Designing Tomorrow’s Food Systems Through Integrative Ethical Water Governance

Integrative Ethical Water Governance (IEWG) offers a structured pathway to enhance the resilience and sustainability of food systems under intensifying water scarcity, climate change, and rising demand. This article develops and applies a scoring-based comparative framework to evaluate how four governance contexts—Türkiye’s Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), China’s Yangtze River Basin management, India’s watershed development programs, and California’s groundwater sustainability initiatives—perform across dual IEWG dimensions: ethical principles (rights-based approaches, justice, intergenerational equity, ecological integrity) and governance frameworks (stakeholder participation, environmental focus, equity approach, institutional integration, economic mechanisms). The analysis assigns explicit scores to each dimension, revealing distinct patterns of ethical integration, strengths and gaps in governance design, and context-specific trade-offs between agricultural production and ecosystem protection. Results show that higher aggregate IEWG scores are associated with more robust participatory structures, clearer allocation of responsibilities across scales, and better alignment of economic instruments with stewardship objectives. The study’s scoring-based comparative method provides a transparent, replicable tool for diagnosing governance performance and identifying priority areas for institutional innovation, offering a novel evaluative lens for future research and policy on ethical water–food governance.