Sustainability Indicator Approaches in River Basin Planning and Management: An Integrative Review

Sustainability indicators are essential tools to ensure the identification of acomprehensive strategies and realistic way of assessing and improving sustainability.This tool can be used for river basin planning and management,... [ view full abstract ]

Sustainability indicators are essential tools to ensure the identification of acomprehensive strategies and realistic way of assessing and improving sustainability.This tool can be used for river basin planning and management, including monitoring,assessment and reporting. Also, indicators are important assessment tools to identifysocial needs and contribute to public planning and management. However, the properuse of indicators in the public management is still a methodological and politicalchallenge with rather vague guidelines in many scales. Few studies explored thedifferent potential uses and impacts of indicators as complementary tool to decision-making in water management and planning processes. The aim of this research was toconduct an integrative review of different sustainability indicator approaches used forriver basin planning and management. The literature review was mainly supported by aselection of scientific papers from Scopus. The analyzed manuscripts were dated fromthe year 1995 to 2016 with the following keywords: "sustainability", "river basin", and"indicators". The initial list (N = 134) consisted of academic papers based on set ofkeywords. Secondly we performed a screening based on all the topics of the papers, notlimiting the search of the terms in titles or abstracts. We executed this task manually toensure that the content of the papers was related to the system of indicators (final listN=130). The main findings demonstrated similar results in territorial level however weidentified different models of sustainability adopted. Most of the experiences wereregional territorial scope, had a systemic approach, and adopted an indicator modelsupported by environmental metrics. We conclude that the indicators systems reviewedare not only a set of different technical approaches and tools, but a balance of strategies,demands, actions and tacit knowledge.

Keywords: sustainability indicators; river basin, management, planning