Fragmentation as a core governance constraint: a political-economy stakeholder analysis of Iraq’s transboundary water management

1 Introduction

The vast majority of Iraq’s water resources originate outside its borders (Al-Ansari, 2013; Yousuf et al., 2018), which makes the Iraqi water crisis a governance dilemma (Sedighi et al., 2025; Torabi Haghighi et al., 2023). Furthermore, the crisis is expected to exacerbate due to climate change and upstream dam construction (Daggupati et al., 2017; Odemis et al., 2010; Sedighi et al., 2025; Tilmant and Kelman, 2007; Torabi Haghighi et al., 2023; Ünver, 1997). Consequently, despite their ambition, engineering solutions cannot resolve water scarcity on their own (AghaKouchak et al., 2026; Assubayeva et al., 2025; Verre et al., 2026). What Iraq faces is a transboundary governance problem coupled with a poor domestic political economy characterized by fragmented institutions, asymmetric power relations with upstream riparian states, and chronic underinvestment in the technical systems that credible diplomacy requires (Hall and Harper, 2023; Kibaroglu, 2019; Shapland, 2023).

The physical baseline against which this governance problem unfolds is well documented. The Euphrates and Tigris supply the overwhelming share of Iraq’s surface water, and both enter the country after substantial upstream regulation (Al-Ansari, 2013). Inflows have declined markedly in recent decades as the Turkish Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) and Iranian tributary development have expanded upstream storage and diversion capacity, with drought and climate change compounding the decline (Al-Muqdadi, 2019; Montazeri et al., 2023; Torabi Haghighi et al., 2024). This paper does not model these hydrological dynamics; it takes them as the documented baseline and asks why the governance responses they demand have not been adopted, a question the hydrological literature explicitly leaves open.

Understanding the political economy problem is important because governance failures are not solely a product of poor policy design or technical shortages (Gasseau, 2025; Harris et al., 2011; World Bank, 2017). They originate from a deeper pattern of competition, conflict, and misaligned incentives across multiple levels of government (Kim et al., 2015; Lukat et al., 2023). Although Iraq has legal frameworks, it lacks a unified water law to integrate them (Ali et al., 2025; Von Lossow et al., 2022). The Iraqi Constitution assigns shared competency in internal water management to both the central and regional governments (Iraqi Constitution, 2005). Unfortunately, an operational model for this coordination is still lacking in practice (Fleet, 2019; Hall and Harper, 2023; Mumssen and Triche, 2017; Von Lossow et al., 2022).

Iraq’s domestic legal framework for water is extensive but fragmented. The 2005 Constitution assigns the formulation of policies relating to water sources originating outside Iraq, and the guarantee of their flow rates, exclusively to the federal government (Article 110(8)), while making the regulation of internal water resources a competency shared between the federal and regional governments (Article 114(7)) (Iraqi Constitution, 2005). Within this frame, the Ministry of Water Resources Law No. 50 of 2008 mandates MoWR to allocate water resources, safeguard water quality, and protect Iraq’s interests in negotiations with riparian states; the Irrigation Law No. 83 of 1936, as amended, governs irrigation quotas and infrastructure; the Conservation of Water Resources Law No. 2 of 2001 regulates the protection of water bodies from depletion and pollution; and the Law on Protection and Improvement of the Environment No. 27 of 2009 assigns water-quality functions to the Ministry of Environment. The Kurdistan Region operates parallel regional instruments. These instruments overlap in competencies without an integrating unified water law, so mandates over allocation, quality, and transboundary negotiation are distributed across institutions with no statutory coordination mechanism. This legal substrate is the fragmentation that the present analysis maps empirically.

Four features of Iraq’s political economy generate the incentives recorded in the mapping below. First, public finances are overwhelmingly hydrocarbon-dependent, which makes allocations to the water sector procyclical with oil revenues and leaves hydrometeorological networks, metering, and maintenance chronically underfunded relative to salaries and short-horizon capital projects (Von Lossow et al., 2022). Water infrastructure is a low-visibility public good competing against politically salient spending, so investment in the very technical systems that credible negotiation requires is persistently deferred.

Second, post-2003 governance operates through the apportionment of ministerial portfolios among political blocs. Ministries function in part as resources for patronage networks, which reward distributive control over appointments and contracts and give each portfolio holder an incentive to protect its mandate rather than pool authority (Hall and Harper, 2023; Von Lossow et al., 2022). This is the mechanism behind the medium predictability of the federal actors mapped below: their conduct on the water file tracks coalition composition and ministerial turnover rather than sectoral policy continuity.

Third, formal authority coexists with informal and tribal authority, particularly in the southern governorates, where access to irrigation is mediated in practice through tribal arrangements and where unauthorized diversions and wells persist because local officials lack both the coercive capacity and the political incentive to enforce against them (Hall and Harper, 2023; Al-Shakery, 2025).

Fourth, center–periphery conflict over shared competencies is entangled with the wider federal–regional dispute over hydrocarbon revenues and budget transfers, so water coordination is bargained alongside revenue-sharing rather than on its own terms (Iraqi Constitution, 2005; Von Lossow et al., 2022). These domestic features interact with geopolitics, although the relationship is one of asymmetric interdependence rather than one-sided Iraqi dependence. Bilateral trade with Türkiye reached a record of approximately US$15 billion in 2024, of which Turkish exports to Iraq accounted for some US$13 billion; Iraq is Türkiye’s fourth-largest export market and takes close to 5 percent of Turkish exports, while Iraqi exports to Türkiye are an order of magnitude smaller (AGBI, 2025). Both states also have a stake in the US$17 billion Development Road corridor linking Al-Faw to the Turkish border (Wilson Center, 2024). Each, therefore, holds commercial leverage over the other, and the trade relationship cannot be read as a simple constraint on Iraqi action. What the record does show is that water is negotiated as part of a package rather than on its own terms. The Iraq–Türkiye Water Cooperation Framework of April 2024, a 10-year memorandum that was the first comprehensive official water framework between the two states in decades, was concluded alongside a strategic framework agreement covering security, energy, and economic cooperation (Al Jazeera, 2024; Arab Gulf States Institute, 2026). The executive-mechanism memorandum signed in November 2025 goes further: Turkish companies approved by Iraqi authorities are to build water and irrigation projects financed by Iraq through a joint fund into which Iraqi crude oil revenue from sales to Turkish buyers is deposited, with a joint committee overseeing implementation (Arab Gulf States Institute, 2026). Water infrastructure is thereby institutionally tied to hydrocarbon revenue and to Turkish commercial participation, in the sense that upstream water functions as an element of a wider bilateral bargain. Two qualifications follow. First, this evidence establishes co-negotiation and issue linkage; it does not by itself demonstrate that commercial interdependence deters Iraq from pursuing water claims through legal or diplomatic channels, and that stronger causal proposition is not asserted here. Second, the arrangement should not be described as an ‘oil-for-water’ exchange, a characterization used in reporting but that misstates the instrument, since Iraq finances contractors rather than purchasing water (Arab Gulf States Institute, 2026). The stakeholder scores reported below should be read as the observable surface of these underlying incentive structures.

