The World Bank and Negotiating the Red Sea and Dead Sea Water Conveyance Project

Abstract

The World Bank (WB) has played an erratic role in international water negotiations. It gained international recognition for mediating the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, 1 but has only replicated this successful mediation by facilitating a set of water-sharing agreements for the Aral Sea in the 1990s. 2 Since then it has struggled to bring about a basin-wide cooperative framework for the Nile. The WB’s attempts to negotiate, oversee feasibility studies, and fund development projects has followed a similar erratic path. The WB also confronted a growing global civil society that has forced it to undergo a democratization or “greening” process. 3 Through expanding opportunities for multi-stakeholder participation, transparency, and accountability, the WB was pushed to be more environmentally conscious. However, the greening process can also generate several perverse outcomes. Specifically, the WB can become preoccupied with assuring stakeholder involvement, transparency, and accountability, while discounting its role as mediator. Mediators are important for overcoming divergent interests and power asymmetry. 4 In the absence of a mediator, one of the stakeholders in the negotiations may need to assume the role to overcome obstacles that arise during complex negotiations. The stakeholder’s own interest in the outcome, however, has the potential to question the integrity of the process. Although the WB’s operating procedures prevent it from being directly involved in politics—the contestation and power relations that affect who gets what, when, and how 5 —its activities inherently involve