Measuring Success in Transboundary Water Cooperation: Lessons from World Bank Engagements

Oct 7, 2021 | Jennifer J. Sara, Edoardo Borgomeo, and Anders Jagerskog
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How do we know when international cooperation is successful? A senior U.N. official once suggested that cooperation is like elephants mating: it all takes place at a very high level, there is a lot of noise, and it takes years to know the result. While this might be just a cynical joke, it contains a grain of truth: the success of international cooperation is often difficult to measure because results are often intangible and materialize over very long-time scales. And while measuring successful cooperation might sound like academic musing, it is a practical question for governments today given the centrality of cooperation to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

So how can we measure success? Rather than focusing on elephants, at the World Bank we have tried to address this question taking one key area of international cooperation where we have supported our member countries for decades: cooperation over transboundary rivers and aquifers. There are many of these shared water resources: more than 310 rivers and 500 aquifers cross political boundaries around the world. More than two-thirds of these rivers – and many more aquifers – lack any type of cooperative arrangement. Since its creation, the World Bank has worked with governments, technical agencies, donors, and civil society organizations to design, finance and implement projects and programs for cooperation over shared waters. Examples of these programs include Cooperation in International Waters in Africa, the Central Asia Water and Energy Program and the South Asia Water Initiative, among others. The authors recently completed a stocktaking of our engagements over the past two decades where we identified opportunities to improve the way we track and measure the results of our actions, particularly in light of the SDGs and climate targets.