These failures stem from Iraq’s vulnerability in transboundary negotiations. The Turkish Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), a system of dams and hydropower plants across the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, has significantly affected flows in downstream countries (Montazeri et al., 2023; Torabi Haghighi et al., 2023). Furthermore, Syria merged its water, electricity, and oil affairs into a single Ministry of Energy (SANA, 2025). Consequently, these complicated negotiations are entangled with water negotiations with energy and petroleum interests (Zeitoun and Warner, 2006). The instruments that do exist are partial in coverage. Under the 1987 Protocol on Economic Cooperation, Türkiye committed to release a monthly average of at least 500 m³/s of Euphrates water at the Turkish–Syrian border, with any monthly shortfall to be compensated in the following month, and a supplementary Syrian–Iraqi accord of 1990 allocates 42 percent of the Euphrates water entering Syria to Damascus and 58 percent to Baghdad. Neither agreement establishes allocation rules for the Tigris or its tributaries, and both lack institutional mechanisms to oversee the implementation of their provisions (Kibaroglu, 2019). Iraq’s shortage of technical and institutional capabilities benefits upstream countries by allowing them to act alone and limits Iraq’s leverage at the negotiating table (Al-Muqdadi, 2019; Al-Shakery, 2025).

Recent developments suggest a promising transboundary water governance in Iraq. Iraq became the first Middle Eastern country to accede to the 2023 UNECE Water Convention (UNECE, 2023). This step introduced a new multilateral framework with structured guidance on joint bodies, data sharing, and dispute prevention. Several agreements and arrangements have been signed and reported in recent years (Türkiye Directorate of Communications, 2024), indicating emerging momentum toward project-based cooperation, even if fundamental allocation disputes remain unresolved (Al-Shakery, 2025). These shifts open a window for reform, but translating legal accession and diplomatic agreements into durable governance change requires confronting the political economy dynamics that have historically stalled implementation.

This paper analyzes those dynamics. Drawing on international water law, basin history, and institutional mapping, it examines the governance failures shaping Iraq’s transboundary water management across four interconnected dimensions: institutional coordination, data availability and management, dispute prevention and resolution mechanisms, and financing structures. The stakeholder-analysis approach builds on established frameworks for identifying and classifying actors by influence and stake (Bryson, 2004; Grimble and Wellard, 1997; Reed et al., 2009) and extends them by adding a predictability dimension. The analysis proceeds from the recognition that no single optimal allocation outcome can be specified given the heterogeneous and partially conflicting preferences of stakeholders, from upstream riparian to federal and regional Iraqi actors (Von Lossow et al., 2022). The goal is therefore not to prescribe an allocation formula but to identify the institutional reforms, capacity investments, and political-economy conditions under which Iraq can become a more credible, resilient, and effective actor in the governance of its most vital shared resource. Specifically, this paper asks: (i) how are the actors shaping Iraq’s transboundary water governance distributed across power, interest, and predictability? (ii) To what extent does domestic fragmentation, relative to upstream power asymmetry, constrain Iraq’s capacity to respond? and (iii) what sequence of institutional reforms does the resulting actor typology imply?

2 Methods

The main components of transboundary water management are the interests, power, and relationships between different stakeholders. Therefore, the methodology adopted in this section provides a systematic approach to outlining the relationships, categorization, and evaluation of stakeholders based on their current and potential impacts on water resources, connections, and inter-stakeholder dynamics.

