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Introduction There is a growing policy emphasis on the involvement of stakeholders and the public in water resource planning and decisionmaking (Global Water Partnership, 2000). In Europe, participation in water resource planning gained a new institutional stature with the Water Framework Directive (WFD). This calls for the``active involvement'' of all interested parties in the implementation process and particularly in the production, revision, and updating of River Basin Management Plans (Article 14; Council of the European Communities, 2000). Planning methods that combine public participation with decisionmaking functions are therefore increasingly in demand (Commission of the European Communities, 2002).

Coastal ecosystems are increasingly threatened by short-sighted management policies that focus on human activities rather than the systems that sustain them. The early assessment of the impacts of human activities on the quality of the environment in coastal areas is important for decision-making, particularly in cases of environmentrdevelopment conflicts, such as environmental degradation and saturation in tourist areas. In the present study, a methodology was developed for the multi-dimensional evaluation and ranking of coastal areas using a set of criteria and based on the combination of multiple criteria choice methods and Geographical Information Ž . Systems GIS . The northeastern part of the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea, Greece was the case study area. A distinction in sub-areas was performed and they were ranked according to socio-economic and environmental parameters. The robustness of the proposed methodology was assessed using different configurations of the initial criteria and reapplication of the process. The advantages and disadvantages, as well as the usefulness of this methodology for comparing the status of coastal areas and evaluating their potential for further development based on various criteria, is further discussed. ᮊ

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A key component towards sustainability in coastal tourist destinations is to establish monitoring and evaluation schemes in order to measure the impacts of tourism on the economy, society and the environment. Although there is a great deal of frameworks providing the methodological baseline for developing the essential monitoring schemes, the relevant literature has shown that a challenge still exists on adapting these general frameworks to the particularities of the destinations under assessment. This paper presents a framework that measures and monitors sustainability at the local level by introducing a three-tier system of indicators. The framework manages to incorporate the different types of tourism activities as well as the special characteristics of coastal tourist destinations in the Mediterranean while at the same time allows for comparisons among them. The paper emphasizes the role of local stakeholders’ engagement in the development of the monitoring framework and discusses the challenges that emerged during the process. Essentially, the paper provides an alternative way for adjusting general frameworks to allow sustainability evaluations at the local level. In this sense, five types of coastal tourism destinations have been identified as critical in the case of the Mediterranean: beach/maritime destinations, urban/cultural, cruising, recreational boating and nature/ecotourism destinations.

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