WaA Call for papers WFD + 20: Assessing the European Water Framework Directive The European Water Framework Directive, issued in 2000, is a major landmark in the history of European water policy. It has introduced in national legislation a number of principles and priorities that have the potential to substantially revise the supply-oriented and state-centred ‘business as usual’ of water resource development. The WFD has, in particular, incorporated some of the policy ideas promoted in the 1990s, such as full cost recovery and resource pricing, the participation of stakeholders or the environmental health of ‘water bodies’. It has also mainstreamed other tenets of IWRM such as water management at the basin scale (or ‘district’) and the polluter-pays principle.