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The integrated water resources management (IWRM) paradigm has emerged as the main guiding framework for water resources development and management. Since the IWRM approach started to gain prominence with the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Summit and the Dublin Conference, developing and developed countries worldwide have adopted and transposed the tools and principles embodied in this holistic approach into their national policies as well as their regulatory and institutional frameworks. The scientific community has performed extensive studies within the IWRM field. In fact, there is a growing literature analysing multi-dimensional functions to pursue an IWRM approach in water resources management. The main objective of this study is to perform a literature review of the scientific knowledge in the IWRM field published between the years 2000 and 2011. A total of 353 papers published in scientific journals were carefully reviewed and extracted from the ISI Web of Science database. The main results show that: (a) the dominant research topics in IWRM analysis focus on its institutional framework, on equitable water allocation (sustainable management of water resources), and on IWRM implementation and stakeholder participation; and (b) the leading countries in scientific research into IWRM are Germany, the USA and South Africa.

Human Rights to Water and Sanitation (HRWS) have been consolidated as relevant frameworks to measure different levels of services. It is essential to move forward with specific initiatives that interpret the content of these human rights and operationalize them through specific metrics. However, some critical issues emerge in attempting this. Different approaches are proposed in this article to tackle this challenge: i) utilizing a participatory technique to discuss the relative importance of the normative criteria to define water and sanitation services, ii) defining a short list of key indicators to measure the different dimensions of HRWS, and iii) assessing the impact of different weighting systems in the constructing an aggregated index, which has been proposed as a useful tool to monitor water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) from a rights perspective. Two municipalities (in Mozambique and Nicaragua) were selected as initial case studies. The results suggest that there is a common understanding among the experts about prioritization of the HRWS criteria. Differences in the relative importance given to the HRWS criteria can be explained due to the particularities of the local context. Further, the research suggests that expert opinions may be partially conditioned by targets and indicators proposed at the international level. Although the influence of weighting techniques on aggregated measures and their utilization in the decision-making process are limited, this methodology has a great potential for adapting specific WASH metrics to different regional, national, and/or local contexts taking into account the HRWS normative content.

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