Politics of Water: A Survey

THE POLITICS OF

WATER

THE POLITICS OF

WATER A SURVEY

FIRST EDITION

Editors: Kai Wegerich and Jeroen Warner

First Edition 2010 Routledge Albert House, 1–4 Singer Street, London EC2A 4BQ, United Kingdom (Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business) This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

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Foreword

Everything is in flux, as the ancient Greeks noted, and so is the emerging field of international hydropolitics. It is only since the 1990s that the topic has started to receive serious attention, with Miriam Lowi’s Water and Power and Leif Ohlsson’s Hydropolitics as landmark forerunners. Water cuts across so many aspects of our human existence that it would be surprising if it never led to conflict, and sometimes even to violence. But while the ‘water wars’ thesis has been revived, given the current issues surrounding climate change, water has also incited many instances of local and international co-operation, as Aaron T. Wolf and his Oregon State University group have convincingly pointed out. The discipline, therefore, has had to move speedily beyond simplistic assumptions, and refine its analytical framework. The politics of water has had to move from a more traditional state-centred approach to take account of societal (for example, gender and water rights) and transnational (privatization, global water fora) issues. The study of water politics has fascinated analysts from many disciplines for a long time. However, there have not, as yet, been many strong contributions from political science. This publication, The Politics of Water: A Survey, seeks to strengthen the interplay between these two domains—political science and water—with a view to creating synergy. It therefore seems fitting that the editors of the present volume are a scholar of development studies and social anthropology working in irrigation and water engineering, and a political scientist working in disaster studies. In putting together this collection, we, the editors, decided to focus on cross-cutting themes—such as hegemony, law and poverty reduction—rather than on isolated case studies. The themes touched on in the essay chapters are reflected in the core of the book: the A–Z Glossary of water politics, which we hope will be accessible to those without a professional background in water or politics, and hence useful to all. We have sought to avoid too much detail of the technicalities of water management or of political theory. We hope that this volume, appearing at the start of a new decade, will inspire many new contributions to the study of hydropolitics and will play a part in strengthening the community of water and political analysts and practitioners. Jeroen Warner Kai Wegerich May 2010

v

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements The Editors and Contributors Abbreviations

ix xi xii xvii

ESSAYS Is water politics? Towards international water relations JEROEN WARNER AND KAI WEGERICH The politics of sharing water: International law, sovereignty and transboundary rivers and aquifers STEPHEN C. MCCAFFREY AND KATE J. NEVILLE The multi-level governance of water and state-building processes: A longue durée perspective JEREMY ALLOUCHE Hydrosolidarity as water security in the Okavango River Basin PÅL ARNE DAVIDSEN Transboundary water interaction: Reconsidering conflict and co-operation MARK ZEITOUN AND NAHO MIRUMACHI Hydro-hegemonic politics: A crossroads on the Euphrates-Tigris? JEROEN WARNER The politics of water and mining in South Africa ANTHONY TURTON Water rights politics RUTGERD BOELENS The politics of gender in water and the gender of water politics MARGREET Z. ZWARTEVEEN Rural poverty reduction: What’s irrigation got to do with it? KAI WEGERICH A–Z GLOSSARY JENS TREFFNER, VINCENT MIOC

1 3

18

45 68

96 119 142 161 184 201

215 AND

KAI WEGERICH

vii

CONTENTS

INTERNATIONAL RIVER BASINS JENS TREFFNER, VINCENT MIOC AND KAI WEGERICH

321

Aral Sea (Amu Darya and Syr Darya) Colorado-Rio Grande-Tijuana Danube Euphrates-Tigris Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna basins Indus Jordan basin La Plata Mekong Murray-Darling Nile basin Okavango Rhine

323 329 331 335 339 342 347 350 353 356 361 365 368

MAPS

371

STATISTICS

377

viii

List of Illustrations

FIGURES

4.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 H.1

Security—A new framework for analysis Three Continua of Conflict Two Scales of Participation Transboundary Water Interaction NexuS (TWINS) matrix The National Water Situation Horizontal cross section of the Witwatersrand showing the conceptual three-layered cake Hydrogeological cross section of the first decant from the Western Basin Schematic representation of the Western Utilities Corporation plan Local water law as a hybrid construct, embedded in multidimensional domains Hydrologic cycle

80 99 104 108 144 147 149 150 166 255

MAPS

4.1 6.1 B.1 B.2 B.3 B.4 B.5 M.6 M.7 M.8 M.9

The Okavango river basin The location of the Ilisu Dam in Turkey Amu and Syr Darya Colorado Basin Euphrates-Tigris Jordan Basin Nile Renewable Water Resources Deserts and Desertification Water Use Access to Drinking Water

74 132 322 328 334 346 360 373 374 375 376

BOX

1.1

Water ownership in ancient Roman law (Caponera 1992, 66)

48

ix

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

TABLES

1.1 1.2

Policy problems contextualised The playing field: from government (state only) to governance (a mix of actors) 3.1 Percentage of population with access to improved water (Schwartz et al. 2004, 4) 5.1 Types and faces of transboundary water interaction (a first approximation) 10.1 Ostrom’s (1990) supporting evidence for design principles A.1 Water footprint of some selected food items (showing quantities without consideration of water quality necessary for production) S.1 Actual Renewable Water Resources, per capita S.2 Access to Improved Sanitation Facilities, percentage of total population S.3 Access to Improved Water Sources, percentage of total population

x

6 11 62 111 207 308 379 384 383

Acknowledgements

We are extremely grateful to our colleagues, notably those at Wageningen University and the London Water Research Group, for their generous support to The Politics of Water: A Survey, enabling us to produce a book within a relatively short time frame. We would also like to thank the chapter peer reviewers: Anders Jägerskog, Colin Green, Elena Lopez-Gunn, Hans van der Veen, Irene Dankelman, Melvin Woodhouse, Naho Mirumachi, Neda Zawahri and Richard Meissner, whose constructive comments gave the team of authors plenty of food for thought. For the A–Z Glossary, we would like to thank Rutgerd Boelens, Stephen McCaffrey, Pål Arne Davidsen, Naho Mirumachi, Kate Neville, Anthony Turton, Mark Zeitoun and Margreet Zwarteveen for the suggestion of entries, Cecilia Saldías Zambrana, Naho Mirumachi, Matti Kummu and Mark Zeitoun for their review and extensive comments and suggestions, and Lynne and Brian Chatterton, Anton Earle, Antoinette Sebastian, Ana Elisa Cascão and Matti Kummu for reviewing the basin studies. The editors and publishers would also like to thank the World Resources Institute, EarthTrends: The Environmental Information Portal (available at http://earthtrends.wri.org) for granting us permission to use its data in the Statistics section of this book. Thanks are also due to the Cartographic Unit at the University of Southampton for drawing up many of the maps for this volume. The chapter ‘Transboundary water interaction: reconsidering conflict and co-operation,’ is republished, with minor modifications and permission, from M. Zeitoun and N. Mirumachi (2008), ‘Transboundary water interaction I: Reconsidering conflict and cooperation’, International Environmental Agreements 8, 297–316. Finally, thanks are due to Cathy Hartley, Editor Europa New Project at Routledge, for her guidance and timely feedback in realizing this publication.

xi

The Editors and Contributors

Kai Wegerich was at the time of the book preparation an Assistant Professor at the Irrigation and Water Engineering Group of Wageningen University, the Netherlands and currently holds a Researcher position at the International Water Management Institute—(IWMI), Central Asia office. He gained his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He previously worked as a researcher for the Centre for Development Research (ZEF in Bonn, Germany), as a development worker for the German Development Service (DED) in Khorezm, Uzbekistan. His research interests are social and political aspects of water management in Central Asia, on which he has published in various journals. He has conducted fieldwork in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan. He co-edited the special issue on ‘Emerging issues on land and water in Central Asia’ in the journal Irrigation and Drainage Systems (with Jochen Froebrich and Marinus G. Bos). Jeroen Warner, PhD, is a political scientist working on domestic and international environmental conflict and participation. He is especially interested in the politics of water risk and security. Since coining the phrase ‘hydro-hegemony’ in his MSc thesis on water conflict in the Middle East, he has published on hydropolitics in various journals. Dr Warner edited Conflictos y participación (with Alejandra Moreyra, Nordan, 2004) and Multi-stakeholder Platforms for Integrated Water Management (Ashgate, 2007). He is Assistant Professor with the Disaster studies group at Wageningen University and at the time of the book’s preparation, was a researcher with Centrum voor Schone Technologie en Milieubeleid (CSTM—Centre for Studies in Technology and Sustainable Development), Twente University, Netherlands. He has taught and delivered training and presentations around the world, and has made national and international radio and television appearances. Jeremy Allouche is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. He has previously worked at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA), Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH—Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was the director of the Water Institutions and Management Competence Centre, the Institut de Hautes Etudes en xii

THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Administration Publique (Swiss Graduate Institute of Public Administration), and the Institut de Hautes Etudes Internationales et de Développement (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies), Geneva, Switzerland. His fields of interest are public-private partnerships, the governance and regulation of water supply and sanitation systems, access to water and sanitation, and pro-poor regulation, water security and transboundary water conflicts. Dr Allouche has most notably published and/or edited three books on the topic: Water Privatisation: Transnational Corporations and the Re-regulation of the Water Industry (Spon Press, 2001); The Multi-Governance of Water (State University of New York Press, 2006); and Water and Liberalisation: European Water Scenarios (International Water Association Publishing, 2007). Rutgerd Boelens is an Associate Professor with the Irrigation and Water Engineering Group at Wageningen University, and Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Peru. His research focuses on water rights and water justice conflicts, peasant and indigenous water control, legal pluralism, and interactive irrigation development, in particular in the Andean countries and Spain. He co-ordinated the international research programme on Water Law and Indigenous Rights (WALIR). Currently, he co-ordinates the inter-Andean Concertación programme on water policy research and interdisciplinary training; the research programme Struggling for Water Security in the Andes; and the international research alliance Justicia Hídrica on water accumulation, conflicts and resistance. His books include Searching for Equity: Conceptions of Justice and Equity in Peasant Irrigation (with G. Dávila, Van Gorcum, 1998); Water Rights and Empowerment (with P. Hoogendam, Van Gorcum, 2002); Liquid Relations: Contested Water Rights and Legal Complexity (with D. Roth and M. Zwarteveen, Rutgers University Press, 2005); Water and Indigenous Peoples (with M. Chiba and D. Nakashima, UNESCO 2006); Políticas Hídricas en la Región Andina (with P. Urteaga, IEP-AbyaYala 2006); The Rules of the Game and the Game of the Rules: Normalization and Resistance in Andean Water Control (Wageningen University, 2008); Aguas Rebeldes (with R. Parra, ImprefeppQuito and IEP-Lima, 2009); and Out of the Mainstream: Water Rights, Politics and Identity (with D. Getches and A. Guevara, Earthscan, 2010). In articles, films and book chapters he has widely published on the linkages between water rights, water cultures, water policies and power relations. Pål Arne Davidsen has a BA in Political Science and History of Religion and an MA in Comparative Politics from the University of Bergen, Norway. He has also taken postgraduate courses in political science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa with a special focus on conflict resolution and comparative transitional justice. He was an election observer in the 2004 national election in South Africa, and a research intern at the African Water Issues Research Centre in Cape Town during 2005. During this period he also carried out extensive fieldwork in the area of xiii

THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

water resource management in Southern Africa, in countries including South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Botswana and Angola. He has previously published an article on stakeholder participation in decision-making in the Mekong River Basin and is currently working as foreign affairs adviser for the largest opposition party in the Norwegian Parliament, where he deals with a range of issues including the UN, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), development policy and trade regimes. Stephen C. McCaffrey is Distinguished Professor and Scholar at the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law, California, USA. He was a member of the UN International Law Commission (ILC) from 1982–91 and chaired the Commission’s 1987 session. He was the ILC’s special rapporteur on international watercourses from 1985 until 1991, when the Commission adopted a complete first draft of articles on the topic. The final draft formed the basis for the negotiation of the 1997 UN Convention on the same subject. Professor McCaffrey served as Counselor on International Law in the US Department of State from 1984–85. He has been counsel to Slovakia (Gabcˇ íkovo-Nagymaros Project), Nicaragua (Navigational and Related Rights) and Uruguay (Pulp Mills on the River Uruguay) in cases before the International Court of Justice. He also advised India in the Baglihar HEP case, brought under the Indus Waters Treaty. He has been legal adviser to the Nile River Basin Co-operative Framework project and the Palestinian National Authority/Palestine Liberation Organization, and was a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on the Management of the Colorado River Basin. Professor McCaffrey’s books and articles are concerned with subjects ranging from public international law and the law of international watercourses to transnational litigation and international environmental law. Vincent Mioc studied journalism and political science in Brussels, choosing to focus on the fields of conflict resolution and water politics in the Middle East. With the assistance of Julie Trottier, he joined the Politics Department at Newcastle University, United Kingdom, first as a trainee and then as a Junior Research Associate, and worked on the present publication. He lives in Brussels and has his own communications agency. He is also developing an environmental web project aiming to help the Belgian authorities to control CO2 emissions. Naho Mirumachi is a PhD student at King’s College London, United Kingdom. She trained in international relations, and her research interests include transboundary water conflict and co-operation, water governance and water security. She has fieldwork experience in the Orange, Mekong and Ganges river basins. Her peer-reviewed publications have appeared in scholarly journals such as Water International, International Journal of Water Resources Development, Geographical Journal, and International Environmental Agreements, and she has contributed to edited volumes with chapters, including ‘Domestic

xiv

THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Issues in Developing International Waters in Lesotho: Ensuring Water Security Amidst Political Instability’, in N.I. Pachova, M. Nakayama and L. Jansky, (eds) International Water Security: Domestic Threats and Opportunities (Tokyo, United Nations University Press, pp. 35–60). She co-directs the activities of the London Water Research Group based at King’s College London that engages water professionals, activists and scholars in cutting-edge discussions on transboundary water management, politics and policy. Kate J. Neville is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Canada, with research interests in environmental politics, transboundary water negotiations, and international relations. She holds a BSc in Biology from Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada and a Master’s of Environmental Science from the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, Connecticut, USA. Kate Neville is also a writer for the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Earth Negotiations Bulletin, an independent reporting service for multilateral environmental negotiations. Jens Treffner is an MSc student in the EU-funded master’s programme Agris Mundus at Wageningen University and Research Centre and the Institut des Régions Chaudes, Montpellier SupAgro, France. He holds a BSc in Agricultural Science from Hohenheim University, Germany and a Swiss professional degree in organic and biodynamic farming. His interests are farmers’ prospects, agricultural water use and food production in the South, the dynamics of natural resource management paradigms and their effect on farming communities (development policies, participatory management), and the sound use of scarce global resources with respect to ecosystem functionality and people’s livelihoods. Anthony Turton is a Professor in the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. His current work centres on water as a strategic transboundary issue in developing countries. He has published widely on transboundary rivers and is deeply involved in the development of a robust solution to acid mine drainage that is technically sound, socially acceptable and economically viable. He is Vice-President of the International Water Resource Association and is a founding member of the Association of Reverse Osmosis Professionals in Southern Africa (AROPSA) and the Geothermal Energy Association of Southern Africa (GEASA). Mark Zeitoun is a senior lecturer at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia (UEA), United Kingdom. His research interests on power plays within environmental conflicts in the Middle East and Africa have been cultivated by his role as co-lead in the London Water Research Group and co-founder of the UEA Water Security Research Centre. The groups take critical perspectives on international transboundary environmental co-operation and conflict, and ‘hydro-hegemony’. His xv

THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

research is based on a professional career in water delivery, policy, management and negotiations. Dr Zeitoun has a PhD in human geography from King’s College London, United Kingdom (2006). Margreet Z. Zwarteveen works at the Irrigation and Water Engineering Group of Wageningen University, and is also a member of the university’s gender studies. Her research questions water distribution and allocation (access and rights) from a perspective of equity, and in general terms involves a feminist analysis of water policies and professional water cultures. Dr Zwarteveen has published widely on these themes, including Liquid Relations: Contested Water Rights and Legal Complexity, co-edited with Dik Roth and Rutgerd Boelens (Rutgers University Press, 2005), and an edited volume on gender and water in South Asia that is forthcoming in 2010. One emerging research interest is the politics of water knowledge and discourses, which looks at how (and by whom) truth claims are produced, and their political effects, especially in the context of debates about climate change. Alongside teaching and supervising MSc and PhD students, she is involved in various capacity-building and research projects on integrated water management in South Asia and the Andes, and co-ordinates diverse action and research projects in these regions.

xvi

Abbreviations

a.m. art. CEO CITES CO CPR CSD CTE cu m cu km cusecs EMS EU FAO FoE FYR GDP ha IMF IPCC IUCN kg km MDGs NATO NGO OECD sq km TWh UN UNCED UNCHE UNCLOS UNDP UNEP

ante meridiem (before noon) article chief executive officer Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora Colorado common pool resources Commission on Sustainable Development Committee on Trade and Environment cubic metre(s) cubic kilometres (109 cubic metres) cubic metres per second, a discharge measure environmental management systems European Union Food and Agriculture Organization Friends of the Earth Former Yugoslav Republic gross domestic product hectare International Monetary Fund Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change International Union for the Conservation of Nature kilogramme kilometre Millennium Development Goals North Atlantic Treaty Organization non-governmental organization Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development square kilometres (106 square metres) terawatt hour(s), energy unit (1012 watt hours) United Nations United Nations Conference on Environment and Development United Nations Conference on the Human Environment United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea United Nations Development Programme United Nations Environment Programme xvii

ABBREVIATIONS

UNESCO UNFCCC vs. WCED WHO WRI WSSD

xviii

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change versus World Commission on Environment and Development World Health Organization World Resources Institute World Summit on Sustainable Development

Essays

Is water politics? Towards international water relations JEROEN WARNER

AND

KAI WEGERICH

INTRODUCTION

The present book confidently states that it is about ‘the politics of water’. So why worry if water is political? The political nature of water appears to be blindingly obvious. The most classic representation of this position (Mollinga 2001, 733) claims: ‘At a general level, the statement that “water is politics” hardly needs any defense’. In a later paper, Mollinga (2008a, 3) qualifies this all-encompassing statement in a narrower version that refers only to water management: ‘water resources management is an inherently political process’. The essentialism of these statements raised our curiosity, as it appears to be fairly easy to think of instances of water management that are not intuitively political. This chapter will look at the meaning(s) of the political. We recognize that water is very often contested or contestable, but that water is not necessarily politically contested. The recognition of the political in water issues is a relatively new development. To mention just one example, the 2004 World Water Council seminar on Water and Politics in Marseille was a first for the organization. In the past few decades internationally networked water scholars with backgrounds outside political science have discovered water as a political issue. Explaining water as a political issue often had more explanatory power than presenting a merely technical analysis of water. The political take on water explicitly sought to expose patterns of depoliticization. Scholars as diverse as Tony Allan, a geographer by training, and Wageningen University’s Irrigation and Water Engineering group, on which Mollinga’s work has had a strong imprint, have worked hard to convince their colleagues in the water sector of the momentous and damaging implications of ignoring water politics. Saying ‘water is politics’ is a strategic speech act (Austin 1962), to politicize water issues for a social (emancipatory) goal, to break an undesirable status quo.1 The essentialism in the claim that water is necessarily political can be strategically appealing in ‘political advocacy and struggles to provide satisfactory analytical concepts’ (Mollinga 2008b, 11). This does not exclude the possibility that claiming that ‘water is not politics’, or that ‘politics is the problem’, as multilaterals like the World Bank have done (Flinders and Buller 2006), could serve the same, or other, strategic goals. Whether water is political or not depends on how you define politics. This is the business of political science, and it should be cause for alarm to 3

ESSAYS

political scientists that prominent authors on water politics like Mollinga rarely engage with the political science literature proper when writing about water politics. Nor does his framing of a ‘political sociology of water’ draw on existing political sociology, yet so far this has failed to elicit a response from the political science (and political sociology) communities. To a degree, the political science community may have itself to blame, as political science can be an inward-looking discipline (Buzan and Little 2001), and there are conspicuously few political scientists who write about water. ‘[T]he few studies conducted on international water relations tend to be written by geographers, civil engineers and experts of law, paying cursory attention at best to established IR [International Relations] theory or political science frameworks’ (Warner and Zeitoun 2008, 802). As a consequence, it is perhaps unsurprising that water politics is not very well defined in the water literature. The absence of leading (competing) definitions can be a problem, as definitions matter, and they reveal a lot about the Weltanschauung of their users. Let us contrast the definition by Peter Mollinga, an expert on water engineering studying water politics, with that of Tony Turton, a political scientist writing about water management. Turton (2002) offers a definition of hydropolitics (unlike Mollinga, Turton treats hydropolitics as synonymous with water politics) that is squarely rooted in David Easton’s pioneering work in political science (1965, 21), adapted to fit water. Turton (2002, 16) defines hydropolitics as ‘the authoritative allocation of values with respect to water in society’. Mollinga (2001, 735) on the other hand, inspired by a dictionary definition,2 refers to water politics as ‘the contestation of water resource planning and use’. With some simplification, we can say that while Mollinga focuses on process, Turton focuses on the outcome—the social order. Obviously, both are very important to understanding water politics, but we observe that Easton, by way of Turton, still equates politics with value conflicts, not resource conflicts. The choice of the broader, process definition allows Mollinga (2001, 2008) to distinguish between three different levels or domains of water politics (hydropolitics, everyday politics and politics of policy3) while observing that ‘a fourth level is emerging’: the global politics of water (2001, footnote 1). He explains hydropolitics as ‘the level of inter-state politics regarding the allocation, distribution, control and quality of water resources. … It can also refer, in a federal structure, to inter-state water resources issues within a nation state’ (2001: 735). This is a helpful start, but it does not explain or problematize the contestation. While Mollinga (2001, 750) identifies the perceptions of different interest groups as inevitable (‘socio-political polarization’), at the same time mentioning ‘scarcity’, Tony Turton implies that he sees scarcity as the main reason for water becoming a political issue: ‘because water is scarce and because it is essential for life, health and welfare, it has become a contested terrain and therefore a political issue’ (Turton 2002, 13). The implication would be that where there is no scarcity, there is no water politics.

4

Is water politics? Towards international water relations Let us first take a closer look at what makes water scarce. Despite dramatic images propelled by alarmist journalistic and non-governmental organization (NGO) publications, water conflict is not over the 3 litres a day that we need for drinking, nor the 125 litres that a Dutchman uses for household applications. It is also rarely about the water used for cooling and hydropower, despite Western central, Nordic, and northern (European Union) accession countries using the largest percentages of abstracted water for urban needs and energy production (Lallana and Marcuello 2004). While cooling and electricity generation have unfortunate effects on the temperature of water, they do not significantly affect the quality and quantity of water downstream. What can and does cause water conflict is agricultural water for food (or cotton), expressed as virtual water in the final product (Allan 2001): 1,000 litres per kg for wheat, a staggering 4,800 litres for a hamburger. However, that amount is not a given, but the result of contestable allocation decisions, that give certain actors more water than others, and may reduce the pie by inducing water scarcity through resource capture (Gleick 1993). This present analysis limits the account to physical H2O, but Allan has noted that taking into account the virtual water embodied in food and non-food production changes the equation considerably. Limiting ourselves to scarcity as a potential source of political contest, we can then identify cases where water is: scarce, but not contested scarce, privately contested, but not politicized not scarce, but contested not scarce and not contested. While most water politics literature concerns itself with the conflict-inducing potential of scarcity, abundance (Gleditsch 1998) can also lead to contestation or require an authoritative allocation of value. Floods trigger politicization as anxieties may be induced downstream by the fear of:
politically-inspired flooding upstream—by opening the flood gates or dam break. Storing water in dams means that water can be suddenly released, as kinetic power. Gleick (1993) cites a South Korean dam specifically raised for that purpose, to be broken in case of an emergency. Major cities such as Buenos Aires run the risk of sabotage to upstream dams, but there is no recent evidence or incidents of this.
pollution—poisoning wells was not infrequently practised as an instrument of warfare in antiquity (Gleick 1993). Local political conflict can also arise over heavily polluting industries (tannery, pulp production) that make downstream water unusable and dangerous. William Alexander (2007), the heir apparent to the Netherlands throne, identifies three threats that need addressing: too much water, too little water,

5

ESSAYS

and water pollution. Taking the three threats to water together, we find ourselves in the realm of politics and risk. However, water risk is not in itself political—anthropologists teach us that it can be made political when ulterior social motives for the preservation of identity arise. Medieval fear of disease from water pollution attributed to the Jewish minority is a prime example of how the water issue is conveniently instrumental to playing on other social fears and highlighting conflicts. Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) note that, of the great many threats that people face, a community will select those risks that do not endanger the (political) structure of the community itself, and thus floods and droughts are addressed mainly in a technocratic manner, and therefore contests are depoliticized.4 Nevertheless, sections of the population (outsiders) may politicize the issue (Douglas 1994). In this respect Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) argue that real social change comes only from the outside. If we apply this perspective to ongoing water debates (Table 1.1), we can interpret the activism of social and environmental NGOs as not necessarily aimed at how the élite handle water resources, but rather at the social effects—uprooting communities, disrupting the bond between people and water, as claimed by Shiva (2002). While both those who oppose the status quo and those who see an easily identifiable threat to the status quo are evidently interested in risk politicization, others have contrary interests. Both politicizing and depoliticizing actors claim that they represent the general interest, the common good. While challengers are interested in portraying problems as value issues, the powerful are interested in depicting problems as technical-managerial. The water managers and experts that make up a ‘hydrocracy’ (Wester et al. 2009) have significant dispositional power, and power does not like to be talked about and taken to account; politicization takes those in power to account by proposing alternatives—denormalization (Guzzini 2005). Public speakers may even seek to depoliticize a problem (that is, take the politics out of it) by ‘securitizing’ it. Securitization positions a particular issue as an existential threat to security, which in turn (with the consent of the relevant constituency) enables emergency measures or the broader suspension of ‘normal politics’ in dealing with that issue (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998). Securitization presents an issue

Table 1.1 Policy problems contextualized

Agreement over facts Disagreement over facts

6

Agreement over values

Disagreement over values

Tamed problem Securitization Technical problem Manageralization

Political problem Politicization ‘Wicked’ (intractable) problem Deliberation (security dialogue; power of better argument) ‘Learning’ Joint learning with local stakeholders

Is water politics? Towards international water relations as technical, non-value laden—there is only one consideration: survival (see contribution by Davidsen).5 Politicization, the imagining of alternatives (Guzzini 2005), has an important social function. It makes clear underlying differences in values and priorities. Hisschemöller and Hoppe (2001) identify political problems as problems where there is little uncertainty over facts, but high disparity over values. However, it is not very helpful to denote any problem (in this case, any water-related problem) as a political problem. Not only may some issues be perceived as something other than value problems (for example resource, technical or management problems), but one can also safely assume that some problems really are not about value contests. All this implies that those engaged in politicization likewise have their own agendas. IS WATER POLITICS NECESSARILY ABOUT WATER?

The discussion above has indicated that disputes over water, whether politicized or not, are not necessarily all about the water issue itself. The good news is that water itself does not cause war. Aaron Wolf (1995) has claimed influentially that throughout history almost nobody went to war over water alone. The bad news is that many issues turned violent when something else was structurally linked (passively or actively) with water resources. We would turn the argument around by stating more explicitly that water is a visible focus for something else. If water was not the issue, something else would become the focus. In other words, water is the occasion, not the reason, for conflict. A focus on water alone is therefore not so productive in understanding disputes, and the same limitation can be noted for water co-operation and participation. Co-operation is not the absence of conflict—the two can alternate or even occur simultaneously (Mirumachi and Allan 2007). Zeitoun and Mirumachi (this volume) show that even co-operation can be full of contest (and vice versa). Even (or perhaps: especially) the most intense form of cooperation involves joint risk-taking, and thus may be subject to the politics of risk. In addition, a participatory water forum such as a basin committee, while aiming at achieving consensus over a discrete, well-defined issue, is a box that encloses certain issues and actors inside and shuts others outside for the sake of state or donor convenience (Moreyra and Wegerich 2006; Moreyra and Warner 2007; Varzi and Wegerich 2008). So far this section has discussed resource-related conflict (and co-operation). The next question is whether conflicts (whether or not strictly water related) are necessarily political. HOW DO THESE DEFINITIONS RELATE TO EXISTING DEFINITIONS OF POLITICAL SCIENCE?

