due to its ability to the holistic illustration of the current situations (Thakur, 2021). In this framework, all problems are divided into the four categories: (1) political problems at national, international and regional scales or regulations, which impact on developing ATUs negatively, (2) economic problems, e.g. lack of financial mobilising, lack of allocated budget, budget cuts or requiring extra costs, (3) social problems, e.g. lack of proper management, individual wrong behaviour or managers’ personal preferences, (4) technical problems, particularly technological gap, maintenance issues and accessibility to desired equipment (Ahmadi et al., 2016; Naghedi et al., 2020).

The responders first need to raise the most challenging problem representing the main influential factors of improper ATU's development. Each responder is then asked to scrutinise the challenges in detail via (1) describing the problem, (2) classifying the type of the problem based on the PEST classification, (3) specifying the occurrence of the problem among all core phases of the project (step 1.1), and (4) classifying all identified stakeholders under primary and secondary stakeholders (step 1.2). All identified problems are then clustered based on their similarities and the visible problem layer is finally formed.

This layer identifies responsible stakeholders and their role in the project components over the project lifetime. For this purpose, each identified visible problem is assigned to a focus group with members from all relevant stakeholders. These focus groups describe relevant visible problems and their associated responsible stakeholders in which all responders are agreed through a qualitative Delphi technique (Cheng et al., 2019). The output of this step is ‘specified responsible stakeholders’ agreed by all responders.

Deep belief in here refers to the strong belief of stakeholders as the best way to manage or run the project. This can also reflect the understanding, knowledge, and experience of stakeholders for dealing with the project within all phases of the project including planning, design, construction and operation. Extracting deep beliefs is a challenging process mainly because it is subjective and discussed in the social sciences (Farrow, 2019). Here, responsible stakeholders are interviewed individually to find out their views and deep beliefs which consciously or unconsciously prevent developing the ATU projects. Furthermore, it is recommended that specialists in various fields such as psychology, sociology, economy, management, philosophy, theology, political science, and history assist the interview to understand the deep beliefs of responsible stakeholders.

Table 1 shows the result of the PESTEL (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal) method by using the input from the responders to identify the visible problems. Out of the six categories in the PESTEL method, the responses for number of general perceptions, total identified problems, and number of total visible problems are classified under four categories including political, economic, social and technical components. Although responders initially stated in the questionnaires that economic component is the major issue preventing the development of ATU systems for treating industrial wastewater, the major issue was then moved to the social component followed by technical component in practice, when responders analysed all problems in detail within the focus group meetings. This may show that responders tended to see all the problems in the shape of economic, especially because lack of budget resources are always raised by the government. Furthermore, this comparison shows that the main nature of problems hindering the proper development of ATU systems can vary from economic to social aspects when they are analysed in detail compared to when they are only based on general perceptions. Therefore, it seems that scrutiny of the project problems can lead to clarify the real source of the problems at the litany layer.

On the other hand, although the same number of problems is reported for design, construction, and operation phases, it seems that the design phase is more vulnerable and plays a vital role in delaying the ATU projects especially because the six mentioned visible problems occur in only six months whereas the duration of construction and operation phases are a year and up to 25 years, respectively. Therefore, social problems in the design phase seem to be the most critical ones. More details of these problems reported by the focus groups include: (1) qualified consultants are not used or there is lack of qualified one or those hired are unable to design the plant properly, (2) lack of international consultants in the projects that are qualified for the design, (3) lack of access or use of recent practical national researches or neglecting them, and (4) lack of hiring accredited private laboratories to enhance the results and hence declining the errors, and instead using limited parameters with a large uncertainty for ATU's design. In other words, identified social problems in this part are mainly related to avoiding or neglecting qualified or accredited stakeholders that can provide more accurate design plans.

Besides, the results show that the stakeholders are responsible mostly in the construction and operation phases, which means problems in these phases are carried out by more diverse stakeholders. This is crucial as when more responsible stakeholders are engaged in one phase, finding a solution needs more agreements upon all stakeholders, which results in a more complicated situation with harder conflict resolution. Therefore, the construction phase involving six responsible stakeholders and contains 27% of total stakeholders, is recognised as a critical core phase of the ATU projects. However, this may not be compatible with general perception of stakeholders about the most critical core phase, in which design operation phase is introduced by initial perception (see Table S3 in the online supplementary material). This can show that how deep analysis of ATU's projects through scrutinising responsible stakeholders can reveal actual role of these stakeholders and clarify impact of their role in finding critical core phase of ATU projects.

