<p>Water resources management frequently faces conflicting objectives and high uncertainty, which challenge the consistency and reliability of decision outcomes. Conventional multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches often produce divergent rankings due to differences in method assumptions and the ambiguity inherent in expert judgments. This study proposes a fuzzy ensemble decision-making framework that integrates eleven intuitionistic fuzzy MCDM (IF-MCDM) techniques with a fuzzy ranking mechanism. The approach explicitly models membership, non-membership, and hesitation degrees, aggregates rankings into interpretable fuzzy distributions, and provides insights into both consensus levels and ranking robustness. Two real-world cases, dam site selection and rural water supply strategy planning, demonstrate the framework’s applicability. Criteria weights were derived using an intuitionistic fuzzy aggregation scheme, while alternatives were evaluated under multiple decision logics. Compared with conventional compromise-based aggregators, the proposed method preserves ranking uncertainty and improves transparency through visual interpretation. Notably, the top alternatives (<i>S</i>₄ and <i>A</i>₁) showed complete agreement with five benchmark methods, confirmed by a Weighted Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient of 1.000, highlighting the robustness of the integrated approach. These findings underline the framework’s potential to strengthen decision resilience, interpretability, and stakeholder confidence, offering a practical tool for adaptive and inclusive water governance under uncertain and data-limited conditions.</p>