Allocating river water in a cooperative way: a case study of the Dongjiang River Basin, South China

Water resources provide the foundation for human development and environmental sustainability. Water shortage occurs more or less in some regions, which usually causes sluggish economic activities, degraded ecology, and even conflicts and disputes over water use sectors. Game theory can better reflect the behaviors of involved stakeholders and has been increasingly employed in water resources management. This paper presents a framework for the allocation of river basin water in a cooperative way. The proposed framework applies the TOPSIS model combined with the entropy weight to determine stakeholders’ initial water share, reallocating water and net benefit by using four solution concepts for crisp and fuzzy games. Finally, the Fallback bargaining model was employed to achieve unanimous agreement over the four solution concepts. The framework was demonstrated with an application to the Dongjiang River Basin, South China. The results showed that, overall, the whole basin gained more total benefits when the players participated in fuzzy coalitions rather than in crisp coalitions, and $$\left\{ {NHS_{Fuzzy} \,and\, SV_{Crisp} } \right\}$$ could better distribute the total benefit of the whole basin to each player. This study tested the effectiveness of this framework for the water allocation decision-making in the context of water management in river basins. The results provide technical support for water right trade among the stakeholders at basin scale and have the potential to relieve water use conflicts of the entire basin.