The key massage of comparison between visible problems and deep beliefs of stakeholders is to understand how to translate beliefs into visible problems. This is crucial as these beliefs are usually hidden behind the visible problems and original and true instincts are hard to be recognised. For example, while running ATU projects needs at least 3 years (Figure 5), managers prefer to agree with developing projects with the shorter required time to account these projects operational as an outcome of their management period. Consequently, insufficient budget is always reflected as the main issue unless associated deep beliefs are properly understood.

Figure 9(b) shows the distribution of identified deep beliefs in the forms of economic, social, and technical visible problems. As can be seen, 4 out of 10 identified deep beliefs are reported in all three forms of visible problems likely due to the complexity of their situation that may not be understandable within one single form. These beliefs include ‘lack of systematic and long-term planning’, ‘lack of trust between different stakeholders’ and ‘adherence to anti-value action’. This deteriorates when the frequency of reported visible problems for these deep beliefs increases compared to others. Consequently, this situation clearly shows how deeper layers can change the understanding of visible problems with respect to complicated deep beliefs that may be difficult to resolve.

The present study had the following limitations: (1) it highly relied on expert judgments, especially for finding visible problems. This is mainly because the case study suffers from proper historical experimental and numerical data, (2) while all stakeholders involved in the questionnaires were already verified, the number of experts and specialists in the industrial wastewater recycling projects of the case study are limited because these projects were developed recently, and (3) while the study aimed to reduce or remove the effect of conflicts between stakeholders, this issue is inevitable and hence identifying the opposing and contradictory opinions raised from this issue was difficult.

This paper presented a new decision-making framework to identify visible problems, relevant responsible stakeholders, and the role of their beliefs in the core phases of industrial wastewater reuse projects (i.e. planning, design, construction, and operation) by using both qualitative and quantitative analysis, including stakeholder analysis, CLA, deep mapping, and frequency analysis. The methodology was demonstrated by its application to a real case study in industrial parks in Iran. Based on the results obtained, the following can be noted from this study:

• To prioritise the importance of distinct phases of ATU projects, frequency of visible problems per se cannot be considered but timeframe for occurrence of these problems is also important. For example, planning and design phases usually take less time compared to construction and operation phases and any delays in these phases caused by any visible problems can effect more than other phases.

• By connecting the role of responsible stakeholders to visible problems, it can be seen that some stakeholders are responsible for some problems that have no official role. This implies that those problems cannot be addressed through administrative procedures and consequently those with no official role may have to take their own method without accepting their roles.

• Identifying deep beliefs can reveal that most of the deep beliefs are hidden behind the visible problems and consequently original failure causes may never be recognised if these deep beliefs are unidentified properly. Hence, addressing the visible problems is insufficient to satisfy the needs for identifying deep beliefs and even if the problems can be resolved in short-time, but remain unresolved for longer periods.

• The deep mapping implies that the ATU development is a challenging task when only visible problems are considered and reveals the complexity level of problems in the ATU development. Deep roots are connecting complexly to visible problems across the project core phases. Hence, these beliefs and consequently associated actions can be challenging to understand and resolve.

It seems this study gives opportunities to interested stakeholders to extract and remove the obstacles depending on how they want to face the issue. In other words, while detailed visible problems may be easily handled in these projects, they may be presented again in short-term or in further projects because their roots are not actually realised. However, beliefs can alleviate the problems over a long-time period but require more budget, significant time and agreement between a wide range of stakeholders. Therefore, integrated and comprehensive assessments are suggested for each strategy in future research works. This assessment can aid to clarify the best option, requiring less financial budget, more willingness for stakeholders to accept and less time duration to plan and operate those strategies that are crucial to make informed decisions by stakeholders.

This work is supported by the PhD scholarship allocated to the first author and the Fellowship allocated to the third author. The authors wish to acknowledge the PhD Vice Chancellor Scholarship supported by the University of West London and the Fellowship supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering under the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowships scheme. The authors also wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the associate editor for making constructive comments which substantially improved the quality of the paper.

All relevant data are included in the paper or its Supplementary Information.

The authors declare there is no conflict.