Susanne Schmeier

This chapter explores the legal and institutional basis for the governance of shared basins. It examines basin treaties, basin organizations, and the institutional capacity which they provide, as well as explaining how they contribute to mitigating conflict and fostering cooperation over shared water resources, especially in times of rapid change. Drawing on three case studies of the Rhine, Danube, and Elbe river basins, the chapter identifies key features of institutional capacity, namely joint and integrated planning, the sharing of data and information, and dispute resolution, and it demonstrates how those features are employed in order to address newly emerging challenges, primarily ones related to climate change and the diverging interests of riparian states in the domains of environmental protection and economic development. It also highlights persistent problems and the risk of conflict that arises from the insufficient or ineffective use of these features, which can affect cooperative water governance in the future.

Water allocation – how water is divided between two or more entities – is addressed at many levels; however, research and policy tend to focus on the national level. At the international level, the focus is more on how actors negotiate, less on how water is physically divided. This paper fills this gap by focusing on how and why water is allocated between states. We develop the Typology for Transboundary Water Allocation to catalogue surface and groundwater allocation mechanisms within transboundary agreements, where mechanisms are separated into two components: a practical and a context component, or the how and why, respectively. Several conclusions are drawn: Over time, agreements with allocation mechanisms have increased. Groundwater-specific mechanisms and water allocated to environmental purposes have increased since the 1970s. With increasing challenges and demands on water resources, many transboundary basins still lack agreements with allocation mechanisms. Overall, the inclusion of allocation mechanisms has the potential to increase institutional capacity and, depending on their design, increase the flexibility to adapt to hydrological or socio-political change. However, the lack of allocation mechanisms or their design could contribute to potential environmental degradation, inequitable access, or conflict between states.

Water diplomacy, with its focus on preventing, mitigating, or resolving disputes over internationally shared water resources, has for a long time been shaped by and studied as state-to-state interactions, with international, regional, and, in particular, basin organizations as interstate platforms for states to address issues arising from the transboundary nature of many of the world’s water resources. It has, however, increasingly been acknowledged that nonstate actors also engage in or at least influence water diplomacy processes. However, the understanding of who these actors are, how exactly they engage in water diplomacy, and what effects these engagements have remains limited. This chapter sets out to identify the various actors – state, state-supported, or nonstate – that engage in and shape water diplomacy and also to understand their effects of actions on conflict and cooperation dynamics in shared basins.

While water has long been an object and mechanism of conflict, predicting water conflict remains a challenge. Little evidence supports strong, direct causal, or statistical links. Yet, connections between water and conflict remain relevant. As climate-driven water disturbances increase, it is imperative to understand how monitorable and predictable drivers like droughts and floods may affect political instability, of which conflict is a subset. Drawing from a variety of bodies of literature, we synthesize theory and case studies on water and conflict and integrate them into a generalized Pathways to Instability Framework. This framework presents a novel arrangement of conceptual categories that parse the biophysical and social elements that make up the multi-step, indirect links from water disturbance to instability. We demonstrate the framework’s usefulness by organizing literature on the onset of the Syrian Civil War and showing how disagreements among findings stem from studies on different links in the causal chain. The framework’s linear nature effaces specificity and depth in favor of simplicity, which helps evaluate the importance of different drivers. Acknowledging that policy contends with intertwined rather than standalone issues, the conceptual categories present discrete entry points in which policy-makers can devise and assess the value of interventions.

With increasing pressure on many transboundary water resources around the world, the need to manage them in a sustainable but also cooperative manner is increasing. This is driven by the need to preserve ecosystems and the services they provide to riparian people and countries, but also by the necessity to prevent or mitigate conflicts that could challenge regional stability and peace more broadly. This chapter therefore assesses how water diplomacy applies diplomatic instruments through political processes operating within different diplomatic tracks in order to prevent and mitigate disagreements, therewith complementing more technical transboundary water management. It provides various examples of water diplomacy in different diplomatic tracks and demonstrates its important contributions, but also its limitations - especially in light of the ever-growing relevance accorded to it by a more policy-oriented audience.

This study presents three global scenario projections of conflict risk in transboundary river basins by combining scenario projection data on risks identified in the existing literature. Under a business-as-usual scenario, 920 million people are projected to live in very high to high conflict-risk basins by 2050. In the low ambition scenario, this number decreases to 724 million people, while in the high ambition scenario, it decreases to 536 million. Large basins with specifically high conflict risk are the Juba–Shibeli, Lake Turkana, Indus and Irrawaddy. These findings hope to inform water diplomacy, conflict prevention and mitigation support for basins at risk.