Toward Adaptive Regulation in Public Irrigation: Integrating the SES Framework into a Quantitative Governance Assessment

Public Irrigation Projects (PIPs) play a strategic role in water security and rural development in semi-arid regions. However, the absence of standardized and replicable tools to assess governance performance and integrate social, ecological and institutional dimensions remains a challenge for sustainable management. To bridge this gap, this study proposes a framework for the quantitative operationalization of the Social–Ecological Systems (SES) approach through the development of the SES Governance Index (SGI), a composite indicator designed to assess adaptive governance in PIPs. The SGI is constructed through a procedure that translates SES components into measurable indicators using a conditional weighting protocol based on correlation analysis and dimensional diagnostics. Five subindices corresponding to core SES dimensions are developed using geometric aggregation, with weights determined according to the statistical structure of each dimension. These subindices are integrated into the final SGI through weighted linear aggregation. The framework is applied to nine PIPs in Brazil to demonstrate suitability for comparative assessment. Rather than producing a fixed ranking, the SGI is presented as a flexible metric for diagnosing governance structures and identifying systemic imbalances. By quantitatively operationalizing the SES framework, this study contributes a methodological tool for governance assessment in PIPs and other resource-dependent contexts.