2.1 Stakeholder identification and data collection

A desk review was conducted to identify and categorize stakeholders involved in Iraqi water management and transboundary water governance, drawing on the literature, reports, policy documents, and stakeholders’ websites. The analytical framework follows the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) Political Economy Analysis (PEA) framework (SDC, 2021), which structures the analysis around the identification of issues, the political landscape, the institutional framework, and stakeholder power, interests, incentives, and external influences. Structured interviews were then conducted with representatives of ten institutional categories spanning the executive, legislative, regional, civil-society, and international dimensions of Iraq’s water sector. Interviewees were purposively selected based on direct institutional responsibility for water policy, allocation, or transboundary affairs. Each interview followed a common protocol covering the respondent’s mandate, perceived influence over decisions, principal interests, and expected stability of their institution’s role. Because a single structured instrument was administered in every case (Supplementary Material S1), the interviews are more precisely described as structured interviews with open-ended prompts than as semi-structured interviews. Respondents rated only their own institution’s influence and interest; they did not score other actors, and these self-ratings were treated as one evidence stream rather than as final scores. Where more than one respondent represented an institution, self-ratings were aggregated by taking the modal rating, and any divergence was recorded in the evidence matrix as conflicting evidence (Supplementary Material S2). Open-ended responses were analyzed by directed content analysis. Coding proceeded in two passes: a deductive pass against an a priori codebook whose categories are the scored sub-criteria defined in Table 1, and an inductive pass in which material that did not fit those categories was coded openly, generating the cross-cutting themes reported in the political-economy analysis. Coding decisions were made by assigning each segment to the sub-criterion whose behavioral anchor it evidenced; segments bearing on more than one sub-criterion were double-coded, and both assignments were retained. The two researchers coded independently, compared assignments, and resolved discrepancies by returning to the transcript and agreeing on an assignment against the anchor definitions, with unresolved cases recorded in the evidence matrix as conflicting evidence rather than being forced to agreement. Quotations reported in the Results were selected as the most representative statement of a position expressed by two or more respondents or are identified in text as the view of a single respondent. Categories represented by a single respondent, notably the Kurdistan Region ministry, cannot support within-category saturation; their evidence is treated as indicative and corroborated by documentary sources wherever possible. In total, 38 key informants were interviewed across ten institutional categories: the Ministry of Water Resources (7), the Prime Minister’s Advisory Commission (2), the Ministry of Agriculture (4), the Ministry of Environment (2), the Iraqi Council of Representatives Committee of Agriculture and Water (2), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2), the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources of the Kurdistan Region (1), the Al-Nahrain Center for Strategic Studies–National Security Council (2), the Al-Aghsan Association for Agricultural Development (2), and international agencies, including UNDP, FAO, WFP, GIZ, the World Bank, KfW, and IUCN (14). Interviews were conducted in Arabic and English, both in person and online, between 4/2024 and 6/2024. The analysis is a snapshot of that period. Documentary sources published after fieldwork, including reporting from 2025, are used only to corroborate or update the documentary record for actors that were not interviewed, and are not treated as evidence of respondents' views; where post-fieldwork evidence is cited in the Results, it is dated in text so that its relation to the interview window is explicit. Recruitment was purposive, based on direct institutional responsibility for water policy, allocation, or transboundary affairs, complemented by snowball referral within institutions; affiliations are reported at the category level only to preserve anonymity. Ethical procedures, including approval, informed consent, and anonymity protections, are described in the Ethics Statement. The 13 entities analyzed constitute the actor constellation of Iraqi transboundary water governance rather than a statistical sample; the design seeks to generalize analytically about this actor system (Bryson, 2004; Reed et al., 2009; Yin, 2018). In practical terms, analytic generalization involves drawing inferences from the case to the theoretical propositions embedded in the framework. Specifically, it examines how the combined distribution of power, interest, and predictability shapes the feasibility and sequencing of governance reform in a fragmented downstream state. It does not involve generalizing from a sample to a wider population. Accordingly, the findings are considered valid for the mapped actor system itself. At the same time, their applicability to other basins depends on replicating and testing the framework rather than relying on statistical inference (Yin, 2018). The corpus is comparable in size to the 9–17 interviews empirically found to be sufficient for code saturation in relatively homogeneous expert populations (Guest et al., 2006; Hennink and Kaiser, 2022), but those thresholds are not transferable to the present design: the sample is deliberately heterogeneous, spanning ten institutional categories of which several are represented by one or two respondents. Saturation was therefore not assessed within categories, and no claim of saturation is made. The corpus is treated as sufficient to characterize institutional positions triangulated against documentary evidence, not as an exhaustive account of any category’s views. Figure 1 shows the steps followed to conduct the stakeholder mapping and analysis.

TABLE 1. Evaluation criteria for the power and interest of stakeholders.

The study establishes how thirteen actors are positioned on power, interest, and predictability given the stated rubric, evidence base, and cut-off rule, and which actors consequently occupy each quadrant. It does not establish that the predictability scores are externally valid, since they have not been tested against behavioral indicators; that scores are strictly comparable across actor categories, since the evidence base differs in kind between interviewed and documentary actors; that the composite local-actor cluster is internally homogeneous; that the positions observed are stable over time, the design being cross-sectional; or that the reforms proposed in Section 5 would produce the outcomes attributed to them, which no mapping of this kind can demonstrate.

Actors were included in the mapping if they met at least one of three criteria: (i) a formal mandate over transboundary water or domestic allocation decisions, whether constitutional, statutory, or treaty-based; (ii) documented capacity to enable or block the implementation of water-sector reforms through financing, regulatory, or compliance power; or (iii) identification by two or more interview respondents as consequential for the transboundary water file. Applying these criteria to the desk review results yielded 13 actors for analysis. Entities with sectoral water interests but no role in the transboundary decision or implementation chain were excluded or subsumed, and actors with negligible transboundary interest were excluded a priori. Single institutions were retained as separate actors, each holding a distinct mandate and able to act unilaterally. Composite actors were constructed only where constituent groups share an incentive structure and exert influence through common channels: farmers, water user associations, and tribal networks jointly constitute the compliance constituency on which metering, tariff, and quota reforms depend, and the available evidence does not differentiate their scores; the same logic applies to the downstream governorates. This aggregation follows accepted categorization practice in stakeholder analysis (Reed et al., 2009).

Two features of the actor set follow from these criteria. The World Bank is retained as a separate actor. In contrast, other international organizations are reported individually only where they hold distinct mandates, because the World Bank alone combines financing conditionality with agenda-setting authority in donor coordination and therefore satisfies criterion (ii) in its own right; bilateral donors and agencies that operate through it or alongside it, without independent leverage over allocation decisions, are represented in the value map rather than scored. The ten interviewed institutional categories and the thirteen mapped actors are distinct sets and do not correspond: the categories describe where respondents were drawn from, whereas the mapped actors are the entities selected by the inclusion criteria. The latter includes actors that could not be interviewed (the two upstream agencies and the societal and governorate clusters) and excludes interviewed bodies that do not themselves hold a transboundary mandate. The mapped actor set is therefore broader than the interviewed set, and the upstream riparian agencies and societal actors were primarily scored using documentary evidence.

Three caveats attach to this composite. First, the constituent groups are not equivalent in the type of authority they hold: tribal structures exercise informal authority backed by mediation and sanction, water user associations are formal-legal bodies that may facilitate rather than obstruct reform where they are functional, and individual farmers exercise influence principally through aggregate non-compliance. Second, four distinct modes of influence should be distinguished and are not equally evidenced: protest (documented, e.g., the 2025 cultivation-ban demonstrations), non-compliance (documented, e.g., unauthorized diversions and wells), implementation resistance (documented in reporting on metering and tariff measures), and informal veto over specific reforms (asserted in secondary sources but not established by case-level evidence in this study). The composite score reflects the first three. Third, because the available evidence does not differentiate the groups on the scored sub-criteria, the composite is a reporting convention adopted under evidential constraint rather than a claim of homogeneity. Disaggregating it, particularly by separating water user associations, whose incentives may align with reform, from tribal authorities, whose informal veto capacity is the substantive concern, is identified in Section 6 as a priority for field-level research.

2.2 Analytical dimensions and definitions

The analysis included power-interest analysis and power-predictability analysis. For power-interest analysis, it measured the degree of influence every stakeholder holds over water management decision-making in the country. Additionally, it measured the degree of concern each stakeholder has about transboundary water issues. For power-predictability, it addresses possible changes in stakeholders' power and interest over time.

