**1. Introduction**

The ultimate aim of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is the sustainable development of humans in harmony with the environment [1]. Therefore, one of the key undertakings in water resource managemen<sup>t</sup> is to maintain a satisfactory relationship between natural water cycle needs and social/economical needs. Scientists and water governors have already been working independently to achieve these goals for decades. Nevertheless, with different influences on research, such as the need to incorporate the general public's opinion in decision making [2], as well as stakeholder theory [3], researchers are used to integrating the two agendas. In the meantime, the 1997 UN water conference and 1992 "Dublin Principles" established an international norm for water governance, namely Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) [4].

Since IWRM is based on water governance for achieving sustainable goals, it is always better to maintain a close relationship between decision makers and key stakeholders while developing managemen<sup>t</sup> tools to optimise the requirements [5]. In parallel, various other initiatives, such as Green Infrastructure (GI), Low Impact Development (LID), and the water framework of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) [6,7], are also in practice; however, an analysis of the available data found that the effects of flood damage on national economies is increasing [8].

The common excuses for this situation are the recipient stakeholders' poor participation, that governance discourses are limited to stakeholders, and that decisions are mainly theoretical [9,10]. Apart from those, there are dozens of negative reasons for the practical incorporation of recipients' perspectives in administrative decision-making modelling or processes. Furthermore, we found that no study had been carried out to inductively explore the integrations of the requirements of the total stakeholder profile of the process in the

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**Citation:** Pradeep, R.M.M.; Wijesekera, N.T.S. In IWRM, Should Scientific Modeller Perspectives Receive Priority over the Benefit Recipients? *Environ. Sci. Proc.* **2023**, *25*, 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ECWS-7-14167

Academic Editor: Athanasios Loukas

Published: 14 March 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

current setting. Therefore, our initial work was carried out to evaluate the integration of stakeholder requirements for a specific area of urban flood managemen<sup>t</sup> [11]. As such, the aim of the present work is to analyse and discuss the results for practical stakeholder integrations in IWRM.

### **2. Methods**

#### *2.1. Evaluation of Levels of Stakeholder Requirements Integration*

As there is no established method to carry out this type of transdisciplinary research, which needs to evaluate different components in integrated water managemen<sup>t</sup> decision making, we required an acceptable research methodology. As such, an in-depth study, including a literature review and expert discussion, was carried out to develop a research methodology for gap identification [12–14].

Then, accordingly, we carried out abductive research using a sequential multi-phase approach of the mixed method. We employed modified constructivist grounded theory, documentary research, and survey strategies to find and verify the main components and their integration depths in the scientific and managemen<sup>t</sup> model of urban flood management. For the component identification, we studied the GIS2MUSCLE urban flood managemen<sup>t</sup> tool, 4 hydro-GIS integration models, and 247 works of research; furthermore, for calibration, we utilised 21 experts. The average integration depths among the components were calculated using 32 studies employing Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) and Weighted Average Programming (WAP). Finally, we evaluated the results with 70 experts and analysed the result by employing thematic analysis and Multi-Criteria Group Decision Making (MCGDM) methods.
