Not three pillars. Two, plus what has to be true
Economic and social impact are read as parallel pillars. Resource stewardship is not treated as a third, because it is not an outcome the model produces — it is a condition on the model working at all. A mechanism that degrades its water source does not score poorly on stewardship; it stops functioning.
Economic impact
National food security and import substitution. What the model removes from the import bill, how reliably, and how much private development it draws in.
Social impact
Who reaches the land, who works it, and what happens to the communities already there. Employment is counted here, as livelihood.
Resource stewardship
Water incentive alignment, tenure term against supply horizon, and enforcement. Answered inside each group's key success factors.
A degraded aquifer is not a low score. It is the end of the model
Placing stewardship as a third scored pillar would allow it to be offset — strong economic and social readings compensating for a weak resource reading. That is exactly the arithmetic the Kingdom's own experience rules out: the wheat programme delivered on volume and on participation, and ended anyway, because the source failed.
Treating stewardship as a condition means it is not traded against anything. A model either satisfies it or is unavailable on that area. This mirrors the evaluation's own treatment of a terminal class, where a limitation that cannot be addressed closes the hectare rather than lowering its rating.
Anatomy of a criterion answer
Every answer has the same two parts, and neither is a number. What distinguishes this framework from a scored one is that the answer says what the group does, in its own terms, rather than placing it on a scale against the others.
Thirteen criteria, in full
Each entry states what the criterion asks, what moves it, how it should be read, and the specific way it tends to be read wrongly. Worked examples built from published national figures sit in the Model Catalogue and are not repeated here, so that a corrected figure has one home rather than two.
Where the criteria pull against each other
These are not defects in the framework. They are the real structure of the decision: seven places where improving one reading reliably degrades another. A composite score would resolve each of them silently, by whatever weighting was chosen — and the Ministry would never see that a choice had been made.
No model is strong on everything, and none is weak on everything
Read across the seven, a pattern emerges: mechanisms that move fastest and draw the most capital concentrate access, and mechanisms that widen access carry the state's liability for longer. That is not a flaw in any particular instrument — it is the shape of the choice.
Which side of it the Kingdom takes is a matter of policy. This framework's only job is to make sure the trade is visible when it is made.