When it comes to power measurement, several criteria were considered, including formal power, resource power, expert power, coercive power, and legitimate power. The formal power criteria derive from the occupational position held, such as government or leadership of a major institution. While resource criteria stem from control over indispensable resources such as financial capital, technological resources, or essential information, such control gives one significant leverage. Expert power is derived from specialized knowledge and skills and can therefore shape the ability of organizations or individuals to influence decisions in ways others cannot. The coercive power criteria are the ability to compel others to act through threats or sanctions, typically exercised by regulatory bodies or dominant groups. Finally, the legitimate power is the power based on social or cultural recognition of an entity’s right to influence decision-making, which often translates into policy control or general authority.

Several factors were considered in the interest analysis, including goal alignment, perceived benefits, perceived risks, values and beliefs, resource allocation, external influence, involvement influence, and uncertainty and information. Involvement and Influence mean that stakeholders who are either part of the decision-making team or have an influential effect on the decision will be most interested.

Predictability is defined here as the degree to which an actor’s mandate, capacity, and revealed behavior toward Iraqi transboundary water governance can be anticipated over the medium term (three to 5 years), independent of whether that behavior is cooperative. A low score indicates behavior contingent on short-term, volatile drivers (leadership turnover, domestic energy or electoral politics, sanctions exposure), not an uncooperative orientation; an actor can be predictably obstructive. Institutional stability is one determinant of predictability (an internal factor below), whereas cooperativeness is an orientation that is deliberately not scored, keeping the construct positive rather than normative. Like power and interest, predictability is an ordinal expert-judgment construct rated against behavioral anchors, the established format of the power–predictability matrix in stakeholder analysis (Gardner et al., 1986; Newcombe, 2003).

The influences of power predictability include.

2.2.1 Internal factors

• ⁃ Organizational changes: Changes in the organization of the stakeholder affect the potential magnitude of the stakeholder’s power.
• ⁃ Resource availability: The availability or unavailability of financial, human, or technological resources can enhance or diminish a stakeholder’s power.
• ⁃ Strategic priorities: The evolution of organizations' strategic priorities rebalances the influence of different stakeholders.

2.2.2 External factors

• ⁃ Political and Regulatory Environment: Changes in legislation and regulations, or shifts in political power, can alter the entire leadership of the game, especially in governmental aspects.
• ⁃ Market Conditions: In market-driven industries, economic fluctuations balance the relative power of the different players, particularly those that are funding- or investment-oriented.
• ⁃ Social and Environmental Trends: For stakeholders who depend on social or environmental power, their influence gains or losses as public opinion or environmental conditions change. Predictability was scored on the same 1 (low) to 5 (high) scale, where 5 denotes an actor whose role, mandate, and behavior are expected to remain stable across organizational, political, and external shifts, and one denotes an actor whose influence and conduct are highly contingent on short-term domestic priorities or volatile political conditions. The scoring anchors are summarized in Table 1.

2.3 Scoring protocol and validation

Scores were assigned through a four-step protocol. First, interview notes and desk-review documents were coded using directed content analysis against the predefined sub-criteria for each dimension (five for power, eight for interest, six for predictability), producing an evidence matrix of actors × sub-criteria, in which each cell records the supporting interview segments and documentary sources. Second, each sub-criterion was rated on a 1 (low) to 5 (high) scale against the behavioral anchors in Table 1. Third, sub-criterion ratings were aggregated to a single score per dimension using the median across sub-criteria, with divergent sub-criterion profiles flagged for deliberation. Fourth, scoring was performed independently by two researchers working from the shared evidence matrix without access to one another’s ratings. Ratings diverging by more than one point were resolved through structured, evidence-based deliberation to consensus, with the deliberation record retained as an audit trail. Pre-reconciliation agreement between the two raters, computed across all 39 actor-by- dimension ratings, was Cohen’s weighted κ = 0.86 (quadratic weights), indicating almost perfect agreement on the Landis–Koch benchmarks. Inter-rater agreement establishes the reproducibility of the coding, not the validity of the underlying scores, which remains subject to the external validation described in Section 6 (O’Connor and Joffe, 2020). Every final score rests on at least two evidence sources; for the riparian and societal actors, scores rest primarily on documentary evidence. The final scores and a summary rationale for each actor are reported in Table 2. The structured data-collection instrument, the stakeholder survey administered in Arabic during fieldwork (April–June 2024), combining the influence and interest self-ratings with open-ended questions on concerns, support, and resource needs, challenges, and communication channels, is provided in English translation as Supplementary Material S1. and the complete actors-by-sub-criteria evidence matrix is provided as Supplementary Material S2, reporting for every actor and sub-criterion the supporting sources, the anchor rating, an evidence-strength rating (strong, moderate, or limited), the treatment of conflicting evidence, and the aggregation applied. Supplementary Material S3 reports, for each actor, the number, type, period, and selection procedure of the sources on which its scores rest.

TABLE 2. Political-economy stakeholder analysis results.

2.4 Mapping and classification

Following this analysis, data mapping has been conducted to visually display the relationships of power-interest and power-predictability amongst the diverse set of stakeholders. In addition, a stakeholder value map was constructed to position actors based on the alignment of their goals and values with the national water interest, distinguishing between direct and indirect channels of influence. Positions on this map are assigned by rule rather than by impression: an actor is placed in the core ring if it holds a statutory mandate over transboundary or allocation decisions; in the direct ring if it engages the core through a formal, standing channel (financing agreement, technical cooperation instrument, or intergovernmental mandate); and in the indirect ring if its influence reaches the core only through an actor in the direct ring. Arrow direction records whether that channel is reciprocal, and arrow weight records whether the channel carries decision-relevant resources. The map is therefore a representation of channels of influence and is not a scored analytical output; it is not used in the classification, and the term “national interest” denotes the objectives stated in the national water strategy rather than a normative judgment by the authors.

