Tracing Indirect Links from Water Disturbance to Conflict Using the Pathways to Instability Framework

Penny Beames, Global Water Security Center, University of Alabama (Canada)

Water stress leads to conflict. Such conventional wisdom appears in news, policy, and even research. Yet conflict is a rare outcome from water disturbances like floods, droughts, and inter-annual variability. Even in the context of internationally shared rivers, water is more often a source of cooperation. But the environment is changing, and so too is water. Understanding the impacts of these changes is imperative. The Pathways to Instability framework simplifies the complex links from water to political instability into six steps that consider the biophysical effects of a disturbance within the context of existing social and political realities. Those steps can be further summed into two categories: what happened, and how do people feel about it. In so doing, the framework reveals critical intervention points where social, diplomatic, and institutional developments can circumvent conflict outcomes before they occur.