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Legitimacy deficits have been identified as central to the ongoing challenges encountered in implementing the policy reforms introduced to reduce the environmental impacts of over-allocating water in the Murray-Darling Basin. In closing the special issue on Building and Maintaining Trust and Legitimacy in Environmental Water Management, this article draws on the preceding articles in responding to a call for the focus of evaluations of environmental water reforms to be broadened to assess their performance against metrics of legitimacy. The first aim is to consider some analytical issues to be encountered in developing legitimacy metrics for MDB environmental water reform contexts. The other aim is to explore the role of legitimacy metrics in empirical research designed to strengthen the evidence available for deciding whether and how to invest in establishing and sustaining the legitimacy of the MDB reforms. Particular reference is made to empirical studies of the consequences and antecedents of legitimacy in U.S. contexts of the law and its policing. Furnishing policy makers with reliable evidence to guide their decisions on whether and how to invest in the legitimacy of the MDB environmental water reforms will require studies of this kind that are adapted to the unique contexts of these reforms.

The increasing pressure on water resources in Europe&rsquo ; s broader area led member states to take measures and adopt a common legislative &ldquo ; umbrella&rdquo ; of directives to protect them. The aim of this research is to investigate practicing deficiencies, information lacks and distances from optimal status as set by the Water Framework Directive and supporting water uses. This contributes to the improvement of the efficiency and harmonization of all environmental goals especially when management of Protected Areas is addressed. Gap analysis, an approach that reveals the distance between current and desired level, was carried out, targeting five Mediterranean hydro-ecosystems, covering three major water policy pillars &ldquo ; Monitoring Practices&rdquo ; &ldquo ; Management Practices&rdquo ; and &ldquo ; Water Quality and Pressures&rdquo ; . Data for such analyses was collected by literature research supported by a query matrix. The findings revealed a lack in compliance with the Water Framework Directive regarding the &ldquo ; Monitoring Practices&rdquo ; and several deficiencies in sites burdened by eutrophication and human pressures on &ldquo ; Water Quality and Pressures&rdquo ; field. As for &ldquo ; Management Practices&rdquo ; extra effort should be applied in all hydro-ecosystems to reach the desirable state. We suggest that gap analysis, as a harmonization tool, can unify apparently different areas under the same goals to reveal the extra necessary &ldquo ; investment&rdquo ; .