Two distinct rules are applied and reported separately. For descriptive reporting, scores are grouped into three bands: high (≥4.0), medium (2.5–3.9), and low (≤2.4). For quadrant assignment on the two planes, which requires a dichotomy, an actor counts as high on an axis when its score is strictly greater than the scale midpoint of 3.0, and as not-high when the score is 3.0 or below. This cut-off is exhaustive over all observed values, including the fractional scores of 2.5 and 3.5 that the median aggregation produces. The two rules are not interchangeable: an actor may fall in the medium descriptive band and still lie on either side of the quadrant cut-off i.e., MoWR (3.5) and the KRG (3.0) are both medium on predictability descriptively, but only MoWR lies above the cut-off. Quadrant labels, therefore, denote position relative to the cut-off rather than the descriptive band, and Table 2 reports both for every actor. No interval-scale properties are claimed for any of the three scales; the analysis uses ordinal information only (quadrant membership and rank).

3 Results

Table 2 shows the political-economy stakeholder analysis results. Figures 2, 3 plot the actors on the power–interest and power–predictability planes, respectively. The findings suggest that the Iraqi government, the Ministry of Water Resources, and riparian states have the highest power and interest and can exert significant influence over water management and transboundary water flows. As one senior official of a federal water institution put it, the ministry ‘leads all of the transboundary negotiations’ through policy-making and financing, yet its effective participation is constrained by ‘insufficient funding, limited access to data, and conflicting interests’, and the negotiating delegation itself still requires ‘capacity building in negotiation skills and command of the technical terminology’ (translated from Arabic). The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have slightly less but still significant levels of power and interest. A senior advisor at the center of government identified ‘water scarcity and quality’ and ‘disputes among stakeholders’ as the institution’s principal concerns, and ‘limited access to data, legal constraints, and conflicting interests’ as the main obstacles to effective participation in transboundary water management (translated from Arabic), testimony consistent with the mandate overlap and coordination gaps underlying the medium predictability scores of the federal diplomatic and executive actors (Table 2).

The World Bank holds comparable structural power to the federal core, but exercises it indirectly: through financing conditions, technical assistance, and agenda-setting in donor coordination, rather than through direct control over water resources. Likewise, international donors and organizations, such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID), European Union, GIZ, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and other United Nations organizations, also contribute largely in terms of financing and technical support. Stakeholders with low to medium power and interest include a number of Iraqi and KRG sectoral ministries (e.g., agriculture and environment), farmers associations and tribal or traditional authorities. These societal actors, despite their formally limited power, have a documented potential to resist or complicate implementation (e.g., resistance to metering, tariff structures, groundwater regulation, crop restrictions). Non-official sources document where these actors’ perspectives conflict with the official narrative: downstream water users report grievances over allocations, salinity, and water quality, notably in Basra and Diyala, and independent assessments attribute part of the crisis to domestic mismanagement rather than to upstream behavior alone (Al-Shakery, 2025; Von Lossow et al., 2022). These accounts evidence a capacity to resist or complicate implementation rather than a demonstrated veto over specific reforms, and the scores assigned to formally weak local actors are calibrated accordingly. The public record illustrates both the grievance and the blocking capacity: in October 2025, farmers from four provinces converged on Ghammas (Diwaniyah governorate) to protest cultivation bans imposed to conserve drinking water, telling reporters that ‘the farmer has been wronged … they have cut off water supplies’ and demanding compensation and restored agricultural allocations (The New Arab Staff and Agencies, 2025). During the 2023 Dhi Qar unrest, protesters blamed the Iraqi government rather than upstream states for their water insecurity, and tribal actors are documented digging unauthorized diversions and wells that local officials are powerless to stop (Hall and Harper, 2023). NGO, humanitarian-agency, and civil-society sources were used systematically to proxy the perspectives of water users who could not be interviewed directly: Human Rights Watch documented the hospitalization of at least 118,000 Basra residents in 2018 from contaminated water, alongside residents’ testimony blaming governmental failure (Human Rights Watch, 2019); IOM field reporting documents displacement from southern communities as irrigation channels run dry and salinity rises (IOM, 2022); the Norwegian Refugee Council reports that recurrent drought has forced farming households to cultivate less land and reduce water use (Norwegian Refugee Council NRC, 2021); and independent civil-society engineering assessments critique unilateral dam development inside Iraq (Save the Tigris Campaign, 2020).

As shown in Figure 4, many stakeholders have direct and indirect influence because their goals and values also serve the national interest. The more powerful the stakeholder, the more likely they are to be at the center, since they can influence the government to make certain decisions and implement international laws and policies in the region.

In terms of predictability, only the Ministry of Water Resources among the high-power federal institutions, together with the World Bank and most international organizations, scores high; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Prime Minister’s Office, and the KRG score medium (Table 2). Interview testimony located the sources of this unpredictability at the federal level in ‘legal constraints’ and ‘conflicting interests’ surrounding the water file (executive advisory body; translated from Arabic), while the KRG’s medium placement rests on documentary evidence of episodic federal–regional coordination and unilateral dam operations (Table 2). On the other hand, there is a low level of predictability for riparian states, local governments, farmers' associations, tribal authorities, and some civil society groups.

Across the 13 actors mapped (Table 2), the median power score was 4.0 (interquartile range 3.0–5.0; range 2–5), the median interest score 4.0 (interquartile range 4.0–4.5; range 3.5–5.0), and the median predictability score 3.0 (interquartile range 2.75–4.0; range 2.0–4.0). By descriptive band, power was high for seven actors, medium for five, and low for one; interest was high for twelve and medium for one; predictability was high for five, medium for seven, and low for one. Means and standard deviations are not reported because the three scales are ordered categories rather than continuous measurements, and their arithmetic moments have no direct interpretation. The compression of the interest distribution is a consequence of the sampling frame rather than a finding: actors with negligible transboundary interest were excluded a priori, so interest does not discriminate among the mapped actors, and the analytically informative variation lies on the power and predictability axes. This is acknowledged as a design limitation. On the power–interest plane (Figure 2), seven actors lie above the cut-off on both axes and fall in the high-power/high-interest “manage closely” quadrant (MoWR, MoFA, the Prime Minister’s Office, the KRG, Türkiye’s State Hydraulic Works, Iran’s Ministry of Energy, and the World Bank), while the remaining six (UN-ESCWA, UNECE, UNICEF, WHO, downstream governorates, and farmers/WUAs/tribal networks) cluster in the low-power/high-interest quadrants. On the power–predictability plane (Figure 3), the seven actors above the power cut-off divide sharply. Only two [MoWR (3.5) and the World Bank (4.0)] also lie above the predictability cut-off and constitute the “reform anchors”. Five [MoFA (3.0), the Prime Minister’s Office (3.0), the KRG (3.0), Türkiye’s SHW (2.5), and Iran’s MoE (2.0)] fall at or below it and form the “contingent heavyweights” quadrant; three of these are medium rather than low on the descriptive band, and the quadrant label denotes only that their predictability is not established above the midpoint. Four actors below the power cut-off but above the predictability cut-off [UN-ESCWA, UNECE, UNICEF, WHO, each 4.0] form the “reform allies” cluster, and two local clusters below both cut-offs [downstream governorates, 3.0/3.0; farmers, WUAs, and tribal networks, 2.0/2.5] occupy the “contingent peripheral” quadrant. Actor-level scores and bands are given in Table 2.

