Towards sustainability of water policies in Mediterranean countries: evaluation approaches in the SWAP project

Sustainable development has become a policy goal, but measuring progress towards this goal is complex and may be subjective. Water policy is a key component of sustainable development – environmental, social and economic sustainability – since water is a fundamental human need. Here we summarise some challenges for evaluating the sustainability of water policies in Mediterranean countries and the approach developed in the SWAP project (Mediterranean dialogue on framing Sustainability in WAter Policy evaluation). We review the attributes of sustainability, discuss several evaluation approaches and tools highlighting their strengths and contributions, and outline the challenges to water policy evaluation. We present and discuss an example framework to evaluate the sustainability of water policy in Mediterranean countries, based on transdisciplinary participation to evaluate governance aspects. We conclude that the evaluation of sustainable water policies does not have an ultimately unambiguous result and we propose that sustainability evaluation needs to establish a public discourse that considers the three pillars of sustainability (environmental, social and economic), their interaction and the process.