Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Towards sustainability of water policies in Mediterranean countries: evaluation approaches in the SWAP project Ana Iglesias and Fabrizia Buono 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. Address Universidad Polite ´ cnica de Madrid, Avenida de la Complutense SN, 28040 Madirid, Spain Corresponding author: Iglesias, Ana (ana.iglesias@upm.es) Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2009, 1:133–140 This review comes from the inaugural issues Edited by Rik Leemans and Anand Patwardhan 1877-3435/$ – see front matter # 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. DOI 10.1016/j.cosust.2009.10.012 Sustainability and water More than 20 years ago the World Commission on Environment and Development – known also as the Bruntland Commission – characterised sustainable de- velopment as the one that seeks to meet ‘the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future gener- ations to meet their own needs’ [1  ]. This definition reflects the essential element of sustainability: the capacity to endure. In the context of development, sus- tainability suggests moving towards a balance among equity, economic security and the environment. All societies seek forms of sustainability in a more or less explicit manner. In 2001 Europe adopted the Sustainable Development Strategy moving towards a promising mode for achieving social progress. Also in 2001 Kates et al. [2  ] published a perspective on paradigm changes in research, speaking of the need for a new field of sustainability science, seeking to understand the fundamental character of interactions between nature and society. Built on their analysis is the claim that a political agenda for sustainable development should be developed with the participation of the research community. Since then, both scientists and society search for ways to evaluate sustainability. Nevertheless, conceptualising sustainable development is not easy since evidently people hold different values and beliefs about the way societies sustain quality of life [3,4  ]. Water is included in all frameworks towards sustainabil- ity, since water is a fundamental human need. Given the universal value of water, one may think that sustainable water policy should be easily evaluated. However, this is not the case. On the contrary, the evaluation of the sustainability aspects of water policy is a major issue, especially in Mediterranean countries both of Europe and North Africa. Mediterranean countries share a culture for managing limited water resources and are increasingly aware that sustainable development may be challenged inadequate water policies. But many current water policies have unrealistic social and environmental sustain- ability attributes. This results in limitations and conflicts. Limitations of safe drinking water create new forms of social discrimination. Limitations of water for agriculture reinforce conflicts with the environment and question food security in some areas. Limitations for water for tourism and other economic activities question economic development. Does sustainability provide the principles for facing these limitations and the increasing pressure on freshwater resources? The goal is clear; the means to achieving it are now and again questioned. Moving towards sustainable water policy in the Mediter- ranean is a contributory element in the wider search for sustainability. But sustainability is difficult to evaluate since it is a complex and contested notion, normative, subjective and ambiguous [5]. As consequence the evalu- ation of the sustainability of water policies is not a simple task. Here we summarise the issues most frequently encoun- tered when incorporating the sustainability pillars into the evaluation of water policy with a view to identi- fying relevant recommendations for moving towards www.sciencedirect.com Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2009, 1:133–140