International Water Cooperation Research Articles

The World Heritage Convention, Protected Areas and Rivers: Challenges for Representation and Implications for International Water Cooperation

Given the dire state of health of rivers worldwide and their significant heritage values, there is a need to consider their current representation in protected areas inscribed under the World Heritage Convention and identify challenges and opportunities for increasing their coverage. This study identifies a total of 153 natural, mixed natural/cultural and cultural landscape World Heritage sites that recognise rivers as a source of Outstanding Universal Value. There are challenges associated with the recognition of river sites as World Heritage, but further nominations could be encouraged through amendments to the World Heritage Convention Operational Guidelines to allow greater discretion to be exercised in relation to integrity requirements at inscription and to explicitly acknowledge freshwater use as a basis for recognising mixed natural/cultural and cultural landscape sites. There is also an opportunity to encourage further nomination of river sites by recognising the important implications of World Heritage inscription for international water cooperation. Together, these recommendations provide a path forward for enhancing the place of rivers in World Heritage protected areas.

International Water Cooperation and Environmental Peacemaking

Proponents of the environmental peacemaking approach argue that environmental cooperation has the potential to improve relations between states. This is because such cooperation facilitates common problem solving, cultivates interdependence, and helps to build trust and understanding. But as of now, very few cross-case studies on environmental peacemaking exist. Furthermore, much of the available literature understands peace in negative terms as the mere absence of acute conflict. This article addresses both shortcomings by studying the impact of international water cooperation on transitions toward more peaceful interstate relations. To do so, we combine information on positive water-related interactions between states with the peace scale, a recent data set measuring the degree of positive and negative peace between states. For the period 1956–2006, we find that a higher number of positive, water-related interactions in the previous ten years makes a shift toward more peaceful interstate relations more likely. This is particularly the case for state pairs that are not in acute conflict with each other.

The Ganges water treaty: 20 years of cooperation, on India's terms

International cooperation has become a universal mandate for governing transboundary waterbodies. Diverse stakeholders promote cooperation as a desirable, if not indispensable, approach to achieving sustainable and equitable benefits from and for transboundary waterbodies. However, calls for international water cooperation operate from the presupposition that cooperation is an unambiguous concept. While cooperation appears self-evident and unproblematic, cases of formal cooperation reveal points of contestation about cooperation itself. For example, India and Bangladesh disagree about the extent to which cooperation is occurring over the Ganges River despite having penned a bilateral treaty that has been in force for 20 years. I analyze qualitative interviews and previously unpublished hydrological data to evaluate assertions that hydrological hazards in Southwestern Bangladesh result from India's activities and that India is failing to uphold the 1996 agreement. The analysis indicates that these assertions are true and false: India is broadly adhering to the Ganges Treaty but unilaterally withdraws water during a critical period of the dry season when regional livelihoods are most vulnerable. The study concludes that transboundary water cooperation as an abstract ideal overlooks the fact that cooperation as a practice emerges from and operates within specific historical, political, cultural, and economic contexts.

Implications of hydro-political dependency for international water cooperation and conflict: Insights from new data

Hydro-political dependencies between countries are widely regarded as having important implications for international water cooperation and conflict. Quantitative ex-post empirical research on the subject so far uses very simple characterizations of international river geography to proxy for such dependencies, though. The authors developed a new geo-spatial dataset for water catchments worldwide. This dataset combines elevation models, flow accumulation approaches, hydrological data, and data on international boundaries to generate more precise and nuanced measures of hydro-political dependencies among riparian countries. The paper discusses these measurement concepts, illustrates how dependencies are distributed worldwide, and revisits three prominent quantitative studies on the issue to show how using improved data affects empirical findings. In contrast to a very popular presumption, upstream–downstream dependencies turn out to have a very small to insignificant effect on international water cooperation or conflict.

International Water Cooperation in the 21st Century: Recent Developments in the Law of International Watercourses

This article surveys selected recent developments in the field of the law of international watercourses. One of the most significant developments concerns the Partial Award rendered by the Court of Arbitration in the Indus Waters Kishenganga Arbitration between Pakistan and India. While the questions presented to the Court concerned whether a dam being constructed by India was consistent with the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, the Court interpreted the Treaty to find that India had environmental obligations regarding the operation of the dam. This award could well influence the positions of other governments as well as disputes between them. Another development of interest concerns the human right to water and its implementation. Perhaps paradoxically in view of their greater economic strength, opposition to the right has come most notably from developed countries. A third development concerns the law of transboundary aquifers. The draft articles on this subject prepared by the International Law Commission give prominence to the ‘sovereignty of aquifer States' and overlap with the 1997 Watercourses Convention. They would thus require significant modification if the negotiation of a treaty were to be based upon them. Finally, two treaties on international watercourses are now open to all States in the world: the 1992 UNECE Water Convention and the 1997 UN International Watercourses Convention. While taking different approaches, these treaties are in fact mutually reinforcing. The growing disposition of States to govern their freshwater relations according to law shows that the International Year of Water Cooperation proclaimed by the UN General Assembly is not just a hollow slogan.

International Water Cooperation and Conflict: A New Event Dataset

Many qualitative case studies provide valuable insights into the determinants of international water cooperation and conflict. In recent years, several researchers have moved on to large-N research in order to find out to what extent some of the case-specific results are empirically relevant across larger sets of international river basins. One major challenge in this large-N work concerns data. This paper describes a new event dataset on international river basin cooperation and conflict worldwide for the time-period 1997-2007. Water related events between riparian countries are characterized on a scale ranging from -6 (most conflictive) to 6 (most cooperative). We provide descriptive statistics for the new data and compare them to the only other publicly available dataset on international river basin events, the Transboundary Freshwater Disputes Dataset (TFDD). Our data confirm that cooperation outweighs conflict; there are no reported offical interactions in many of the world’s river basins; most documented interactions concern issues of water quantity and infrastructure; and cooperation and conflict are not mutually exclusive, but often occur in conjunction. However, the comparison also indicates substantial differences that stem from different sources for newsmedia information, different search strings for selecting newsmedia items, differences in substantive definitions, and differences in coding rules and procedures. Future research on the causes of international water cooperation and conflict is likely to produce more robust results now being equipped with two independently generated complementary datasets.

Understanding Water Regime Formation—A Research Framework with Lessons from Europe

International river basins are mostly characterized by upstream-downstream externalities that involve asymmetric incentives to cooperate and, therefore, suggest a high conflict potential between riparian states. However, with more than 400 river basin treaties, cooperation along international rivers by far outweighs water-related conflicts. The abundance of international water cooperation despite the odds is puzzling and has so far received little systematic attention. Against this background, I develop a research framework that draws on international regime theory and combines power, interest, knowledge and contextbased approaches to water regime formation. In a second step, I probe the plausibility of my framework in two case studies on international water cooperation in the Rhine and Elbe river basins. The empirical findings suggest that there is no “one-answer-fits-all” in trying to explain water regime formation. While power-based approaches are of limited explanatory value, a thorough understanding of cooperation along the two international rivers requires the combination of interest, knowledge and context-based arguments.

Water Regime Formation in Europe: A Research Framework with Lessons from the Rhine and Elbe River Basins

Since the early 1960s, the European continent has witnessed the (subsequent) spread of multilateral agreements to combat transboundary pollution. In order to explain the formation of these international water regimes, we have developed a research framework that considers power-, interest-, knowledge- and context-based approaches to the study of international cooperation. This research framework was then tested at the example of international water cooperation in the Rhine and Elbe river basins.