We have seen that water problems may be not so much about water, but about what constitutes and serves the common good. The ancient Greeks (Plato,

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Aristotle) saw politics as the pursuit of the common good in the public sphere. If there is a public sphere, there should also be a non-public sphere. As a consequence, there is a distinction between public politics and private actions, which are not politics. A lot of modern political struggle is about where to draw the boundary between the public and private spheres. This has often been operationalized as the size and reach of the state. In the traditional sense, Turton and Easton see politics in the perspective of the ancient Greeks, and for many, especially North American, political scholars (Easton, Dahl), politics is about the state. What may be called the ‘liberal school’ of approaches to international hydropolitics looks at two-level games in which subnational actors influence a state’s position in international politics, and at how multilateral actors influence the governance of water (Young 2002; Gupta et al. 2008). However, the focus remains on sovereign states, represented by politicians and bureaucrats, as distinct from society. The approaches proposed by associates of the London Water Research group, such as Zeitoun and Warner (2006) and Zeitoun and Mirumachi (this volume) have likewise tended to focus on the interstate level. However, the political is more than the study of what happens in the public sector, and what happens officially. If we look beyond the state, we see important international and subnational interactions, giving rise to more water politics than does interaction only between states. The currently fashionable emphasis on global governance focuses on states, but also on multilateral institutions, as well as on the influence of transnational business and international NGOs on the development of international norms and regulation mechanisms (Haufler 1993). These influences therefore help delineate what is an issue in the public or private sphere. But critics note that this literature still tends to set great store by the agency of the sovereign state in an anarchist arena. Selby (2007) for example notes on the basis of Gramscian theory that the development of a transnational water élite may be more significant than the interactions between state representatives (a critique addressed in this volume by Warner). Sneddon and Fox (2006) likewise claim that an ‘analytic and normative focus on cooperation among states’ is characteristic of the vast majority of mainstream hydropolitics, which they find unnecessarily limiting. They argue in favour of a critical view of hydropolitics, but are not very clear on their perspective of politics itself. Instead, they take issue with what they call political geography authors (for example Feitelson, who is an economist, and Giordano or Wolf). They cite as the ‘overriding question’ of those authors: ‘How can sovereign states, pursuing national selfinterest and those policies that would best assure the regime’s survival, cope with the challenge of bi- or multi-national coordination in the use of a common resource?’ (Shmueli 1999, 441; quoted in Sneddon and Fox 2006, 183). Sneddon and Fox identify a political project underlying mainstream water literature, such as the ‘water wars’ literature of the 1990s, which they link with resource development literature, with ‘postulations of an “inevitable” global water crisis that will lead to more overt geopolitical conflicts’. In their

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Is water politics? Towards international water relations case study, they focus on the lobbying of local actors challenging a national dam project (the Pak Nam dam in the Mekong basin), and on their representations. Even a supposedly objective system like international law reflects political arrangements and representations (see contribution by McCaffrey and Neville). Such challenges, levelled at a supposedly consensual mainstream that may not be all that consensual, always run the risk of becoming mainstream themselves. Nevertheless, we subscribe to a view of hydropolitics, such as that of Sneddon and Fox, that does not limit the attainment of the ‘common good’ of people in a nation state to the state alone,6 and is not objective, but involves contested images of rivers and landscapes. Sneddon and Fox’s perspective strikes us as a water version of critical geopolitics, i.e. critical political geography (e.g. O’Tuathail et al. 1998; O’Tuathail and Dalby 1998), rather than a critical study of international hydropolitics. This limitation reminds us of Furlong’s (2006) claim about the patent uselessness of IR theory, which she equates with realist and liberal schools of IR, in understanding water conflict. While fairly attacking the lack of good theory, this charge ignores, among others, the tradition of critical International Political Economy (see Warner and Zeitoun (2008) for a rejoinder), but sets us on a productive course: towards the multilevelled and not infrequently hidden nature of water politics. It impresses on us that a ‘satisfactory social arrangement’ is very likely to have been contested at some point in the past. No social order or social arrangement came into existence without (mostly violent) conflict. It is not only that (in Europe) ‘war made states and states made war’ (Tilly 1992), but also that orders in societies rarely came into being peacefully. The present remains of these struggles could be called ‘culture’. However, even though they might have been contested in the past and are contestable in the present, these arrangements might not be contested and drawn into the public arena today. Hence it is not to be taken for granted that they are subject to politics now. History, as is well known, is normally written from the perspective of the winner. Rewriting it from the perspective of the loser adds texture, but does not make it truer. The inhabitants of many conquered territories have accepted their fate and identified with their captors, while others hung on to their historical, God-given right to inhabit a space. An example: critical water literature on the Andean region lambasts neo-liberalist reforms, and advocates the preponderance of the traditional rights system (see the chapter by Boelens in this volume). This literature puts these rights as accepted within the local framework and therefore as nonpolitical—rights only became political when alternative frameworks interfered with them. To engage critically with the depoliticized discursive construction of water and identity in this literature, we may take our cue from Sneddon and Fox (2006, 182–84) who propose to focus on ‘the socioecological processes that delineate conflicts and transformations in specific basins. … It examines the ways in which discursive strategies as expressions of power relationships and codified within transnational agreements, simplify and represent river basins (and other complex entities) in certain

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ways—as cooperative space, as transnational space … In addition, the approach we [Sneddon and Fox] advocate engages discussions concerning critical geopolitics, which focuses on how representations of political actors and of social interactions influence and shape particular geopolitical orders.’ It should be noted that this view has distanced hydropolitical analysis from the water resource itself. While water is in an excellent position to trigger subliminal political potential, it is not inherently political. Drawing on Lukes’s (1974) three faces of power, Warner (2008) distinguishes first order contests, which engage in the ‘first face of power’ in open struggles over the distribution of (physical) water resources, including what Mollinga refers to as everyday politics of water distribution. Second order contests bring in the ‘second face of power’ contest over water allocation rules and rights, water quality standards, and decision-making about water allocations and quality standards. This second face also includes the setting of the non-agenda: the (contested) power of making sure that certain issues never even make it to the agenda. It is also fair to see water as a more visible focus for something else, other contests over, for example, territory, identity, or historic grievances. Finally, there is contest over representation and ‘truth’, Lukes’s ‘third face of power’; this is where we rejoin Sneddon and Fox. Hydropolitics, for Sneddon and Fox, is not about the distribution of resources, but about the discourses and representations influencing orders. In authoritarian states, everything can be framed around state security. As Allouche in particular notes in this volume, Wittfogel (1957) highlighted how Oriental despotisms built themselves around the mobilization of resources, people and (often) hydraulic structures, and Egypt continues this water etatism to this day with the help of a state of emergency (Warner 2010). Similarly, a state of emergency facilitates dam constructions in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan within the Aral Sea basin (Wegerich 2009). While social democrats in non-authoritarian countries traditionally wanted to expand the public sphere to even out social disparities, liberals seek to reduce the public sphere so as to increase the space for personal development. Liberal societies have given politics a separate place in society, thus liberating a private sphere (van der Zweerde 2008). Politics, then, is about the current stable functioning of the state and its institutions, generally averting fundamental conflicts by compromise, conciliation and negotiation (Heywood 2002), but also by negation, subversion, etc. However, not all societies have private spheres, while other (failed) states have no public sphere to mention. Feminists have argued that the personal is the political, concerning the cases where individual struggle is symptomatic of a social struggle, such as for women’s rights (see contribution by Zwarteveen). However, the personal is not always political for others. The political order is never a given, and can be contested—what is political to one may not be political to another. Only when politicization as an ‘illocutionary speech act’ (‘This is politics’) has resonance (‘felicity’; Austin 1962) is it successful as a speech act, and will it be reproduced as a social reality.

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Is water politics? Towards international water relations The imputed and oft-repeated shift ‘from government to governance’ (Kooiman 1993, and many more) is presented as a shift from political to ‘post-political’, a further narrowing and blurring of the political sphere. Rather than top-down steering by governments, Kooiman’s narrative postulates the alignment of governing capacities, the making of functional alliances at the horizontal level (an organization makes deals with, or confronts, an organization on the same level but in a different sector), vertically (an international organization interacts with the state, or at local level), and diagonally (a private enterprise makes deals with the state and with international organizations). The in many contexts mythical shift from water government to water governance means a playing field consisting of public, private and civil society at multiple levels (Table 1.2). The currently predominant discourse of governance and, increasingly, transitions in the water sector expresses the desire for an arrangement whereby the role of the political is severely circumscribed. Politics, it seems, is a Bad Thing, and it is often seen as a problem. If politics is a problem, it can be ‘solved’ by depoliticizing issues, giving them back to the experts. This leads to the question: if politics is about conflict, should such conflicts be resolved? A functionalist approach to environmental politics certainly appears to think so. This is reflected in the following definition of politics from a web-based political science glossary: ‘A process of conflict resolution in which support is mobilized and maintained for collective action’ (alphaDictionary.com), as well as in programmes such as UNESCO’s ‘From Potential Conflict to Cooperation Potential’ (PC CP). Likewise, deliberative approaches inspired by the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas (including learning alliances and multi-stakeholder platforms) believe that there is a common will that can be revealed by ‘authentic communication’—consensus can be reached by force of argument, once actors overcome their institutional structures. From a different angle, Hardt and Negri (2005) envisage peaceful, harmonious consensus among the multitude. This is reflected in ‘post normal science’ (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993), an approach to tackle ‘wicked problems’, in which both values and facts are Table 1.2 The playing field: from government (state only) to governance (a mix of actors) Sector level

Civil society

Public

Private

International

International nongovernmental organization (e.g. IUCN) National nongovernmental organization Local nongovernmental organization

International organization (e.g. EU, NATO, UN)

Multinational company

The state

Nationwide business

Province, municipality

Local SME

National Local

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unclear or unsolved, by gathering experts and lay people round the table, to work out what the problem is and together to learn about the facts and uncertainties. This approach brings lay people into technical decision-making and in so doing can help to tackle wicked problems. This is certainly an improvement, but in practice it also fits a pattern of governance that invites a certain technocratization and can make for patronizing decision-making. Water experts, NGOs and users working together buttressed by ‘pro-poor’ discourse decide on and operate systems that purport to do good things for people, such as relieving poverty through irrigation—a ‘truth’ that is repeated so often that it becomes a truism (see the contribution by Wegerich in this book). For dialecticians such as Chantal Mouffe (2000), this is like taking the political out of politics. Where there is no conflict, social dynamics disappear. She finds inspiration in the work of the German philosopher of law Carl Schmitt (1990). For Schmitt, who reasons that the political is the decision that defines who is a friend or who is an enemy, it is what ‘bears the “potential of real conflict”, “real conflict” meaning a situation in which parties no longer have a common rule that allows them to solve their conflict, and hence stand in opposition to each other as (groups of) “friends” and “enemies”, ready, eventually, to kill each other.’ The political, while ever present, does not necessarily need to be translated into actual fighting. ‘Politics can then be defined as a general concept denoting any form of “dealing with the political”, ranging from denying it, via neutralizing or canalising it, to exploiting it’ (van der Zweerde 2008, 6). Liberal states have institutions such as state monopoly on violence to contain this fundamental conflict. They may have become so good at isolating the sphere of conflict from the rest of society that it may seem that one is in a post-political world of ‘governance’. In this regard, all water contests that are not in the public sphere are not political or, put simply, all private contests are not political. Under this definition, a private dispute between the private farmer and the irrigation department, or between private farmers, in which nobody else suffers or contests, is unlikely to be political. This is because the emphasis is on Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) and the establishment of Water User Associations (WUAs), which are supposed to allocate water within the irrigation systems and regulate water disputes between farmers within a conflict resolution committee. Water allocation within an irrigation system is often just a private matter and therefore is not politics unless it is politicized (e.g. in cases of feminists’ approach or entitlements for the poor). While the boundaries between the private and public spheres are relatively stable, they can be challenged. While we may claim that water is ‘not politics’, it can be successfully politicized. (Conversely, despite the claim that ‘water is politics’ water can be successfully depoliticized.) Under specific circumstances innocent objects, like water, can become subject to ubiquitous conflict. Feminists have long argued that ‘the personal is the political’ and to a degree succeeded in bringing previously private issues like reproductive health and

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Is water politics? Towards international water relations family law into the political arena. (However, this is not restricted to feminists— the current debate about headscarves in the Netherlands or minarets in Switzerland proves that others can do the same thing.) Water supply is mostly not political in the Netherlands, but it is in Gaza. Other issues, which would seem obviously political to an outside observer, are not universally political. What is political, then, is context dependent. After Mouffe, politics (la politique) can be defined as a general concept denoting any form of ‘dealing with the political (le politique)—whatever that may be at some point in time and space—ranging from denying it, via neutralizing or canalizing it, to exploiting it. How this is done is dealt with differently by different actors in different (overlapping and structurally linked) arenas, at different (and interlinked) levels. CONCLUSION

We have seen that water is mostly assumed to be scarce and therefore political. Where there is very little scarcity, there is no need to contest, co-ordinate or co-operate; where scarcity is very great, there is every reason to co-operate, but a large incentive not to. Yet, even in highly contested settings, there may not be political contest if the social arrangement for dealing with ‘the political’ is that conflict is dealt with in other ways—from violence to silence. It is too simplistic to refer only to state matters as the domain of politics, but also to say that water is always political. It appears to be strategic, rather than analytical, discourse to say that ‘water is politics’ as shorthand for ‘to make meaningful (emancipator) change, water should always be politicized’, as a counter to the still-influential suggestion that to make any meaningful change, water should not be politicized. It has been argued that water may be subject to political play through deliberate or structural linkages with other issues. When we discuss water politics, these politics may not necessarily be about the water itself. Water politics is not just ‘politics affected by the availability of water and water resources’, as Wikipedia (as consulted on 10 December 2009) has it; we have seen that the reverse may be equally true: water resources are affected by (other) politics. Depoliticization seeks to take the politics out of water, to make it more ‘rational’. As the present book will amply show, neither politics nor policies universally warrant the word ‘rational’. If politics is about values, it is about emotions and passions. We hope that the book contributes to the reader’s understanding of the rationales and sheer irrationality of much water politics. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Naho Mirumachi and Hans van der Veen for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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NOTES 1 A speech act has social force only if it is spoken in the proper circumstances, by a speaker with the appropriate authority—e.g. the registrar can declare a couple married; a president can declare war (Austin 1962). On the basis of his scientific authority, a scholar can pronounce that A = B or A causes B, and declare, for example, a water, governance or climate crisis, but by the nature of his profession, he can be expected to be challenged. 2 Having made reference to ‘a dictionary definition’ of politics, Mollinga (2001, 735) presents two definitions, then focuses on the broader definition: ‘the complex or aggregate of relationships of men in society, especially those relationships involving authority or power’ (in New Collins Concise English Dictionary, quoted in Mollinga 2001, 735). 3 Mollinga (2008) notes that, unlike the English language, many other vernaculars— Spanish, for example—do not distinguish between politics and policies. A policy is typically described as ‘a deliberate plan of action to guide decisions and achieve rational outcome’ (Wikipedia, last consulted on 10 December 2009). 4 The degree of agreement over facts and values itself may also be subject to political debate. 5 ‘Power’ implies an idea of counterfactuals; i.e., ‘it could also have been otherwise’. We can conceive of outcomes where no power was exerted. According to Guzzini (2005), depoliticization happens when, by common acceptance, no power is involved. This may not be the result of a deliberate strategy. A case can be conceived where depoliticization results from ‘systemic luck’, when power played no part in an outcome, e.g., when free riders profit from something, without being able to influence it (Guzzini 2005, 511–12). 6 Notions of ‘informal politics’ and ‘sub-politics’ (Beck 1997) suggest that non-state and informal contests can indeed be about the common good, and therefore political.

