Metropolitan Planning for Sustainable Water Resource Management

Metropolitan regions concentrate economic growth and population expansion, increasing pressure on water resources and making integrated water governance a central challenge for sustainable territorial development. This study examines structural imbalances between territorial planning and water resource management in legally recognized metropolitan areas, highlighting the need for coordinated and adaptive planning frameworks. A mixed-methods approach combines a systematic bibliometric and regulatory review, socio-territorial and hydrological characterization, and a structured comparative assessment based on a validation checklist with defined variables, indicators, and qualitative performance and importance scales. The analysis covers seven metropolitan areas selected through institutional and analytical criteria. Findings show that governance capacity, institutional coordination, planning integration, and implementation coherence are key determinants of water management performance, while revealing significant heterogeneity in planning maturity and a persistent gap between planning formulation and execution, particularly in financial alignment. Based on these results, the study proposes a metropolitan water-planning framework integrating strategic action lines, adaptive response mechanisms, and monitoring indicators to support decision-making, strengthen water security, and enhance territorial resilience. Although grounded in empirical analysis and expert validation, the model’s implementation depends on institutional capacity and broader governance conditions. The study contributes an operational and transferable methodological framework that advances the integration of water governance into metropolitan planning through explicit evaluation criteria, supporting sustainability-oriented territorial management in complex and heterogeneous environments.