Iran's water crisis is commonly described as a consequence of declining precipitation, recurrent drought and climate change, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that governance and management failures are at least as important as physical scarcity in explaining the severity of the crisis. This paper presents a structured diagnostic and conceptual framework for water resource governance under crisis conditions, developed from the operational experience of a regional water company in south-eastern Iran and synthesised with the international literature on integrated water resources management, adaptive governance and water security. Rather than applying a data-driven or machine-learning model to a hydrological time series, as in the companion papers of this issue, the study uses a qualitative policy-analysis approach to identify the structural and operational pathologies that most commonly undermine water governance: a project-oriented rather than problem-oriented management culture, weak demand-side management, over-abstraction of groundwater relative to aquifer recharge, a persistent gap between legally permitted and hydrologically sustainable allocations, limited data-driven decision-making, administrative rather than basin-scale management, fragmented coordination among sectoral agencies, weak scenario-based foresight, and performance-evaluation criteria for managers that reward physical implementation over resource sustainability. Building on this diagnosis, the paper proposes an integrated governance model comprising a five-pillar operational strategy (protection, monitoring, demand management, governance and resilience), a six-stage adaptive decision-making cycle, a three-tier provincial and national water-security dashboard, a revised set of manager performance indicators, and a short-, medium- and long-term action roadmap. The framework reframes the central policy question from ‘how can more water be supplied?’ to ‘how can limited water resources be governed so that today's vital needs are met while the capacity of the resource is preserved for the future?’, and offers a transferable diagnostic checklist for regional water authorities operating under similar hydro-climatic and institutional stress