4 Discussion

4.1 Implications

MoWR combines high power and interest with high predictability, while MoFA and the Prime Minister’s Office hold comparable power and interest but only medium predictability (Table 2). This configuration is what motivates the proposal of a national water coordination council: MoWR provides a predictable technical anchor, the executive provides binding authority, and the council compensates for the medium predictability of the surrounding federal actors. Despite the centralization of the Iraqi water sector, it struggles with coordination between responsible parties (World Bank, 2021). The principal risk is therefore not a lack of authority but fragmentation within the state itself, which the council is designed to remedy.

Lukat et al. (2023) argue that water-sector coordination fails when hierarchical, market, and network governance modes lack synergistic interplay, and that leadership and conflict mediate whether formal coordination practice translates into coordination outcomes. Iraq’s federal core (MoWR, MoFA, the Prime Minister’s Office) sits within a nominally hierarchical structure but operates across overlapping mandates without a veto-clearing institution, the condition under which Lukat et al. predict that practice will fail to translate into outcome. This mechanism, rather than the absence of authority, generates the high-power/medium-predictability cluster visible in Figure 3. Von Lossow et al. (2022) reach a closely related conclusion through a different evidence base, identifying dysfunctional decentralization and an insufficiently implemented allocation framework as the two structural binding constraints on Iraqi water governance. The present finding, that internal fragmentation is a major constraint weakening Iraq’s ability to respond to upstream power asymmetry, therefore converges with Von Lossow et al. (2022) and adds a structured, actor-level description to their qualitative account.

Zeitoun and Warner (2006) hydro-hegemony framework attributes the persistence of non-cooperative outcomes in basins such as the Euphrates–Tigris to power asymmetry that allows the upstream hegemon to set the agenda unilaterally. The framework anticipates the pattern observed in Figure 3. Türkiye’s SHW and Iran’s MoE score high on power but low on predictability because their behavior tracks domestic priorities, energy policy in Türkiye, drought management and sanctions exposure in Iran, rather than basin-level commitments. Kibaroglu (2019) documents the institutional residue: the Joint Technical Committee was suspended in 1993 after sixteen meetings, and no binding allocation regime has since replaced it. Read through Kibaroglu, the high-power/low-predictability placement of upstream actors is not an anomaly but the expected outcome of a basin in which cooperation has historically lagged power asymmetry.

Two qualifications are required here. First, the units scored are agencies, Türkiye’s State Hydraulic Works and Iran’s Ministry of Energy, rather than riparian states as a whole; the scores describe the operating authorities whose release, storage, and notification decisions Iraq encounters, and should not be read as characterizations of Turkish or Iranian foreign policy. Second, predictability as defined in Section 2.2 concerns the anticipability of conduct, not its cooperativeness. On the allocation question, these agencies have been consistently non-cooperative, and that consistency is itself predictable; the low scores instead reflect the predictability of operational behavior from year to year. The documentary record supports that reading: the Joint Technical Committee met sixteen times before its suspension in 1993, and no successor allocation regime has replaced it (Kibaroglu, 2019); the standing commitment of 500 m³/s at the Syrian border has been met irregularly, with reported flows at times falling below it (Hall and Harper, 2023); engagement has proceeded through episodic bilateral frameworks tied to broader political bargains rather than standing procedures, most recently the 2024 agreements (Türkiye Directorate of Communications, 2024); and Iranian tributary diversions have proceeded without systematic prior notification (Al-Shakery, 2025). Because these scores rest on documentary rather than interview evidence and have not been externally validated, they are provisional: the longitudinal indicators specified in Section 6 are the appropriate test, and until they are applied the predictability placement of the upstream agencies should be treated as a hypothesis rather than an established result.

On the Turkish side, the commitment given to Iraq in the 2014 memorandum of a ‘fair and equitable share’ has been contested by Iraqi authorities as unfulfilled; the April 2024 framework created joint planning teams but left the underlying legal dispute untouched, Türkiye continuing to treat the rivers as ‘transboundary’ waters subject to its upstream prerogatives while Iraq maintains that they are international rivers subject to equitable sharing, a divergence the negotiating parties did not address in drafting (Arab Gulf States Institute, 2026; ORSAM, 2025). On the Iranian side, the operating record is one of unilateral and largely unannounced changes: the Daryan and Sardasht dams have reduced tributary inflows, the impoundment of Sardasht produced immediate downstream effects in the Kurdistan Region, and the Alwand is stopped seasonally, in a basin where Iraqi authorities estimate that between a fifth and a third of Tigris flow originates in Iranian territory (Save the Tigris Foundation, 2017; Washington Institute, 2020). Two readings of this record are possible and the present evidence does not decide between them: sustained refusal to accept binding allocation, which would be a stable and therefore predictable orientation, and volatility in operational conduct, which would not.

The KRG’s high-power/medium-predictability placement reflects the constitutional tension between exclusive federal competency over external water sources (Article 110(8)) and shared federal–regional competency over internal water (Article 114(7)) (Iraqi Constitution, 2005), which leaves federal–regional coordination dependent on episodic political alignment rather than on a stable allocation rule. Unilateral dam construction in the north (e.g., Dukan, Darbandikhan) and downstream complaints from federal authorities illustrate this dynamic. Following Lukat et al. (2023), attempting a full unified-water-law reform with the KRG before establishing modular intergovernmental protocols is unlikely to succeed, because the synergistic interplay between hierarchical (federal) and network (federal–regional) governance modes has not yet been constructed.

