The project will not only provide valuable information for a more efficient management, but also allows an integrated management, increasingly required by the directives and regulations of the European Union. For example, the Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC, Art. 9, obliges EU member states to manage hydrographic basins in an integrated manner. The Water Framework Directive requires taking into account the principle of recovering the costs of multiple ecosystem services within water bodies, including environmental costs and water scarcity. Thereby, the results of the project are not only useful for those responsible for management but are also necessary to comply with European standards.

The expected results are also interesting for the design of policies that promote their own and other policies adoption. They help us answering the question of whether it is better to design policies that promote adoption through public learning –for example, through extension services–; or through social learning –for example through the formation of associations of farmers who have previously adopted the new technology or by fostering interactions between participants in training workshops–. As social learning policies aim to broaden the interactions between adopters and non-adopters, the characteristics of the social network (centrality, neighborhood cohesion, segmentation) influence their effectiveness. Therefore, the results of the analysis evaluate not only the effectiveness of public versus social learning policies but also the design of learning policies based on the characteristics of the social network and the number of adopters.