Wicked Problems, Messy Analysis, Clumsy Solutions?

Apr 28, 2015 | Naho Mirumachi
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Increased climate uncertainty, changing lifestyles and disparities in socio-economic development make finding solutions to water scarcity and water-related hazards significant. Today, there are both persistent and emerging water insecurities that can have major impacts on communities, nation-states and the natural environment. New ways of engaging cooperation between a range of stakeholders are becoming increasingly important. This blog post follows from the previous entry on ‘Water securities and insecurities: event summary’ and takes the discussion further to better understand water cooperation, drawing on some South and Southeast Asian examples.

What are examples of water cooperation? International agreements between nation-states sharing a transboundary river could be one, or the setting up of water user associations between local stakeholders in a basin. It could also point to the processes of data sharing or joint learning to identify solutions to water scarcity or abundance. However, as I argue in my latest book ‘Transboundary Water Politics in the Developing World’, conflict and cooperation are not polar opposites whereby the existence of one (e.g. cooperation) means that the other (e.g. conflict) does not occur. It is not unusual that international transboundary river basins exhibit situations where technical committees are established or agreements put in place, but characterised by political rivalry and stalled negotiations—as in the case of the Indus or the Ganges river basins. Viewing conflict and cooperation as coexisting in combinations of differing intensities provides rich ground to understand how institutionalisation exists side-by-side with tense foreign policy. For example, between Nepal and India, it might seem that the ‘landmark treaty’ put in place to govern the Mahakali River (a major tributary of the Ganges) has laid down principles of river basin development. However, the subsequent negotiations over specific clauses of the treaty demonstrated a highly contentious political process to share benefits equitably. Here, we can begin to understand how institutions may provide norms of ‘equitable benefit-sharing’ but the actual implementation of such is charged with power asymmetries, historical issues of perceived inequity, and socially constructed knowledge of existing water use.