Objective: Rural entrepreneurship in regions facing environmental crises develops amid resource scarcity, livelihood shifts, access inequality, and changing spatial relations. Under such conditions, entrepreneurial continuity cannot be explained solely by individual characteristics or isolated resources and institutional support; attention must instead focus on relationships among actors, networks, resources, markets, infrastructure, and institutions. Despite the expansion of literature on rural entrepreneurial ecosystems, a significant portion of studies has focused on identifying and classifying ecosystem elements, paying less attention to explaining the process of relational change among them. Furthermore, studies of environmental crises have mostly examined responses at the individual or household level, paying less attention to ecosystem rearrangement in networks, resource flows, and spatial links. Accordingly, this research was conducted to explain how spatial and network relations within the rural entrepreneurial ecosystem are rearranged under conditions of chronic water crisis. The main research problem concerned how the water crisis reconfigures relationships among actors, resource and information flows, and entrepreneurial action strategies.


Methodology: This study was conducted within an interpretive paradigm using a qualitative design based on systematic Grounded Theory. The approach aimed to move beyond factor identification and provide a process-based explanation of how chronic water crisis reconfigures relationships, resource flows, infrastructure, and spatial linkages. Data were collected through 40 semi-structured interviews with rural entrepreneurs, local managers, government officials and experts, entrepreneurship consultants, and academic experts. Field observations and document analyses were also used to complement and triangulate the data. Interview, field-note, and document data were analyzed using MAXQDA 20. The analysis proceeded through three coding stages: open, axial, and selective coding, using constant comparison, theoretical memoing, and conceptual mapping. Open coding extracted action- and experience-based codes, while axial coding organized categories around causal, contextual, and intervening conditions, action strategies, and consequences. In selective coding, categories were integrated around a central category, formulating the research paradigmatic model. Trustworthiness was enhanced through member checking, peer debriefing, triangulation, and an audit trail. Cohen's kappa (0.831) was also calculated as a complementary indicator of coding consistency.


Findings: The findings revealed that the central category is "Forced Spatial Rearrangement of the Rural Entrepreneurial Ecosystem." This category represents a process through which the declining reliability of traditional livelihoods, local resource constraints, and market access difficulties drive rural actors to reconstruct relationships, form trans-local linkages, redirect resource flows, and leverage digital communications and infrastructure. The water crisis and the weakening of agricultural livelihood foundations have put pressure on the previous socio-economic arrangement, leading to the reconfiguration of horizontal and vertical networks, redirection of resource and information flows, labor and goods mobility, expansion of urban-rural linkages, and the emergence of coopetition patterns. Horizontal networks enhance local capacity through experience sharing, production aggregation, cost reduction, and increased bargaining power, while vertical networks provide access to capital, permits, technology, training, and external markets. Social capital facilitates cooperation but may reinforce closed networks and unequal access to opportunities, especially where institutional and digital capacities are unevenly distributed across villages and actors. Moreover, digital infrastructure mitigates geographic distance during spatial constraints, enabling access to information, markets, and trans-local connections. However, the capacity to utilize these mechanisms varies among entrepreneurs and villages. Geographic location, internet quality, professional experience, individual positioning in local networks, and connection to support institutions explain the disparities in accessing and benefiting from emerging opportunities. Thus, spatial rearrangement is not a uniform or equitable process, but a conditional and unequal one shaped by the interaction among networks, resources, infrastructure, markets, and institutions.


Conclusion: The research paradigmatic model demonstrates that the water crisis is not merely an external constraint on rural entrepreneurship; rather, as a structural factor, it disrupts the prior arrangement of resources and relationships, forcing actors to reconfigure the paths of capital, labor, knowledge, and market flows. Consequently, ecosystem adaptation is achieved through the rearrangement of spatial and network relations rather than the isolated strengthening of a single component. On one hand, this process can lead to economic diversification, expanded access to resources and markets, and enhanced ecosystem adaptive capacity; on the other hand, it may result in greater dependence on trans-local networks and the reproduction of spatial inequalities. Accordingly, this study presents the rural entrepreneurial ecosystem as a spatial and relational system whose adaptive capacity depends on the cohesion and reconfigurability of relationships among networks, infrastructure, markets, resources, and institutions. The main contribution of this research lies in providing a process-based formulation of the forced spatial rearrangement of the rural entrepreneurial ecosystem under water crisis conditions, highlighting the simultaneously adaptive and unequal nature of this process.