The findings converge with Von Lossow et al. (2022) in identifying domestic fragmentation, alongside upstream behavior, as a major structural constraint, and extend that argument by quantifying the asymmetry between power and predictability across actor categories. They agree with Al-Muqdadi (2019) on the diagnosis that technical and infrastructural deficits compound the crisis but disagree in emphasis: where Al-Muqdadi prioritizes technical-infrastructural remediation, the present matrices suggest that technical investment is necessary but not sufficient without an explicit coordination architecture, because the high-power actors holding implementation authority (MoFA, the Prime Minister’s Office, the KRG) are those with medium predictability. The findings diverge most clearly from approaches in the Kibaroglu (2019) tradition that locate the principal lever for change at the basin-diplomatic level. On the reading of Figure 3, basin-level diplomacy alone cannot overcome the high-power/low-predictability placement of Türkiye’s SHW and Iran’s MoE without prior consolidation of the Iraqi federal core. Conversely, consolidating that core makes any future basin agreement more credible. This sequencing claim is consistent with Zeitoun and Warner (2006) observation that hegemonic basin configurations rarely yield to fragmented downstream interlocutors. The policy implication is that Iraq’s 2023 UNECE accession is best understood as an enabling condition for domestic coordination reform, not as a substitute for it.

The term “fragmentation” requires specification, since different forms of it call for different remedies. Six can be distinguished in the Iraqi case: legal fragmentation (overlapping statutes without an integrating water law); administrative fragmentation (overlapping ministerial mandates with no veto-clearing institution); informational fragmentation (dispersed, partially withheld hydrological data); fiscal fragmentation (separate budget lines and parallel donor channels); territorial fragmentation (shared federal–regional competency under Article 114(7)); and political fragmentation (apportionment of portfolios among blocs). The mapping speaks most directly to the administrative, informational, and fiscal forms. Fragmentation persists because it is not merely a design failure: each fragment confers control over appointments, contracts, or data, and each holder retains a veto that is itself a bargaining asset, so the actors best placed to consolidate authority are also those who would surrender the most by doing so. It follows that a coordination council is adoptable only if it is incentive-compatible for them, which is why the design proposed below pools only coordination functions while leaving core ministerial mandates intact, ties donor finance to council decisions so that participation becomes a route to resources rather than a loss of them, and offers the negotiating and reputational returns of addressing upstream states with a single voice. Conversely, the political and territorial forms of fragmentation lie beyond what any council can resolve: they are constitutional and coalitional bargains, and the argument advanced here is that a council makes those bargains more tractable, not that it substitutes for them. Treating an administrative instrument as a solution to political fragmentation would be precisely the technocratic error this analysis seeks to avoid.

4.2 Prioritized sequencing and risk mitigation with actionable steps

Each step below is a policy proposal informed by, rather than a finding demonstrated by, the mapping; the corresponding mapping result is indicated for each: the coordination council responds to the concentration of high-power but only medium-predictability actors inside the federal core (Figure 3); donor-anchored investment in data systems responds to the high-predictability ‘reform allies’ cluster (Figure 3); incremental UNECE technical annexes respond to the high-power/low-predictability placement of upstream actors; and compliance design responds to the low-predictability placement of local actors (Figures 2, 3).

A distinction between empirical findings and policy proposals should be maintained throughout this section. The mapping establishes how power, interest, and predictability are distributed across the actor set; it does not establish that a coordination council would reduce fragmentation, that donor conditionality would stabilize actor behavior, or that domestic consolidation must precede basin diplomacy. Those are conditional proposals derived from the distribution together with the governance literature cited above, and testing them would require implementation evidence that does not yet exist. A further caution applies to the power scores themselves: power is treated here as a single ordinal attribute per actor, whereas in substance it is relational and heterogeneous in kind. MoWR holds technical and operational authority, downstream governorates hold implementation capacity, tribal actors hold informal local authority, the World Bank holds financial leverage, and the upstream agencies hold physical control of flows. These are not commensurable quantities, and a shared score of 4 or 5 does not imply that two actors can substitute for one another in a reform coalition. The scores index position within this actor system, not a general capacity to prevail.

The first step is to build a credible domestic center. The center should have clear and binding decision-making rules. Afterward, embed MoWR data systems as the council’s core evidence unit to counter fragmented mandates (World Bank, 2021). The second step is to use donors to lock in predictability. Achieving a unified donor compact could bring together the World Bank and key bilateral donors to fund hydromet and data systems. Additionally, funding could be tied to governance milestones, like council decisions, regular data publication, and metering pilots. The third step is to utilize Water Convention through small steps at first. For instance, starting with technical annexes such as station-level data exchange, advance notice on dam operations, and drought consultation triggers. This could be treated as a trust-building step before pushing toward a bigger forum (UNECE, 2023). The fourth step is to use progressive modularity to achieve a unified water law with minimal risk. This means beginning with small and implementable steps and pilot allocation protocols. The next step is to create coordination agreements between the KRG and the federal government, then proceed to consolidate everything into a unified law package (IILHR, 2023). The council is envisioned as the lead institution for this step. It would be technically anchored in the Ministry of Water Resources, empowered by binding executive authority, and include the KRG ministry responsible for water. This structure would provide a single legal custodian for both the modular protocols and the eventual unified water law. The final step is to design compliance reforms around low predictability parties. This could be achieved through pairing metering, tariffs, and quota enforcement with targeted protections and visible service improvements. This final step is envisioned as a coalition task rather than the responsibility of a single agency. The Ministry of Water Resources and downstream governorate authorities would lead enforcement, while water user associations and tribal mediation structures would support local implementation. The donor compact established in the second step would finance the required protections and service improvements, and the council’s data systems would monitor compliance. This arrangement would ensure that enforcement does not depend solely on actors with the weakest capacity and lowest predictability.

4.3 Actionable recommendations for negotiation strategy and domestic sequencing

There are several recommendations for Iraq’s negotiation strategy to consider. First, focusing on technical agreements, such as data exchange, joint monitoring, and drought triggers, to build a robust and agreed-upon baseline before starting negotiations over water shares. Second, build two separate but working in parallel coalitions. The first coalition is a fast-moving core group, mainly consisting of MoWR, MoFA, and the executive, focusing on immediate institutional reforms. The second is a slower and carefully managed group, consisting of local governments, farmers, tribal leaders, and civil society, focusing on making sure new rules are actually followed on the ground. Third, stop considering donors as source of money only and start treating them as a backbone of Iraq’s data and monitoring systems (World Bank, 2020). Finally, set up technical committees and shared data systems that can keep operating regardless of politics state.

