Water scarcity is one of the most pressing development challenges of our time. This issue, along with climate change globally—especially in arid and water-scarce regions already grappling with this problem—has intensified. Concern about environmental outcomes and crises, particularly regarding water, can be seen as a significant starting point for activism aimed at managing emerging crises with long-term roots. Since this crisis affects the quality of people's daily lives for their survival. Hence, it is argued that addressing and managing these challenges requires strategies to increase local adaptive capacity and resilience, not just against catastrophic events, but as part of everyday life gaining as one of the most urgent global challenges. Since water lies at the juncture of interests of actors such as the local community, the state, the market, and the environment—which may not be aligned—the legitimacy of decisions depends on transparency and fairness in allocation procedures. With regard to the fact that recent approaches, by criticizing structural technocracy, the paper believes that water scarcity has less of a climatic nature and more of an institutional-social nature rooted in societies' behavior and performance over the distant past, but now often manifests itself as a climatic unexpected event. From this perspective, it is the distribution of power and the pattern of interaction among stakeholders and relevant agents that controls the quality of managing water scarcity for living in the local community In this regard, the water crisis can be understood as a social trauma resulting from the imbalance of power and the nature of water governance in societies that are, so to speak, located in water-scarce regions due to geographical characteristics. However, each society at its various levels of development can show different reactions to environmental crises often manifested in the collective activism of the local community and are better manifested in societies and regions that have experienced these crises over the long term. Assuming that the major problems of water scarcity are rooted in the nature of governance rather than resource limitations—which is possible through studying the experiences of actors, especially at the local level—this study seeks to understand the nature of water governance and, in particular, the experience of local participation in water scarcity management. For this purpose, Dastgerd village in Qom province was selected as the case study, as it is located in one of the country's water-poor provinces. To gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon, a qualitative method was employed. Research data were obtained through semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 local activists and stakeholders and were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings showed that water management can be organized around five main themes: structural silence, inequality in power distribution (understood as unequal accessibility to water resources), institutional weakness of the state, non-participatory management, and multiplicity and plurality in management—revealing some of the most important challenges at the local level. The analysis of stakeholders' experiences indicates an inconsistency between the biological needs related to water at the local level and its decision-making structure at higher levels. While water is a vital issue affecting daily life, from their perspective, decision-making processes have proven to be decentralized, out of reach, and lacking accountability. This partially confirms Wittfogel's perspective on centralized management in the water-scarce geographies of the East, which encounters dysfunctional contradictions in practice within today's modern society. As a historical fact, it can be said that because of factors such as the traditional over-centralization of decision-making power in state institutions, the lack of opportunity for stakeholder and non-governmental sector participation in the resource policymaking process, the political and social dimension of water governance has been considered unimportant. It seems that there is still this Wittfogelian (1957) mentality both among state institutions and decision-makers that optimal water management in Eastern lands, including Iran, must be carried out through a powerful and centralized state. Based on findings and given that developing public educational mechanisms towards optimal water consumption as well as developing their indigenous knowledge are primary steps for local people involvement, it is recommended that , at the Policy Level: the feasibility of establishing educational centers be placed on the agenda by the institutions in charge at the national, provincial, and village levels. Moreover, at the Executive Level, it is suggested that, to enhance perceived justice and protect social capital, it is recommended that the Water Resources Management Organization (at national and provincial levels), under the auspices of the Ministry of Energy, along with relevant executive organizations, continuously implement protocols. This would help to clarify allocation criteria, violation processing procedures, and the status of resources by shifting from purely technical management towards justice-oriented governance. The transparency would also help to prevent perceived discrimination and the erosion of public trust.