Evaluation from academia and practitioners. In addition to official evaluations, a significant volume of academic literature has also been published over the past 15 years dealing with the WFD: its goals, aspirations, potential, challenges and implementation processes. According to Xxxx (2008) between 2001 and 2008 about 1000 papers were published in ISI listed journals that have “Water Framework Directive” in their title or key words. Following his analysis, we note that most of that literature has focused on the more technical aspects of the Directive: setting the background conditions, inter-calibration processes for the different indicators, results of the evaluation processes, etc. However, only a few papers deal with the policy implications of the WFD. 15 Hering et al. (2010) identify over 1900 papers that have been published as a result of research projects associated with the implementation of the WFD, also in their view mostly focused on improving our understanding of the ecology of Europe's surface waters aquatic ecosystem function. On their part, Xxxxxxxxx et 15 This observation coincides with the conclusions Xxxx-Xxxxx (2011) derives from a bibliometric analysis of scientific publications on water management, which "highlights the continued dominance of technical over social perspectives in scientific writings on water management" and a lack of integrative analysis of water management challenges, despite the wide-spread acceptance that water management problems are fundamentally problems of management and governance and calls for integrated approaches to water management. al. (2013) observe that most WFD implementation studies look at the formal implementation aspects (transposition, statistical analysis of evaluation results, etc.) and few deal with actual practical implementation "on the ground", an aspect which in their view remains largely under- researched and therefore unclear. Existing institutional and policy studies of WFD implementation tend to focus on a particular country (Xx Xxxx and Xxxxxx, 2010 for Spain; Xxxxxx et al., 2011 for Sweden; Xxxxx, 2012 for Scotland; Xx Xxxxxxx and Xxxxxxxxx-Xxxx, 2012 also for Spain; Xxxxxxx et al. 2013 for Germany; Xxxxxxxxxx et al., 2015 for Greece; or Xxxxxxxx, 2011 and xxx xxx Xxxxxxx, 2015 for the Netherlands, to cite just a few examples); or on a more comparative analysis of implementation strategies between different MS (Xxxx, 2008; Xxxx-Xxxxx et al., 2010; Xxxxxxxxxx et al., 2011; Xxxxxxxx et al., 2013; to cite some that focus on the...