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Is water politics? Towards international water relations ——(2010) The Politics of Flood Planning. London: I.B. Tauris. Warner, J. and Zeitoun, M. (2008) ‘International Relations and Water Do Mix: Hydro-Hegemony and International Water Relations’, Political Geography, 27, 802–810. Wegerich, K. (2009) ‘Konflikt und Kooperation bei der Wassernutzung in Mittelasien, in Russlands instabile Südflanke’, Wissenschaft und Frieden, 4, 22–26. Wester, P., Rap, E. and Vargas and Velázquez, S. (2009), ‘The Hydraulic Mission and the Mexican Hydrocracy: Regulating and Reforming the Flows of Water and Power’, Water Alternatives 2 (3), 395–415. William Alexander (Prince of Orange) (2007) ‘Water and Microfinance: Exploring the Engagement of Two Sectors’, speech at seminar on Water and Microfinance: Exploring Innovative Partnerships in New Delhi, India, 25 October 2007 (Available at: www.koninklijkhuis.nl/content.jsp?objectid=23422). Wolf, A.T. (1995) Hydropolitics along the Jordan River—Scarce Water and Its Impact on the Arab–Israeli Conflict, United Nations University Press. Young, O. (2002) Institutional Dimensions of Environmental Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT. Zeitoun, M. and Warner, J. (2006) ‘Hydro-hegemony: A framework for analysis of transboundary water conflicts’, Water policy, 8, 435–460.

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The politics of sharing water: International law, sovereignty, and transboundary rivers and aquifers STEPHEN C. MCCAFFREY AND KATE J. NEVILLE1

INTRODUCTION

Sovereignty is a key concept in international law. It signifies the independence of a state, which means that it is subject to the authority of no other state (Jennings and Watts 1992, 117, para. 382). Sovereignty is thus the fundamental principle that allows states to negotiate and enter into treaties with other states: the ability autonomously to engage in reciprocal arrangements with other parties requires having territorial and governance jurisdiction and authority. Consequently, international agreements reaffirm sovereignty by reinforcing the legitimacy of the state to participate in these arrangements (Permanent Court of International Justice 1923). However, while seemingly straightforward, the meaning of this central concept is debated among international law scholars2 and takes on additional complexities when viewed through the prism of political science and states’ claims in their interactions with each other. Sovereignty is thus a contested term, particularly as scholars challenge traditional notions of the state as a centralized, territorially bounded, unified entity that interacts with other states solely on the governmental level—in short, the Westphalian system.3 The notion of sovereignty as having any role in interstate relations has also been strongly challenged. The noted international law scholar Louis Henkin has observed, in a paper entitled ‘The Mythology of Sovereignty’, ‘As applied to states in their relations with other states, “sovereignty” is a mistake. Sovereignty is essentially an internal concept, the locus of ultimate authority in a society, rooted in its origins in the authority of sovereign princes. … Surely, as applied to the modern secular state in relation to other secular states, it is not meaningful to speak of the state as sovereign. Sovereignty, I conclude, is not per se a normative conception in international law’ (Henkin 1993, 6). Henkin is not alone in efforts to question sovereignty: many political scientists—particularly those engaged in examining transboundary environmental politics and changing international governance structures4—have also sought 18

The politics of sharing water to deconstruct the concept. For example, some have reframed sovereignty through ‘unbundling’ it, whereby they differentiate between internal and external sovereignty5 and distinguish among the concepts of autonomy, authority, and control. Karen Litfin’s (1998a) ‘sovereignty bargains’ represent one analytical approach to understanding the dynamics of state interactions, in which engaging in international agreements and reciprocal compromises leads to trade-offs among the constituent components of sovereignty. These transactions might reduce one dimension of sovereignty (by, for example, reducing the control of the state over unilateral decision-making), but correspondingly increase another component of sovereignty (for instance, securing greater authority by better protecting its citizens from harm that could otherwise be caused by unilateral action by another state), thereby enhancing overall sovereign effectiveness. In international negotiations, sovereignty is often used to announce the sole authority of a state over the activities and resources within its territorial jurisdiction, and to denounce the rights of other states to interfere with that control. For those of us interested in transboundary water, the relevance of these debates over terminology and the concept of sovereignty at the international level is that sovereignty—interpreted as a state’s supreme authority over resources within its borders—is a doctrine that is not well suited to regulating relations between two or more states that share the same resource. Sovereignty has been used in international water negotiations and disputes as a means of staking claims and making decisions. It is, in fact, the starting point of the new draft articles on the law of transboundary aquifers adopted by the UN International Law Commission.6 However, it is, we argue, a flawed basis for regulating the relations between states over shared water; strong assertions of its primacy as a principle of law in this field in fact tend to engender disputes over international waters and hinder their resolution. This chapter does not pretend to cover the entire field of international law with respect to understanding international water negotiations and dispute resolutions; however, it does address a central debate in the field, and bring a political and legal lens to our understanding of how better to resolve conflicts over transboundary waters. International law is a necessary and valuable tool for international water governance: it provides a basis for making consistent and equitable decisions for water management, offers a tool for resolving conflicts through peaceful means, and establishes guidelines and rules for an otherwise fragmented and complex set of ecosystems and resources (where water resources are, simultaneously and among other things, territory, borders, means of transportation and tools of trade, providers of basic survival, producers of electrical power, and the underpinnings of food production). However, for international law to be an effective tool for water governance, its foundational principles must provide mechanisms for weighing claims, allocating rights, and negotiating compromises. The UN Watercourses Convention (UN 1997) provides a set of principles that encourage resolution of water disputes in a manner that is reasonable, equitable, and internationally

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acceptable. In contrast, we are concerned that the approach of the draft articles on transboundary aquifers is likely to exacerbate conflict through legal disputes, result in stalemates in the courts (if the courts have jurisdiction7), and provide no resolution to persistent conflicts in the watersheds. While claims of sovereignty have arisen in a number of transboundary water disputes, co-riparians have successfully resolved disputes most frequently when they have moved away from unilateral declaration of control towards principles of equitable and reasonable utilization, prevention of significant harm, and prior notification, that is, methods of joint use as well as peaceful and mutually beneficial dispute resolution, which are reflected in both customary and codified international law relating to transboundary waters. In the following sections, we look to a classic example of the invocation of the principle of sovereignty—known as the ‘Harmon Doctrine’ after its most noted exponent—in an international water dispute between the USA and Mexico over the Rio Grande, and we look also at more recent examples of the centrality of sovereignty claims (and the problems this causes) in conflicts over transboundary water for India and Bangladesh on the Ganges, and for Turkey, Syria, and Iraq on the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers. We offer a discussion of a disaggregated understanding of sovereignty, to introduce the trade-offs involved in assertions of rights over resources, particularly over those which are fluid and mobile. We then turn to the UN Watercourses Convention to illustrate alternate principles of international law that can guide more effective resolution of disputes, and that provide a promising basis for moving forward on co-operative relationships among countries in shared watersheds. The worrying direction of the most recent international legal effort to address shared freshwater management, the draft articles on transboundary aquifers, is examined, and it is argued that using sovereignty as the leitmotif of a regime governing transboundary water, at best, is unhelpful and, at worst, actively undermines conflict resolution efforts. I. TERRITORIAL SOVEREIGNTY CLAIMS OVER WATER

The recent history of sovereignty claims in resource governance is found in several places. For natural resources in general, the Declaration on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, adopted by the UN General Assembly as Resolution 1803 in 1962, has become a principle reference for subsequent international agreements, including the draft articles on the law of transboundary aquifers. In asserting the ‘full permanent sovereignty of every State over its natural resources and all economic activities’, which includes the right to control and exploit those resources, the resolution reflects the interest of states in self-determination through the development of resources within their territories, and consequently has been echoed in more recent negotiations over resources. Given the current references to the UN resolution, it is worthwhile recognizing the context in which it was initially adopted. The resolution was

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The politics of sharing water intended to safeguard the rights of states—particularly post-colonial and other developing states—to the economic and development benefits accruing from their resources, and ensure that foreign capital did not acquire undue power over resource decisions made by state governments (Gess 1964). However, its more recent uses—as in the draft aquifer articles—emphasize the capacity of states to make unilateral resource-use decisions. In contrast, most assertions of sovereignty in international environmental agreements adopt a qualified approach that retains national control over resources but emphasizes that these rights are bounded, with the condition that no harm is caused to other states and areas beyond national jurisdiction. This qualified sovereignty, which includes these duties to other states, is established in principle 21 of the 1972 Declaration of the UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE—Stockholm Declaration) and, similarly, in principle 2 of the 1992 Rio Declaration. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Convention on Biological Diversity, Convention on LongRange Transboundary Air Pollution, and Vienna Convention on the Protection of the Ozone Layer either mention the Declaration of the UNCHE or use similar language referring to sovereignty in conjunction with the responsibility not to cause harm. This approach, which could be described as one of limited sovereignty, seems to have been adopted in most transboundary water negotiations, where sovereign control over shared waters is moderated by the principles of equitable and reasonable use and of prevention of significant harm. For shared water resources specifically, rights to unilateral decision-making authority were notably asserted in the landmark ‘Harmon Doctrine’ of 1895 in the USA, a legal opinion in which the Attorney General at the time asserted the USA’s rights to use the waters of the Rio Grande as it saw fit, with no requirement to consider downstream Mexico’s interests in the river. However, the official positions of countries and their actual functional arrangements for water-sharing are not always aligned. The USA, for example, declared absolute sovereignty over its water resources in the Harmon Doctrine, yet it had previously established the International Boundary Commission (later the International Boundary and Water Commission, IBWC) in 1889 and resolved the dispute that gave rise to the Harmon Doctrine through the 1906 Convention between the USA and Mexico concerning the Equitable Distribution of Waters of the Rio Grande for Irrigation Purposes, actions which acknowledge joint decision-making and the need for cross-border co-operation. Moreover, while the language in the 1906 Convention explicitly denies any recognition by the USA of rights of Mexico to the water beyond those laid down in the treaty, it nonetheless provides for the construction by the USA of a storage dam and the delivery by the USA of a specified quantity of water each year to Mexico.8 This official position of unilateral control combined with a more co-operative strategy for dispute resolution in practice is seen in several river basins. Let us turn first to the Rio Grande controversy at the turn of the 20th century to see the legal development of these sovereignty claims, and then to water disputes on the Ganges and the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers.

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a. Case studies i. USA–Mexico—the Rio Grande and the Harmon Doctrine9 In the late 1800s, concerns were expressed by the consul of Mexico to the USA about reductions in water flows in the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo del Norte) that were threatening Mexican communities in the vicinity of Ciudad Juarez that depended on the river for water supplies. The Rio Grande—which originates in the USA, flows south and forms part of the USA–Mexico border, before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico—had been in drought conditions for several years (a fact to which Secretary of State W.Q. Gresham attributed the water shortages), but was also being used to supply new irrigation projects in Colorado’s San Luis valley in the upper reaches of the river (which was seen by Mexican communities as contributing to the low flows, as noted in an 1890 report by a US Army officer in Texas). While the USA initially denied any impact of its upstream activities on the water flows in Mexico, continued communications between the countries on the issue led to a resolution passed by the US Congress requesting that the President participate in negotiations with Mexico to resolve the water problems. Mexico contended that the USA had violated the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo by developing irrigation works on the river that interfered with navigation, and, furthermore, asserted that it held legal rights to water based on the principle of prior use. The USA subsequently asked Attorney General Judson Harmon of the Department of Justice to evaluate the legal basis of these claims. In the opinion that followed from his deliberations, the key message of which has become known as the ‘Harmon Doctrine’, the Attorney General interpreted the 1848 treaty as applicable only below the southern border of New Mexico, and thus concluded that the irrigation systems in Colorado and New Mexico were not in violation of the prohibitions on development; moreover, he stated that the section of the river above the head of navigation10 was not only outside the scope of the treaty, but that private rights over the river in that section (including for development projects) could not be interfered with by the national government without exercising its power of eminent domain, or expropriation—that is, he concluded that the treaty applied to the countries but not to the countries’ citizens.11 The USA had a vested interest in maintaining control of the Rio Grande, as the land irrigated with its waters had increased substantially through the 1880s (Ganoe 1937). Legislation enacted through the mid-to-late 19th century, including the 1862 Homestead Act (US NPS 1862), 1873 Timber Culture Act (Sanger 1873), 1877 Desert Lands Act (US Secretary of State 1877), 1878 Timber and Stone Law (General Land Office 1878), and 1894 Carey Irrigation Act (Audenried 1908), encouraged settlement—and irrigation—in the West.12 The Desert Lands Act, for example, allowed the appropriation of non-navigable streams by new landowners (‘entrymen’), subject to requirements of beneficial use (Clark 1975), and, in particular, required irrigation of land before title to