5 Conclusion

This analysis asked how the actors shaping Iraq’s transboundary water governance are distributed across power, interest, and predictability, and what that distribution implies for reform. Drawing on 38 key-informant interviews across ten institutional categories, a structured desk review, and triangulated secondary sources, thirteen actors were scored on anchored 1–5 scales and mapped onto the power–interest and power–predictability planes. The mapping is consistent with an account in which Iraq’s transboundary water governance is constrained less by a lack of formal authority than by the fragmentation of authority across the federal core, sub-national executives, and upstream riparian agencies whose operational conduct is difficult to anticipate. On this evidence, fragmentation is a major constraint on Iraq’s ability to respond to upstream power asymmetry, and the constraint most open to domestic action, because it lies within Iraq’s own institutional reach; the analysis does not establish that removing it would be sufficient to secure Iraq’s water position. Five of the seven high-power actors score only medium or low on predictability; the Ministry of Water Resources and the World Bank, the two high-power actors whose mandates and conduct were assessed as most stable, are the most plausible candidate anchors for a sequenced reform strategy. Two actionable implications follow. First, the distribution of power and predictability suggests that a national water coordination council with binding decision-making rules should precede ambitious basin-level agreements, on the argument, advanced here as a proposal rather than a demonstrated result, that because basin diplomacy is difficult to sustain without a consolidated domestic interlocutor. Second, Iraq’s 2023 accession to the UNECE Water Convention is best leveraged through incremental technical annexes, including station-level data exchange, advance notification of dam operations, and drought consultation triggers, rather than through pursuit of a binding allocation regime in the short term. In both tracks, compliance design must account for the low predictability of local and upstream actors alike.

Three of these propositions remain open. The predictability placement of the upstream agencies is provisional and awaits the longitudinal test specified in Section 6; the recent institutionalization of Iraqi–Turkish water relations, through the 2024 framework memorandum and the executive mechanism agreed in November 2025, provides an immediate opportunity for that test and may revise the placement upward if the arrangements are implemented and sustained. Whether a coordination council would in fact reduce fragmentation, and whether domestic consolidation is a precondition for effective basin diplomacy, are propositions this study frames rather than settles.

6 Limitations and future work

This analysis has four principal limitations. First, the predictability scoring relies on expert judgement informed by structured interviews and the desk review, and has not been externally validated against quantitative behavioral indicators such as historical compliance with bilateral protocols or the frequency of unilateral upstream actions. Although scores were assigned independently by 2 raters and reconciled by consensus, inter-rater agreement within the team is not a substitute for external validation against observed behavior. Second, the actor pool was drawn from formal institutional roles and may underweight informal influence networks, particularly tribal authorities and informal water-user arrangements in southern Iraq, whose influence is documented qualitatively but not scored. In addition, composite actors are internally heterogeneous, and their single scores should be read as central tendencies of the group rather than as attributes of every member. Relatedly, although the interview corpus spans executive, legislative, regional, civil-society, and international institutions, all respondents held institutional positions, so it reflects organized, largely official perspectives; marginalized water users, independent hydrologists, and field engineers were not interviewed directly. Beyond resource constraints, directly interviewing vulnerable local respondents about a politically sensitive resource question raises protection concerns in the current climate, and their perspectives were instead proxied through triangulation of secondary qualitative sources (NGO investigations (Human Rights Watch, 2019), humanitarian-agency field reporting (IOM, 2022; Norwegian Refugee Council NRC, 2021), independent civil-society engineering assessments (Save the Tigris Campaign, 2020), and press documentation of farmer protests) which informed the scoring of the societal actors (Section 2.1). Direct field interviewing of these groups remains a priority for future work, not a substitute for it. A further consequence of this design is evidentiary asymmetry: federal Iraqi and international actors were scored primarily from primary interview data, whereas upstream riparian agencies and societal actors were scored primarily from secondary documentary sources, so scores are not strictly equivalent in provenance across actor categories. Three safeguards limit the effect on comparability: every actor was rated against the same behavioral anchors; the two-source evidence rule applied to every score; and the documentary corpus for non-interviewed actors was extensive and triangulated across NGO, humanitarian-agency, civil-society, and press sources. Nevertheless, documentary scoring may smooth short-term behavioral variation and lag actors’ current positions, and the predictability scores of the upstream riparian agencies in particular should be read with this caveat. The number, type, period, and selection procedure of the sources underlying each actor’s scores are reported in Supplementary Material S3, so that readers can weigh the evidential basis of any cross-category comparison. Institutional informants did independently describe the state’s internal fragmentation, naming ‘conflicting interests' and ‘disputes among stakeholders' among their principal concerns and obstacles; no claim is made, however, that the elite composition of the corpus biases the analysis in a conservative direction, since the direction of any such bias cannot be established from the present evidence. Third, the analysis is a snapshot at the time of fieldwork and does not capture dynamic shifts in power and predictability that may follow UNECE implementation or future changes in upstream domestic politics. Fourth, no claim of thematic saturation is made: the sample is heterogeneous, several categories are represented by one or two respondents, and saturation was not assessed within categories (Section 2.1) (Hennink and Kaiser, 2022). The single-case design limits statistical generalizability beyond the mapped actor system, consistent with the case-study logic of political-economy analysis.

Future research should focus on quantitative validation of the predictability scoring against observable indicators such as the frequency of unilateral upstream actions, compliance with notification protocols, and the longevity of bilateral arrangements. Furthermore, future research should track actors’ power and predictability especially after UNECE Convention implementation. This allows testing whether the framework alters the high-power and low-predictability placement of upstream actors. Finally, field-level research should extend the mapping through anonymized interviews and participatory methods with water users, independent hydrologists, and local engineers in southern Iraq, testing whether the federal-core fragmentation finding holds when informal authority and ground-level perspectives are scored from primary data. Comparative application of the framework to other downstream states would further test whether domestic fragmentation operates as the binding constraint, a question the present single-case design deliberately leaves open.

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Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2026.1925616/full#supplementary-material

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Footnotes

Edited by: Abdullah Muratoglu, Batman University, Türkiye

Reviewed by: Shahbaz Altaf, National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan

Aysegul Onat Kibaroglu, MEF University, Türkiye