The EU FP7 GENESIS project on groundwater systems. Contributions to the analysis of economic, legal and institutional issues of groundwater management with selected case studies.

The EU Water Framework Directive clearly integrates economics into water management and policy making, and economics is to have a decisive role in the development of the programme of measures and the new river basin management plans. This paper provides a brief overview of the contribution of the EU GENESIS project with the application of different economic or hydro-economic methods and approaches for analyzing and/or selecting sustainable cost-efficient measures and management strategies to achieve a good quantitative and chemical groundwater status in six selected case studies across Europe that differ in their physical settings, drivers, pressures, impacts, and management and policy issues. Three main economic approaches have been employed: hydro-economic modelling combining simulation and optimization techniques, non-market valuation (choice experiment) and econometric analysis to derive relevant policy insight from specific surveys in the area. The Bayesian network technique was also tested to assess the impacts of several polices for integrated multiobjective groundwater management. Given that any feasible policy has to be designed considering the conditions of the legal and institutional framework, a in-depth analysis of the legal and institutional conditions was conducted for three cases. Finally, multicriteria studies (MAVT technique) were also applied to three selected cases in order to assess stakeholder preferences and identify potential conflicts as well as common ground.