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The politics of sharing water that land could be acquired (Bath and Petit 1998, 10). The legislation, combined with low levels of precipitation that made rain-fed agriculture more uncertain, encouraged farmers to acquire large tracts of land and to irrigate them (Quinn 1982). Although Colorado was not included in the Desert Land Act until 1891, by 1890 the state nonetheless accounted for one sixth of the irrigators and one quarter of the ‘improved land’ recorded in the US Census (Ganoe 1937); the extension of the Act to include Colorado provided additional incentives for expanding irrigation-based agriculture. While prolonged droughts alone may have compromised Mexico’s water access from the Rio Grande, it seems likely that the increasing irrigation withdrawals compounded the problem. Given these US interests in its waters, and the arguable interpretation of the terms of the treaty and its intent, the Harmon Doctrine has been described as advocacy rather than as a judicial assessment of the law, and its status as proper international law has been challenged (McCaffrey 2000). Nonetheless, it constitutes a precedent of sorts with regard to interactions over international waters and has become synonymous with the principle of absolute territorial sovereignty over the portion of an international watercourse located in a state’s territory. The scaffolding provided by the Harmon Doctrine has supported the development of later negotiations over rivers, by asserting— contrary to other developments in international environmental and watercourse law—that countries have the right to dispose unilaterally of water resources that they share with other states, regardless of the impact on those states, be they downstream or neighbouring. Using the claims of the Harmon Doctrine as a template for understanding these assertions of sovereignty, we now turn to riparian disputes in Turkey and India, to see how similar positions of unilateral control have been taken by upstream countries, and how these assertions are connected to interests in economic development (for instance, irrigation and hydropower generation) and in political autonomy (such as political independence with respect to governance issues like minority rights and separatist movements). ii. India–Bangladesh—the Ganges and the Farakka Barrage India and Bangladesh currently have a treaty governing water management on the Ganges River (the Ganges Water-Sharing Treaty, signed in 1996); however, relations between the two countries over shared waters have historically been rocky, and were complicated by political tensions related to Bangladesh’s struggle for independence from Pakistan in the 1950s.13 The Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin is a significant watershed in South Asia, with the Ganges River originating in the Himalayas in India, and meeting the Brahmaputra to form the Padma before emptying into the Bay of Bengal (Salman and Uprety 2002).14 In 1951, India decided to construct a dam on the Ganges at Farakka, close to the Bangladeshi border, to divert water to the Hooghly River, which

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empties into the Calcutta harbour (Khalid 2004); construction on the Farakka Barrage was undertaken between 1961 and 1975 (McCaffrey 2007). Although India was an ardent supporter of Bangladesh, as one of the few countries that actively helped it secure independence from Pakistan (Khalid 2004), when it came to critical and strategic water resources, India was less interested in conceding rights to its neighbour. Although it did not cite the Harmon Doctrine, India maintained a similar position to that of the USA in the Rio Grande disputes: India denied the need for negotiations with East Pakistan by rejecting the downstream state’s claims over the water. In an aggressive assertion of sovereignty, India maintained for many years that the Ganges was not an international river, on the basis that the majority of the catchment area for the river was in India (McCaffrey 2007). East Pakistan raised the dispute in the UN General Assembly in 1968 (Islam 1987), and continued discussions in UN forums through to the formation of an agreement between the two countries in 1977. Two consecutive Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs), in 1982 and 1985, followed the expiration of the 1977 treaty. As with the USA, when India agreed to negotiations, it did so on the basis that it was willing to assure East Pakistan that upstream activities would cause no harm,15 but not on the basis of a recognition of equal rights to the river. In later negotiations, India conceded that the Ganges was international and recognized the principles of reasonable and equitable usage of international waters by riparians (McCaffrey 2007); however, the preamble of the 1977 agreement denies the establishment of any precedent or principles of law. By denying the power of the agreement to set precedent, India was reasserting its theoretical claims to sovereign control over waters in its territories, regardless of their ultimate path outside national jurisdiction, even as it conceded the limitations of that sovereignty in practice (McCaffrey 2007). iii. Turkey–Syria–Iraq—the Tigris-Euphrates Of the three cases considered here, Turkey’s conflict over its transboundary waters has been unresolved for the longest period of time, and (likely a not unrelated factor) Turkey has taken the fewest steps in practice to relinquish sovereignty claims.16 Turkey’s water disputes revolve around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which rise in Turkey and flow through Syria to a point of confluence in southern Iraq, forming the Shatt al-Arab, before emptying into the Persian Gulf. As with India, Turkey’s negotiations over the waters of its shared rivers overlap with other political issues of territory, identity, and statehood. While political issues were salient in India, Bangladesh’s claims to statehood were not a threat to Indian territory and were supported by the government of India, and thus disputes over the Ganges were not exacerbated by territorial battles. In contrast, Syria has provided sanctuary to members of the Kurdish Workers’ Party, or PKK—a group that has led violent independence

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The politics of sharing water campaigns in Anatolia, the southern region of Turkey (McCaffrey 2003). Thus, political issues have heightened tensions between the riparians, and have increased the perceived importance of protecting sovereignty claims. Moreover, in a move that has further aggravated pressure in the region, Turkey made threats to cut off the flow of the Euphrates if Syria continued to protect Kurdish separatists (The Economist 1989, 42). Recent disputes between Turkey and its downstream neighbours have been sparked by a series of irrigation and dam-building projects on the Euphrates in Turkey, under the umbrella of the Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi, or Greater Anatolia Project, ‘GAP’ (Caponeera 1996, 102). The implications of the massive diversion and extraction plans for the river on Syria and Iraq’s water supplies are significant, although Turkey has denied that there will be negative downstream effects; in planning the water projects, Turkey has exhibited little willingness to consult with its neighbours. Donors of the GAP had already demanded fixed discharge rates from reservoirs in the construction of the Keban and Karakaya dams on the Euphrates, but these were short-term commitments and did not lead to lasting water guarantees to downstream states. Subsequently, some concerned funders made continued financing contingent on agreements among the riparians, and so communication with Syria and Iraq was initiated by Turkey. However, when Syria rejected a final agreement, Turkey opted to finance the dams on its own, and made public statements infused with sovereignty claims about Turkey’s right to develop its own resources (Zawahri 2006). Zawahri quotes the then prime minister Suleyman Demirel on the issue, who stated: ‘Neither Syria nor Iraq can lay claim to Turkey’s rivers any more than Ankara could claim their oil. We have a right to do anything we like. The water resources are Turkey’s, the oil resources are theirs. We don’t say we share their oil resources, and they can’t say they share our water resources.’17 In a move similar to India’s assertion that the Ganges was not an international river, Turkey claimed that its rights over the Euphrates were due to the river being a ‘transnational’ and not an ‘international’ river. Since the Euphrates crossed a border, but did not constitute the border itself, Turkey claimed that it was not in fact an international river, and thus laws of international rivers did not apply. Turkey’s claim to the river thus echoed the Harmon Doctrine, since, in effect, it claimed absolute territorial sovereignty and thus unilateral control over the portions of rivers within its borders (Zawahri 2006). However, the appeal to sovereignty did not resolve the dispute among the riparians. Iraq and Syria countered the invocation of the doctrine of absolute territorial sovereignty with absolute territorial integrity, which, in Zawahri’s words, ‘argues that the states that developed the rivers first have an absolute right to the water’ (Zawahri 2006, 1046). Moreover, the downstream states contested Turkey’s use of semantics, countering that ‘the rivers are international, not transnational, and that, because of their historical use, they had rights to a share of the waters’ (Zawahri 2006, 1046).

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b. The meanings of sovereignty In building a theory of sovereignty, Karen Litfin and her collaborators in The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics (1998b) offer a series of discussions on the concepts bundled up in the term. Litfin suggests that, contrary to some claims, shared environmental governance regimes are not incompatible with territorial exclusivity. She considers different realms of jurisdiction, including territoriality, autonomy, authority, and control, and suggests that although sovereignty as a monolithic concept has been challenged, with this disaggregated conception, sovereignty has still not been eroded. External sovereignty, defined as the legal or constitutional independence of the state, involves territorialization and authority (Litfin 1998a, 5–6), and is related to the juridical recognition of a state by others in the international area. Internal sovereignty refers to a state’s capacity to control people and processes within its boundaries, and to exercise autonomy over its own affairs, thereby encompassing the operational or effective exercise of sovereignty (Litfin 1998a, 5–6). These two spheres of autonomy are relevant for understanding sovereignty claims in water disputes, as states appear to emphasize their external sovereignty, but are willing to make compromises on their internal sovereignty in order to overcome challenges posed by shared resources.18 By shifting to a set of principles that diverges from absolute territorial sovereignty—where decisions are made with no regard for consequences to others—to a limited territorial sovereignty—in which duties to others put boundaries on the unilateral decisions that can be made—states are in fact protecting their effective sovereignty. That is, through the mutual recognition of the responsibility not to cause harm to others,19 states enter into arrangements that safeguard themselves from harm by others, and consequently protect their future autonomy by reducing external threats. We can only understand this strengthening of effective sovereignty if we see sovereignty in Litfin’s terms, as a composite concept in which bargains can be struck and exchanges can be made (Litfin 1998a, 10)—for instance, to increase control and security through more predictable resource access by relinquishing some autonomy over those resources.20 The idea of restricted sovereignty is addressed by Paul Wapner in a discussion of rights and responsibilities of states; he notes that while the Harmon Doctrine emphasizes rights, more recent international developments have added a focus on responsibility, through caveats on sovereignty claims about duties to neighbours and against extraterritorial harm.21 He emphasizes that ecological interdependence challenges the logic of sovereignty, if sovereignty is understood to mean states acting independently for their own ends, with no consideration of other states (Wapner 1998, 277). This mutual consideration and restraint over unilateral resource use is particularly necessary for many shared water resources where withdrawals from or pollution on either side reduces water availability or quality on the other. While both parties could claim absolute territorial sovereignty and act

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The politics of sharing water freely to extract and pollute the water, each side would be harmed by the activities of the other, and sovereignty would do little to resolve disputes or safeguard adequate water access for either; such a relationship would ultimately threaten the availability of the resource for both states (and sovereignty over a depleted or exhausted resource would be of little value). Water has been described as ignoring political boundaries (Wolf 1999)22—but it has a more complicated relationship with these boundaries than such a statement suggests: water in fact does more than ignore borders, in some cases it delineates them. The fluidity of water makes it difficult to capture, and its two-fold role in defining and ignoring territorial divisions challenges claims of absolute sovereignty over the resource.23 One option for reconciling sovereignty with transboundary resources is to delink the institution of sovereignty from physical territoriality, as Ward (1998, 81) suggests. Kuehls describes territories and populations as ‘socially constructed as appropriate objects of sovereignty’ (Kuehls 1998, 18), and sovereignty as a form of social organization (Kuehls 1998, 43); with this understanding of these terms, a reconceptualization of sovereignty might be possible. However, reimagining the state and finding new ways to configure political space are challenging tasks, according to Ruggie (1993), and whether we can move beyond territoriality remains doubtful. Nevertheless, even if sovereignty remains tightly linked to territoriality,24 there are ways in which it need not define countries’ relationships over shared resources. There are ways of addressing environmental (or other) cross-border problems that ‘[lie] outside the sovereignty framework’, as noted by Jupille in his discussion of the principle of subsidiarity in the European Union. With subsidiarity, which emphasizes ‘political and democratic efficacy, rather than “rights”’, the power and autonomy of member states is retained, but their legal authority is reduced as problems are addressed at the ‘appropriate level’, which may not be congruent with state borders.25 Another option is to skirt the issue of sovereignty altogether: while many international environmental treaties include some statement reaffirming state sovereignty, states have recognized that not all cases of international cooperation need refer to this principle. Beyond disaggregating and qualifying sovereignty claims, some agreements have been established without reference to sovereignty at all: the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), for instance, contains no such reference. This does not indicate that, in signing up to the CMS, states have given up any claims to sovereign rights over their own territories and resources, but rather suggests that they recognize that sovereignty is not useful as a guiding premise for governing these shared and mobile resources. Similarly, for water negotiations, sovereignty is not the only principle that has guided conflict resolution among states. There is no evidence that the Harmon Doctrine ever truly represented international law. It could be (and may best be) considered an exercise in advocacy on behalf of a lawyer’s (Harmon’s) client (the USA). Just as the 1906 Convention between the USA

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and Mexico concerning the Equitable Distribution of Waters of the Rio Grande for Irrigation Purposes provided rights to Mexico to water from the river, other cross-border conflicts over water resources have similarly set aside invocations of the Harmon Doctrine in favour of more conciliatory arrangements. The doctrine was repudiated by the US government itself, in the context of a dispute with Canada over the Columbia River, in which the USA was the downstream country.26 Within the USA, in 1907, a dispute over water between Kansas and Colorado was taken to the Supreme Court. Starting in the late 1880s, Colorado had increased diversions from the Arkansas River (US Supreme Court 1907, 107–8), contending that ‘it ha[d] a right to appropriate all the waters of this stream for the purposes of irrigating its soil and making more valuable its own territory’ (US Supreme Court 1907, 98), while Kansas took the position that it had rights to water from the river. In its decision, the court pointed to the principle of equality of right to reconcile the interests of the states, saying: ‘Each State stands on the same level with all the rest. It can impose its own legislation on no one of the others, and is bound to yield its own views to none’ (US Supreme Court 1907, 97). Equality of right signifies that all states—whether upstream, downstream, or contiguous—have rights in the resource that are equal to those of the others. The explicit caveat is that it does not imply that states are entitled to an equal share of the waters in a transboundary river, only that it ensures all states must be considered when allocating water from shared watersheds. In a later decision of the court in Kansas v. Colorado, this distinction was emphasized in the court’s statement that equality of right does not mean, ‘that there must be an equal division of the waters of an interstate stream among the States through which it flows’, but that ‘the principles of right and equity shall be applied’ (US Supreme Court 1931, 670–71, emphasis added). Moreover, the principle refers not just to the sharing of the water itself, but to equity in apportioning the benefits and uses of the river (McCaffrey 2007, 389–92). The US case was not the first time that equality of right prevailed in domestic legal decisions: in 1878, the Swiss Federal Court called on this principle in the case of Aargau v. Zurich (Swiss Federal Court 1898, 34), stating, ‘In the case of public waters which extend over several cantons and, therefore, belong to several cantons, it follows from the equality of the cantons that none of them may, to the prejudice of the others, take such measures upon its territory, as the diversion of a river or brook, construction of dams, etc., as may make the exercise of the rights of sovereignty over the water impossible for the other cantons, or which exclude the joint use thereof or amount to a violation of territory’ (Swiss Federal Court 1898, 46–47). Equality of right has been recognized in practice (if not in name) in international as well as domestic cases (McCaffrey 2007, 389–92), including the River Oder case before the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) in 1929 (PCIJ 1929, 27), and, later, in the Gabcˇ íkovo-Nagymaros Project case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1997, as will be discussed below

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The politics of sharing water (ICJ 1997, 56, para. 85). Oppenheim’s 1905 International Law concisely summarizes the intersection between sovereignty and equality of right principles, stating that ‘territorial supremacy does not give a boundless liberty of action. Thus, by customary International Law, … a State is, in spite of its territorial supremacy, not allowed to alter the natural conditions of its own territory to the disadvantage of the natural conditions of a territory of a neighbouring state—for instance, to stop or divert the flow of a river which runs from its own into a neighbouring territory’ (Jennings and Watts 1992, 175). c. Declarations of rights versus resolution of disputes In this chapter, we chose the specific river disputes discussed above as particularly prominent examples of cases in which countries took unilateral action in development activities on shared waters, literally or effectively asserted sovereignty in the ensuing disputes over these waters, but came to agreements and resolutions that were not premised on claims of sovereignty. Although the USA, India, and Turkey all made claims that emphasized their unilateral rights to their water resources and development decisions, sovereignty has not been the basis on which negotiations have actually moved forward or treaties been concluded. The next section builds on the explanation of the principles for water governance, including equality of right, that have been developed more effectively to address disputes over this fugitive resource, as codified in the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention. II. LAW FOR A SHARED RESOURCE: DOES THE BIGGEST STRAW WIN?

