Negotiated resolution of transboundary water disputes

Abstract

Increasingly global, regional and national water problems are recognised as transboundary in nature, and their solutions require transboundary governance. This chapter argues that as long as we address the problems as conflicts, they will remain unsolved because of the constraints and institutional capacities under which practical solutions are currently possible. Understanding the problems of such governance and the mechanisms of addressing and solving them is fundamentally different from the way current institutional expertise and arrangements are designed to work and be practised. The chapter focuses on the problem of facts, frames and fairness issues remaining delinked or joined by national design imperatives. Reducing the discrepancy requires the alignment of the facts, frames and fairness issues in transboundary governance. The chapter elaborates on this argument by first discussing the facts, fairness and frame issues in separate sections. It then maps the discourse on frames into three categories. Based on the summative maps, the argument for alignment is made conditional on addressing disputes only through an integrative negotiation process. The negotiation process itself frames the relevance of facts and fairness issues and their relations as they exist in a specific context, thereby avoiding the need as well as the impossibility of having a causal theory or model of alignment. Alignment, rather than imposed, emerges from the working of the negotiation process itself in terms of the agreements reached by the disputants themselves. However, research can identify the enabling conditions for such alignment to emerge. Three such enabling conditions are proposed for further inquiry.