Use of indicators in River Basin Management Planning and Strategic Environmental Assessment processes

River Basin Management Planning (RBMP) and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) processes often rely on the use of indicators to assess the sustainability of planning options, to communicate with stakeholders and to support decision-making. The aim of this research was to investigate the adoption of indicators to support these processes and to analyse indicators integration between them. A conceptual framework was adopted to support a qualitative content analysis of the Portuguese RBMP and corresponding SEA reports. The main findings showed that indicators are generally used in SEA and planning reports. The analysed documents used a large number of indicators, mostly quantitative, and adopted very different approaches for their organization, selection and validation. Usually no participatory process was used in this context. The research supported the identification of areas for improvement, such as the need to promote a stronger stakeholder engagement in the indicator development process, the relevance of using standardized cross-cutting indicators and the call for the identification of a set of critical indicators to be used in both processes.