Unless they are explicitly set forth in an applicable treaty, the rights and obligations of countries sharing freshwater resources are governed by customary international law (often referred to simply as ‘custom’). A few words about this form of international law will provide background for the discussion in this section of the UN Watercourses Convention and the draft articles on transboundary aquifers. Customary international law—which is binding on nations even though, by definition, it is not written—is formed by a general practice of states that is accepted as law (ICJ 1945, art. 38(1)(b)).27 Once the chief source of international law, custom has been both codified in multilateral treaties and supplanted by other international agreements at an ever-increasing pace since the end of the Second World War. But despite this formalization of law, custom remains an important source of international law: to the extent that an issue is not governed by a treaty, custom is the law that applies. If there is no treaty, custom will guide decisions on the issue at hand; even if a treaty is applicable to a particular dispute, custom will often be relevant as a gap-filler, for use in interpreting the treaty, or resolving the dispute when the rules are not supplied by the treaty. Thus, for example, the ICJ had occasion to draw

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quite heavily upon customary international law in the Gabcˇ íkovo case mentioned earlier, even though it found that the dispute was generally governed by a treaty (ICJ 1997). A drawback of custom is precisely the fact that it is not written. This can give rise to disputes, both as to the content of a customary rule and even with regard to whether the alleged rule is a norm of customary international law at all. Recognizing these drawbacks, the UN General Assembly, in 1947, established the International Law Commission (ILC) as one of its subsidiary bodies. The Commission is charged by its Statute, or charter, with the identification of customary law and its codification, along with the progressive development of international law (ILC 1982, art. 1(1)). Over more than sixty years of operation, the ILC has prepared a number of drafts on basic subjects of international law that have formed the basis of ‘codification conventions’— treaties on such subjects as Diplomatic and Consular Law, the Law of Treaties, and the Law of the Sea that were negotiated by governments on the basis of draft texts prepared by the ILC. Indeed, the fact that a convention— another name for a treaty—is based on the work of the ILC strongly suggests that some or all of its provisions reflect customary international law. The International Court has so held on numerous occasions. With this brief discussion of customary international law as a backdrop, let us now consider two products of ILC work that directly address international waters. a. The 1997 UN Convention The UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (‘UN Convention’, UN 1997) was negotiated at the UN headquarters in New York in two sessions, held in 1996 and 1997, on the basis of draft articles on the subject prepared over the course of twenty years by the International Law Commission (ILC 1994, 89). The negotiations were open to all UN member states. For the reasons indicated above, the fact that the UN Convention is based on a draft prepared by the ILC, many provisions of which were not changed significantly in the negotiations, indicates that the Convention’s basic principles reflect customary international law. This characteristic of the UN Convention was reinforced a mere four months after it was concluded, when the ICJ referred to the UN Convention several times in its judgment in the Gabcˇ íkovo-Nagymaros Project case. The Convention sets forth what are generally considered to be the three most basic principles of the law of international watercourses: equitable and reasonable utilization, prevention of significant harm, and prior notification of planned measures. Of the three, the principle of equitable utilization is perhaps the most fundamental. The ICJ invoked this principle in the Gabcˇ íkovo case when it referred to a state’s ‘basic right to an equitable and reasonable sharing of the resources of an international watercourse’ (ICJ 1997, 54, 56, emphasis added). Since it was not relying on the treaty between the parties in making this statement, the Court can only have considered this

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The politics of sharing water ‘basic right’ to have had its source in customary international law. While it is not entirely clear why the Court described the right as being ‘basic’, it at least indicates that the ICJ regarded the right, and the corresponding obligation of the other state, to be of a fundamental character. The Court reinforced the principle of equitable utilization in Gabcˇ íkovo by applying a concept articulated in the River Oder (PCIJ 1929, 27) case by the Permanent Court almost seventy years earlier. The Oder case involved the question of the status of the Oder as an international river. Poland claimed the exclusive right to navigate on sections of tributaries of the Oder situated wholly in Polish territory, while other states claimed that, as the Oder was an international river, they all shared in these navigation rights. Poland’s position was that the freedom of navigation principle was intended to allow upstream states to gain access to the sea, not to allow downstream states to navigate on tributaries that were situated entirely in another country’s territory. The Permanent Court said: A solution of the problem [of the extent of freedom of navigation] has been sought not in the idea of a right of passage in favour of upstream States, but in that of a community of interest of riparian States. This community of interest in a navigable river becomes the basis of a common legal right, the essential features of which are the perfect equality of all riparian States in the user of the whole course of the river and the exclusion of any preferential privilege of any one riparian State in relation to the others. (PCIJ 1929, 27–28) In the Gabcˇ íkovo case, after setting forth the above passage, the ICJ found that, ‘Modern development of international law has strengthened this principle for non-navigational uses of international watercourses as well, as evidenced by the adoption of the Convention of 21 May 1997 on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses by the UN General Assembly’ (ICJ 1997, 56). The Court thus confirmed that the ‘principle’ of the community of interest is part of modern international law and applies to non-navigational uses of international watercourses, citing as evidence the 1997 UN Convention. However, the Convention does not refer to the community of interest principle explicitly. Therefore, the Court must have considered that the principle was expressed through the fundamental obligations reflected in the Convention. The Court’s confirmation that the principle of community of interest is part of modern international law is highly significant because, while the ICJ’s judgments do not set generally binding precedents (ICJ 1945, art. 59),28 its findings on customary international law are widely accepted as authoritative. The features of the principle, as it applies to non-navigational uses of international watercourses, are those spelled out by the Permanent Court in the Oder case. Thus, regardless of the position of the states involved on a

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watercourse (whether a state is downstream, upstream, or contiguous to another state with respect to an international watercourse), the principle of community of interest forms ‘the basis of a common legal right, the essential features of which are the perfect equality of all riparian States in the user of the whole course of the river and the exclusion of any preferential privilege of any one riparian State in relation to the others’ (ICJ 1997, 56). This ‘perfect equality of all riparian States in the user of the whole course of the river’29 and ‘the exclusion of any preferential privilege of any one riparian State in relation to the others’ is the antithesis of the Harmon Doctrine’s exclusionary dogma of absolute sovereignty over a portion of a watercourse. Indeed, the very notion of a ‘community’ of interest of riparian states in an entire watercourse is inimical to that of exclusive, absolute sovereignty of one state over the part of a watercourse in its territory. One treats the watercourse as a whole; the other segments it into parts delimited by the respective territorial boundaries of the riparian states. Thus recognition of the principle of community of interest by the International Court precludes the lawfulness of absolute sovereignty claims with respect to international watercourses. It is the ‘perfect equality of all riparian States’, or the equality of right among them, that undergirds the principle of equitable utilization. The International Law Commission had the following to say about the concept of equality of right in the commentary to its draft articles on International Watercourses: ‘Indeed, the principle of the sovereign equality of States results in every watercourse State having rights to the use of the watercourse that are qualitatively equal to, and correlative with, those of other watercourse States. However, this fundamental principle of “equality of right” does not mean that each watercourse State is entitled to an equal share of the uses and benefits of the watercourse. Nor does it mean that the water itself is divided into identical portions. Rather, each watercourse State is entitled to use and benefit from the watercourse in an equitable manner.’30 Such an entitlement excludes the notion of absolute sovereignty over the portion of a watercourse located in a state’s territory. Equitable utilization requires that a state utilize a watercourse in a way that is equitable and reasonable vis-à-vis its co-riparian states. But equity does not mean volumetric equality of shares. Equitable utilization instead entails a fair balance of uses between the different states sharing a watercourse. Striking this balance can be a complex exercise, since it depends upon the evaluation of the entire context of a given case. This idea is captured in Article 6 of the UN Convention, which provides that determining what is equitable and reasonable in a particular situation requires taking into account all relevant factors and circumstances, including those relating to natural and social conditions as well as uses of the watercourse. The second basic principle of the law of international watercourses, set forth in Article 7 of the UN Convention, is the prevention of significant harm to other riparian states through activities related to an international watercourse. If harm is caused despite efforts by the state of origin to prevent it,

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The politics of sharing water under Article 7 that state is required to seek to eliminate or mitigate the harm, guided by the overall objective of equitable utilization. The article provides that the state of origin of the harm is to consult with the affected state concerning these efforts and, where appropriate, is to discuss with the affected state the question of compensation. In general, during the negotiation of the UN Convention, upstream states (which are often mountainous and develop their water resources later than their flatter, downstream neighbours) favoured according primacy to equitable utilization over prevention of harm, while downstream states preferred the reverse. What emerged from the negotiations was the balanced obligation just described, which seeks to avoid harm in a way that is consistent with equitable utilization. This formulation of the obligation is probably an accurate reflection of general international law. What it most certainly does not reflect is any recognition of a role for absolute sovereignty in the adjustment of the rights and interests of states sharing an international watercourse. In fact, it was precisely upstream states—i.e., those in the position of the USA, India and Turkey—that favoured giving pre-eminence to the principle of equitable utilization.31 The third general principle of international watercourse law is that of prior notification of planned measures. It requires that a state in which measures— e.g., dams or withdrawals—are planned that may have a significant adverse effect on other riparian states notify the potentially affected states in a timely manner. The notifying state must then be prepared to enter into consultations, and, if necessary, negotiations with the potentially affected states if the latter so wishes. While states that may be affected do not have the right to stop the planned project, the notifying state remains subject to the obligation not to cause significant harm to other states, as well as the obligation of equitable utilization. Like the principles of equitable utilization and prevention of harm, it is likely that the principle of prior notification is part of customary international law. This obligation is fleshed out in some detail in Part III of the UN Convention, Articles 11–19. However, the principle’s essential purpose is to avoid situations that will lead to inequitable or harmful uses. It is much more difficult, and costly, to stop a harmful project that has commenced operation than it is to modify one that is still on the drawing board in a way that will avoid harm. If the riparian states have not formed a joint management mechanism to assist them in optimizing their uses on a basinwide level, procedural rules concerning possible changes in the use regime of a watercourse are essential. These three basic principles of international watercourse law are often viewed as reflecting customary international law. In and of themselves, they should be sufficient to dispose of any claim that a state may, in its sole discretion, exercise absolute sovereignty over the portion of an international watercourse within its territory. As used here, the expression ‘absolute sovereignty’ has the same meaning as the one Attorney General Judson Harmon gave it in 1895, namely, that the state may use or otherwise affect the waters

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of an international watercourse within its territory as it wishes, without regard to the consequences for other riparian states. While international watercourse law has long since rendered the Harmon Doctrine a curious, though potentially dangerous, relic of history,32 the notion of sovereignty over shared water resources is powerful and seductive, as seen in the case studies discussed in section I, and does not die easily. There is perhaps no more striking illustration of this than a draft on transboundary groundwater recently completed by the ILC—the same body whose draft formed the basis of the 1997 UN Convention. b. The draft articles on transboundary aquifers In 2008 the ILC finalized a set of draft articles on The Law of Transboundary Aquifers, which it then submitted to the UN General Assembly (ILC 2008, 19).33 The original purpose of this project was to fill a gap in the Commission’s earlier work on international watercourses. That work (like the UN Convention) defines the central term ‘watercourse’ to mean: ‘a system of surface waters and groundwaters constituting by virtue of their physical relationship a unitary whole and normally flowing into a common terminus’ (ILC 1994, 90, Art.2(b)).34 Because this definition does not cover groundwater that does not interact with surface water, which the ILC referred to as ‘confined groundwater’, the Commission in 1994 adopted a resolution on the latter form of groundwater in which it recommended that states be guided by the principles of the watercourses draft in regulating confined transboundary groundwater (ILC 1994, 135).35 The resolution also recognized ‘the need for continuing efforts to elaborate rules pertaining to confined transboundary groundwater ….’ That recognition led the Commission to prepare its draft articles on transboundary aquifers. A full treatment of this draft is beyond the scope of this chapter. What is of particular interest for present purposes is a provision, Article 3, that was given pride of place in the draft as the first of seven ‘general principles’. Entitled ‘Sovereignty of aquifer states’, that article provides as follows: Each aquifer State has sovereignty over the portion of a transboundary aquifer or aquifer system located within its territory. It shall exercise its sovereignty in accordance with international law and the present draft articles. (ILC 2008, 21) Several points should be made with respect to this article. First, there is no counterpart to this provision in either the ILC’s watercourses draft or the 1997 UN Convention. Second, while a state is of course sovereign within its territory, applying that doctrine to a shared resource encourages a virtual tugof-war between the states sharing the groundwater rather than co-operation in its management. Third, while the second sentence of Article 3 attempts to

