International Initiatives for Water Policy Assessment: A Review

The recent international agreement to implement principles of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) as a means to overcome the current world water crisis has brought about the need to measure countries’ progress towards a new way of managing water. Several governmental and nongovernmental international organizations have taken up this challenge using different methods. This paper analyzes the methodological approaches currently applied to comparative water policy assessment, points out advantages and drawbacks of the different types of initiatives, and looks at where this relatively young field of research is heading. The technical and topical constraints of existing numerical indicators, the lack of consolidated qualitative assessments and the difficulty to measure real water policy implementation are among the main challenges to be addressed in the near future in the context of water policy assessment.