Based on biodiversity conservation projects or integrated management projects of the Mediterranean wetlands, this paper shows that their sustainable development mainly depends on a political thinking about misdevelopment. The biodiversity conservation projects try with various successes to conciliate conservation and development. Amongst the problems, the decrease of the fresh water resource is added to the social disparity and the poverty. Promoting and managing institutional changes, increasing the stakeholders’social capital, learning and collectively deciding are the main keys of sustainable development. Many disparities still exist in the democratic processes atthe local,regional and national levels but a participative developmentis suggested.More centered on the needs of local communities than on economic growth, being more reflexive, and setting the science’s critic and the co-construction of projects at the heart of the process, this participative development may offer an alternative to the prevalent approaches that were used until now. The sustainable development of the Mediterranean wetlands is still promising if it increases the adaptive capacity of both social and ecological systems in order to reject any irreversibility.