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The politics of sharing water take back, or at least to attenuate, something of what the first sentence gives, the damage may already have been done. We will take these points up in turn. As to the first point, it bears emphasis that the notion of sovereignty has long been recognized as inapposite to shared water resources. The ILC’s draft articles and the UN Convention, both of which are based on state practice, thus eschew references to sovereignty of states over shared water resources. Rather, as has been seen, the lodestar of those instruments is equitable utilization, which is based not on sovereignty but on its functional antithesis, equality of right. Second, a state is of course sovereign within its territory. But as discussed above, the notion of sovereignty is at best unhelpful when applied to a shared resource in which rights are correlative. It is a mismatch; a square peg that does not fit in a round hole. Extraterritorial harm, as Wapner (1998, 277) noted, constrains the validity of claims of sovereignty; shared groundwater resources create ecological interdependence that requires responsibilities of states to each other. What might have led the Commission to inaugurate the substantive provisions of its draft with this article is its choice of terminology to describe the subject matter regulated by the draft as a whole: aquifers, rather than groundwater. An aquifer, in simple terms, is a water-bearing geologic formation.36 The rock, gravel, or the like, constituting the aquifer does not move, of course. It is the water in the formation that moves—generally without human intervention, but sometimes in response to pumping or similar activities. The Commission, properly, defined the term ‘aquifer’ to include the water contained in the formation.37 And yet the ILC does not seem to have been able to focus sufficiently upon what it was that the draft articles were intended to regulate: the water contained in the formation, not the formation itself. Because the draft deals with transboundary aquifers, instead of ‘groundwater’, it would be natural enough for members of the ILC—whose expertise is in public international law, not hydrology—to conceive of a state as having sovereignty over the portion of the geologic formation located within its territory. Unfortunately, because of the definition of ‘aquifer’, this also means that the state has sovereignty over the water contained, for the moment, at least, in the formation. We have seen how intoxicating the notion of sovereignty can be to a state when applied to shared water resources, even if the water, absent human intervention, would only be in the state’s territory fleetingly. If the subject matter being regulated by the draft articles had been ‘groundwater’ it seems less likely that sovereignty would have played a role, although this is not certain. The first sentence of the ILC’s commentary on Article 3 offers insight into what apparently motivated the Commission to include this provision in its draft: ‘The need to have an explicit reference in the form of [a] draft article to the sovereignty of States over the natural resources within their territories was reaffirmed by many States, particularly by those aquifer States that are of the opinion that water resources belong to the States in which they are located and are subject to the exclusive sovereignty of those States’ (ILC 2008, 38–39). If supported by the available documentation, this statement would appear to

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turn back the hands of time to the year 1895, in which the Harmon Doctrine was enunciated (although, even then, it lacked support in the law). Did ‘many states’ actually take this position, a mere eleven years after the adoption of the UN Convention, which as we have seen offers no support for it? In fact, only a small number of states submitted written comments on this article at all;38 not all of them supported the sovereignty approach, and none of the comments supports the notion of ‘exclusive sovereignty’ of a state over water resources located within its territory. But the states supporting the notion of sovereignty over shared aquifers included Austria, Brazil and Turkey, important upstream, or largely upstream, countries with respect to surface water resources.39 On the other hand, the ILC was unable to point to any actual state practice supporting the idea of sovereignty over shared water resources (McCaffrey 2009). It is thus questionable whether the Commission was justified in including Article 3 in the draft, given its mission of codification and progressive development of international law. Be this as it may, for present purposes it is interesting to note that some states—even if only a few—are still willing to go on record as embracing the notion of sovereignty over shared water resources. A somewhat more subtle, but in the end potentially more important, aspect of the ILC’s commentary has to do with its use by governments and commentators in interpreting articles prepared by the Commission. Indeed, the Working Group in which the UN Convention was negotiated stated: ‘Throughout the elaboration of the draft Convention, reference had been made to the commentaries to the draft articles prepared by the International Law Commission to clarify the contents of the articles’ (UN Sixth Committee 1997). Thus, when the ILC explains that the need to refer to state sovereignty over natural resources within their territories was reaffirmed ‘particularly by those aquifer States that are of the opinion that water resources belong to the States in which they are located and are subject to the exclusive sovereignty of those States’, there is a distinct danger that the ‘sovereignty’ referred to in the article will be interpreted as ‘exclusive sovereignty’ in the sense of the Harmon Doctrine. Yet, as the USA found in the Rio Grande controversy of the late 19th century, claims of sovereignty over a shared resource can simply beget opposing claims of sovereignty by the other state sharing the resource. Groundwater would seem to lend itself even more readily than surface water to such conflicting claims because by its nature it is slower-moving and thus may be viewed by government officials as something more akin to a stationary resource.40 Be that as it may, the fact remains that if two states share a single transboundary aquifer, according to Article 3 both of them have sovereignty over it. The two sovereignties may be conceptualized, if somewhat simplistically, as the proverbial contest between the irresistible force and the immovable object. Pumping by one that reduces the quantity available to the other could be claimed by the latter to be an invasion of its sovereignty. The former could claim, conversely, that it has the sovereign right to pump water contained in the portion of the aquifer within its territory. In this way, a sovereignty-based

36

The politics of sharing water approach tends to encourage reliance on unilateral claims rather than the forms of co-operation that are necessary for the management of a shared resource and the peaceful resolution of disputes over those resources. Why the ILC created this additional and entangling layer of complexity to the well-established process of maintaining an equitable allocation is difficult to understand— particularly when it is unsupported in state practice. The third point that should be noted with regard to Article 3 has to do with the second sentence of the article, providing that a state sharing an aquifer ‘shall exercise its sovereignty in accordance with international law and the present draft articles.’ The legal effect of this sentence, technically, is to qualify, or limit, the sovereign powers conferred in the first sentence of the article: such powers must be exercised in a way that is consistent with the other obligations set forth in the draft—the most basic among those being equitable and reasonable utilization (Article 4) and the obligation not to cause significant harm (Article 6). However, once the genie of sovereignty has been let out of the bottle in the first sentence of Article 3, it seems fair to wonder to what extent the second sentence can put it partially back in. In practice, it would not be at all surprising if a state, relying on its ‘sovereignty’ over the portion of a shared aquifer within its territory, gave priority to the satisfaction of its interests over scrupulous adherence to its other obligations under international law and the draft articles—perhaps in the belief that sovereignty trumps other obligations in case of doubt. The legal and political implications of such an effect of Article 3 are worrisome. The pride of place given to sovereignty would seem to encourage unilateral action and result in putting the burden of proving a violation of ‘international law and the present draft articles’ on the other state sharing the aquifer (which might also be encouraged to make its own sovereignty claims, as just seen). Even if it were not difficult to discharge this burden,41 if the first state had not exercised restraint in its use of the shared aquifer, relying on its sovereignty over the groundwater, its actions could well be more difficult to reverse. It is challenging enough in international law generally to prevent the breach of states’ obligations, especially due to the lack of courts with compulsory jurisdiction or any counterpart to a police force. Article 3 almost seems to invite states to, in effect, act first and wait for other riparian states to ask questions later—not the optimal way to design a normative scheme for the regulation of relations concerning a shared resource. Moreover, returning to Litfin’s sovereignty bargains, the incentives to act unilaterally could lead to a decrease in effective sovereignty over time, as the rush to withdraw water could compromise its future availability and thus limit states’ options for access to and control over the resource. The problems that can arise when a state acts unilaterally to draw from a shared water resource—in particular, an aquifer—are well illustrated by a dispute that was ongoing at the time of writing between the US states of Mississippi and Tennessee.42 Mississippi claimed that some 30% of the water pumped by the municipal utility of the city of Memphis, Tennessee, from an aquifer underlying several states, came from beneath Mississippi. The quantity

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of water involved was estimated to be around 60m. gallons per day. Mississippi, whose well levels in the area had been falling, sought some US $1,000m. in damages. Mississippi brought this dispute before the US Supreme Court, which had the authority to decide it and make an allocation of the shared resource. Even so, resolution on the practical level would not be easy since the City of Memphis had likely come to rely on this source of water, and Mississippi was without the water to which it would otherwise have had access (aside from the added expense of pumping water from deeper levels). If the two states involved had been nation states and not political subdivisions of a country, a forum such as the US Supreme Court would not be available for resolving the controversy (unless the states involved agreed to bring it before the ICJ or an arbitral tribunal). Thus the incentive would appear to be similar to that of the herdsman in Garrett Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ (Hardin 1968, 1243): garner as much of the shared resource as you can, before someone else does. Such an incentive would appear to be enhanced by the lack of either a tribunal with compulsory jurisdiction to make an authoritative allocation or any mechanism for policing adherence to the law (in this instance, equitable utilization, prevention of harm, etc.). It would also seem to be enhanced if the basic, governing principle of transboundary aquifer law is sovereignty, subject to other duties, rather than the triptych of equitable utilization, prevention of harm and prior notification of planned measures. If the legal starting point is equitable and reasonable utilization, which we believe to be the case, a state would seem to be more likely to be inclined to act co-operatively with other states sharing a resource than if the starting point were sovereignty. In brief, under Article 3 of the ILC’s draft articles on The Law of Transboundary Aquifers, sovereignty, not equitable utilization, is the leitmotif. The ‘basic right’ to equitable sharing (referred to by the Court in the Gabcˇ íkovo case, as described earlier), which is considered to be part of customary international law, is in stark contrast with the principle of sovereignty. Approaching shared waters by asserting sovereignty results in a scenario that is reminiscent of what happens when two children are given straws and told to share the same milkshake: the bigger child, the one with the bigger straw, or the one getting a straw into the milkshake first, will get more. This result is compounded if the other child does not know that the ‘race’ has begun, which could very well be the case with respect to many internationally shared aquifers. If the goal of the international community—through instruments like the draft articles on transboundary aquifers—is to promote the just and peaceful resolution of conflicts over shared waters, it would be wise to abandon assertions of unilateral ownership, and to trade in the milkshake straws for a more co-operative form of joint governance and management. NOTES 1 The authors would like to thank Jeroen Warner, Kai Wegerich, Graeme Auld and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on the chapter.

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The politics of sharing water 2 See, e.g., the trenchant criticism of the concept and its abuse by governments in Henkin (1993, 1). See also Henkin (1994, 351). 3 These characteristics are often associated with the modern state, with its origins, at least symbolically, in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which brought to an end the 30 Years’ War and led to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. 4 See, for example, work on European integration and regionalization by Hooghe and Marks (2001). 5 See also Jennings and Watts (1992, note 1), discussing sovereignty as being comprised of external and internal independence. See also distinctions made between de jure (or juridical) and de facto (or empirical) sovereignty, by Jackson and Rosberg (1982). These terms differentiate between the legal recognition of authority over a given population and territory and the actual capacity to govern through extension of control within that territory. 6 The third preambular paragraph of the text of the draft articles on the law of transboundary aquifers recalls ‘General Assembly resolution 1803 (XVII) of 14 December 1962 on permanent sovereignty over natural resources.’ 7 Under international law, jurisdiction of courts and arbitral tribunals over states is based on consent. In many disputes over shared water resources this will not be present. 8 United States Treaty Series No. 455. See Hoffman (2006). 9 This section is based primarily on McCaffrey (2000); see also Austin (1959, 393). 10 The head of navigation of a river is the farthest point upstream on a river that can be navigated by a ship. 11 This claim was later challenged by a ruling of the subsequent Attorney General, Joseph McKenna, on an action brought against a private company—the Rio Grande Dam and Irrigation Company—on the construction of a dam at Elephant Butte, New Mexico. McKenna found that the dam’s construction would compromise the navigability of the river below the dam, and would cause the USA to violate its treaty responsibilities, and so ruled that the project could not proceed (see Clark 1975). 12 For discussion of this legislation, see Bath and Petit (1998, 10). 13 See Khalid (2004); see also Salman and Uprety (2002). East Pakistan became an independent Bangladesh in 1971. It should be noted that even as Bangladesh and India had conflicts over the Ganges, negotiations were progressing well between India and Pakistan over the Indus River, in talks mediated by the World Bank. 14 See also McCaffrey (2007). 15 Crow and Singh (2000) say: ‘In addition, when India decided to build the Farakka Barrage in the early 1960s, Nehru was convinced (presumably by his engineers) that it would cause “no real injury” downstream.’ 16 Even though Syria successfully bargained with Turkey for some minimum water flows in the Euphrates, these negotiations have been attributed to strategic issuelinkage by Syria rather than recognition of its inherent right to the water by Turkey (Daoudy 2009). 17 Quoted in Zawahri (2006), from ‘Thirsting for war’, Christopher Mitchell, BBC News, 5 October 2000, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/correspondent/ 958132.stm. 18 Notably, there may be conflicts between domestic and international responsibilities, and a state may face the difficult trade-off between addressing distributional inequalities within the country and honouring reasonable and equitable sharing of water resources with its neighbours. 19 We include in the concept of ‘harm’ in this context violations of the obligation of equitable and reasonable utilization of shared water resources. 20 Miller (1998) makes the political power dimensions of these transboundary environmental issues more explicit, as she suggests that developing countries have gained some power in international negotiations over transboundary environmental

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21 22

23

24 25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32

40

problems since they have the ability unilaterally to influence those environmental systems, and thus must be included in the negotiations. (In contrast, for issues that they cannot influence directly, they are often left out of the bargaining processes). Transboundary resources can, consequently, strengthen sovereignty for states with little international clout, by making their voices significant in the international arena and making their acquiescence relevant to the success of an agreement. Miller suggests that this power is particularly strong when the problems are perceived to be open-access common pool resource problems, rather than transboundary problems (where, for instance, third world countries have more control over negotiations on ozone than over hazardous waste regimes). A transboundary aquifer or lake, or a border river, shared by a developed and a developing country, seems to have similar characteristics for these purposes. These more recent developments include the Stockholm and Rio Declarations and the outcome of the Trail Smelter case; see Wapner (1998). This is true of other natural resources, too, where, for instance, Ward (1998) describes ‘borderless nature’ and ‘border-defined states’ as being difficult to reconcile using science-based arguments, and considers physical and conceptual clashes between sovereignty and ecosystem management. Additionally, although rivers that transect political borders may have clear upstream and downstream riparian states, not all transboundary water has clear directionality. Some rivers act as borders, lakes may be relatively static, and groundwater may flow in multiple directions; this adds to the difficulties in determining ownership and control, and in reconciling claims of sovereignty. Litfin (1998b) says that sovereignty is premised on territory, and Jupille (1998) also says that most versions of sovereignty involve explicit or implicit considerations of territory as central. One example of this in the European Union is the ‘Directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2000 establishing a framework for Community action in the field of water policy’ also known as the ‘Water Framework Directive’ (WFD). Adopted in 2000, the WFD approaches water management at the river basin, instead of country, level. By setting aside political borders, it focuses on surface and ground water as integrated systems, and has provisions for rivers that are shared with countries outside as well as within the EU. For a discussion of the WFD, see McCaffrey and Salcido (2009); for the text of the WFD, see http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32000 L0060:EN:HTML. See generally McCaffrey (2007, chapter 4); one of the documents in which the USA took pains to clarify the limitations of Harmon’s conclusions is Griffin (1958). The Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which forms an integral part of the UN Charter (see art. 92 of the Charter) serves as the constitution of the ICJ. This article of the ICJ Statute provides that the Court’s judgments are binding only on the parties to the case before the Court and only in respect of that particular case. While, for purposes of navigation, states may have perfect equality in the use of ‘the whole course of the river’, in the case of non-navigational uses this obviously does not imply that one state may enter another’s territory to divert water. Instead, it may be taken to reflect equality of right of all states sharing an international watercourse, meaning, for example, that one state has a right to object to a use by another state within its territory on the ground that it is inequitable and unreasonable. Paragraph 8 of the International Law Commission’s commentary to draft article 5, ‘Equitable and reasonable utilization and participation’, in its draft articles on ‘The Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses’ (ILC 1994, 98). See, e.g., McCaffrey and Sinjela (1998, 97–101). As noted, the USA repudiated the doctrine in disputes over the Columbia River— see Griffin (1958).

The politics of sharing water 33 See generally McCaffrey (2009), and also Mechlem (2008). 34 ‘International watercourse’ is defined as ‘a watercourse, parts of which are situated in different States’ (ILC 1994, Art. 2(a)). 35 The sense in which the ILC used the expression ‘confined groundwater’ differs somewhat from the definition used by hydrologists. The latter would generally take the term ‘confined’ groundwater to refer to water contained in a geologic formation that is overlain by an impermeable geologic layer. See, e.g., ILC (2008, 35), for commentary on the ILC’s definition of ‘aquifer’. 36 Article 2(a) of the ILC’s draft defines ‘aquifer’ as ‘a permeable water-bearing geological formation underlain by a less permeable layer and the water contained in the saturated zone of the formation’ (ILC 2008, 20). 37 See the previous note. 38 Only six states (Austria, Brazil, Cuba, Israel, Portugal and Turkey) submitted written comments on Article 3, four of which both have international watercourses and supported the article in varying degrees (UN 2008, 21–22). 39 The other state with international watercourses that submitted comments, Israel, is predominantly downstream (on both the Jordan River and the three West Bank aquifers that it shares with the Palestinians), although it is ‘upstream’ on one of the aquifers that it shares with the Palestinians (the Coastal Aquifer). Israel stated that it ‘does not support the making of exceptions to accepted customary international law on this issue’ (UN 2008, 22). 40 We might anticipate that some government officials treat groundwater as static, given evidence that many citizens see groundwater in this way, where the view of groundwater is ‘underpinned by a static (stagnant) conceptualisation of the aquifer’ (Colvin and Saayman 2007). 41 In practice, it may well be difficult. See, e.g., Hungary’s unsuccessful attempts to convince the ICJ of prospective harm to shared groundwater in the Case concerning the Gabcˇ íkovo-Nagymaros Project (Hungary/Slovakia) (ICJ 1997). In addition, the slow movement of most groundwater means that it would take time for a violation to manifest itself. 42 See Cameron (2009). Mississippi’s suit against the City of Memphis was dismissed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on the ground that the State of Tennessee was an indispensable party (Fifth Circuit 2009). See also Charlier (2009, A1). The US Supreme Court has original and exclusive jurisdiction in suits between US states. Mississippi had indicated an intention to file suit against Tennessee in the Supreme Court, but by late 2009 had not done so.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Audenried, W.G., Jr., (1908) ‘Irrigation: Being a brief treatise compiled from authoritative sources and containing the full text of the “Carey Act”’, www.archive.org/ stream/irrigationbeingb00auderich#page/n5/mode/2up. (Accessed on 12 June 2009 from the University of California Libraries, contribution to the Internet Archives). Austin, J., (1959) ‘Canadian-United States Practice and Theory Respecting the International Law of International Rivers: A Study of the History and Influence of the Harmon Doctrine’, Can. Bar Rev. Vol. 37. Bath, C.R. and Petit, A., (1998) ‘Who Owns the Water? A Case Study of El Paso del Norte’, Working Paper No. 23, North America Series, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Land Tenure Center, November. Cameron, A.B., (2009) ‘Mississippi v. Memphis: A Study in Transboundary Ground Water Dispute Resolution’, Sea Grant Law and Policy Journal Symposium, University of Mississippi, 24–25 March.

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Caponeera, D., (1996) ‘Conflicts over International River Basins in Africa, the Middle East and Asia’, Rev. Eur. Comm. & Int’l Envtl. L. Vol 5. Charlier, T., (2009) ‘Supreme Court to Decide if Miss. Water Suit All Wet’, Memphis Com. Appeal, 6 June. Clark, I.G., (1975) ‘The Elephant Butte Controversy: A Chapter in the Emergence of Federal Water Law’, The Journal of American History, Vol. 61, No. 4, 1006–1033. Colvin, C. and Saayman, I., (2007) ‘Challenges to Groundwater Governance: A Case Study of Groundwater Governance in Cape Town, South Africa’, Water Policy, Vol. 9, Supplement 2, 127–148. Crow, B. and Singh, N., (2000) ‘Impediments and Innovation in International Rivers: The Waters of South Asia’, World Development, Vol. 28, No. 11, 1907–1925. Daoudy, M., (2009) ‘Asymmetric Power: Negotiating Water in the Euphrates and Tigris’, International Negotiation, Vol. 14, 361–391. The Economist, (1989) ‘Mesopotamia; Send for the Dowsers’, World politics and current affairs section, 16 December. Fifth Circuit, (2009) Hood v. City of Memphis, No. 08–60152, 5th Cir., WL 1564160, 5 June. Ganoe, J.T., (1937) ‘The Desert Land Act in Operation, 1877–91’, Agricultural History, Vol. 11, No. 2: 142–157. General Land Office, (1878) ‘Regulations under Timber and Stone Law (act of June 3, 1878, and acts amendatory)’, www.archive.org/stream/regulationsunder00unit/regula tionsunder00unit_djvu.txt; (accessed on 12 June 2009). Gess, K.N., (1964) ‘Permanent Sovereignty Over Natural Resources: An Analytical Review of the United Nations Declaration and its Genesis’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol. 18: 398–449. Griffin, W.L., (1958) ‘Legal Aspects of the Use of Systems of International Waters, Memorandum of the United States Department of State’, US Senate Doc. No. 118, 85th Cong., 2nd Sess., 59–62, 21 April. Hardin, G., (1968) ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, Vol. 162. Henkin, L., (1993) ‘The Mythology of Sovereignty’, ASIL Newsletter, March–May. ——(1994) ‘The Mythology of Sovereignty’, in R.S.J. Macdonald (ed.), Essays in Honour of Wang Tieya, London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Hoffman, K., (2006) ‘The Role of State Sovereignty in US–Mexican Treaty Law on Transboundary Water and Wildlife’, chapter 10 in K. Hoffman (ed.), The US– Mexican Border Environment: Transboundary Ecosystem Management, SCERP Monograph Series 15, San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press. Hooghe, L. and Marks, G., (2001) Multi-level Governance and European Integration, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. International Court of Justice (ICJ), (nd) ‘Statute of the International Court of Justice’, 1945, www.icj-cij.org/documents/index.php?p1=4& p2 = 2& p3 = 0, (accessed on 24 November 2009). ——(1997) ‘Case concerning the Gabcˇ íkovo-Nagymaros Project (Hungary/Slovakia)’, Judgment of 25 September, 7, www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/92/7375.pdf ?PHPSESSID =e9a5a7314420d98828110ec6d2ee0b0d, (accessed on 24 November 2009). International Law Commission (ILC), (1982) ‘Statute of the International Law Commission’, UN Doc. A/CN.4/4/Rev.2. ——(1994) ‘Report of the International Law Commission on the Work of Its Fortysixth session’, Y.B. Int’l L. Comm’n, Vol. 2, Part 2.

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The politics of sharing water ——(2008) ‘Report of the International Law Commission on the work of its sixtieth session’, UN GAOR, 62nd Sess., Supp. No. 10, UN Doc. A/63/10, www.un.org/ law/ilc/, (accessed on 24 November 2009 on the ILC’s website). Islam, M.R., (1987) ‘The Ganges Water Dispute: An Appraisal of a Third Party Settlement’, Asian Survey, Vol. 27, No. 8, 918–934. Jackson, R.H. and Rosberg, C.G., (1982) ‘Why Africa’s Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood’, World Politics, Vol. 35, No. 1, 1–24. Jennings, R. and Watts, A. (eds), (1992) Oppenheim’s International Law, Vol. 1, 9th edn, London: Oxford University Press. Jupille, H.J., (1998) ‘Sovereignty, Environment, and Subsidiarity in the European Union’, chapter 9 in K.T. Litfin (ed.), The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Khalid, A.R.M., (2004) ‘The Interlinking of Rivers Project in India and International Water Law: An Overview’, Chinese JIL, 553–570. Kuehls, T., (1998) ‘Between Sovereignty and Environment: An Exploration of the Discourse of Government’, chapter 2 in K.T. Litfin (ed.), The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Litfin, K.T., (1998a) ‘The Greening of Sovereignty: An Introduction’, chapter 1 in K.T. Litfin (ed.), The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ——(1998b) ‘Satellites and Sovereign Knowledge: Remote Sensing of the Global Environment’, chapter 8 in K.T. Litfin (ed.), The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McCaffrey, S.C., (2000) ‘The Harmon Doctrine One Hundred Years Later: Buried, Not Praised’, Natural Resources Journal, Vol. 36, 965–1004. ——(2003) ‘Water Disputes Defined: Characteristics and Trends for Resolving Them’, in International Bureau of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (ed.), Resolution of International Water Disputes, Vol. 5 of the Peace Palace Papers. ——(2007) The Law of International Watercourses, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——(2009) ‘The International Law Commission Adopts Draft Articles on Transboundary Aquifers’, American Journal of International Law. Vol. 103, 272. McCaffrey, S.C. and Salcido, R., (2009) Global Issues in Environmental Law, American Casebook Series, Thomson/Reuters, 107–112. McCaffrey, S.C. and Sinjela, M., ‘The 1997 United Nations Convention on International Watercourses’, American Journal of International Law, Vol. 92, 97–101, 1998. Mechlem, K., (2008) ‘International Law Commission Adopts Draft Articles of a Transboundary Aquifers Convention’, ASIL Insight, Vol. 12, No. 18. Miller, M.A.L., (1998) ‘Sovereignty Reconfigured: Environmental Regimes and Third World States’, chapter 7 in K.T. Litfin (ed.), The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ), (1923) ‘The Wimbledon’, Series A, No. 1. ——(1929) ‘Territorial Jurisdiction of the International Commission of the River Oder’, Judgment No. 16, Ser. A, No. 23. Quinn, M.-L., (1982) ‘Federal Drought Planning in the Great Plains—A First Look’, Climatic Change, Vol. 4, 273–296. Ruggie, J.G., (1993) ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’, International Organization, Vol. 47, No. 1, 139–174.

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Salman, M.A.S. and Uprety, K., (2002) Conflict and Cooperation on South Asia’s International Rivers: A Legal Perspective, Kluwer Law International, 125–191. Sanger, G.P. (ed.), ‘An Act to Encourage the Growth of Timber on Western Prairies [S. 680; Public Act No. 105]’, in The Statutes at Large of the United States of America from March 1871 to March 1873 and Treaties and Postal Conventions, Vol. 17, Chap. 277, 605–606, 1873 http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=amrvl&file Name=vl003//amrvlvl003.db&recNum=0&itemLink=D?consrvbib:2:/temp/~ammem_ pNEf:& linkText=0, (accessed on 12 June 2009). Swiss Federal Court, Aargau v. Zurich, Entsch. des Schweizerischen Bundesgerichts, vol. IV, 1878 (transl. from Schindler, 170). United Nations (UN), ‘Convention on the Law of the Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses, UN Doc. A/RES/51/869’, International Legal Materials (ILM), Vol 36., 700, 21 May 1997. ——‘Comments and Observations by Governments on the Draft Articles on the Law of Transboundary Aquifers’, UN Doc. A/CN.4/595, 2008, http://daccess-dds-ny.un. org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N08/284/80/PDF/N0828480.pdf ?OpenElement (accessed on 23 November 2009). United Nations (UN) Sixth Committee, ‘Report of the Sixth Committee Convening as the Working Group of the Whole’, UN Doc. A/51/869, 11 April 1997. United States National Park Service (US NPS), ‘The Homestead Act of 1862: An Act to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Domain’, 37th Congress Session II 1862, Chapter LXXV, 1862, www.nps.gov/home/historyculture/upload/MW, pdf,Homestead%20Act,txt.pdf, (accessed on 12 June 2009). United States (US) Secretary of State (ed.), ‘An Act to Provide for the Sale of Desert Lands in Certain States and Territories’, in The Statutes at Large of the United States of America from December 1875 to March 1877 and Recent Treaties, Postal Conventions, and Executive Proclamations, Vol. 19, Chap. 107, 377, 1877, http:// memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=amrvl&fileName=vl130//amrvlvl130.db&rec Num=0&itemLink=r?ammem/consrvbib:@FIELD(NUMBER(vl130))&linkText=0, (accessed on 12 June 2009). United States (US) Supreme Court, (1907) Kansas v. Colorado, Vol. 206, Case 46, http://supreme.justia.com/us/206/46/case.html, (accessed on 24 November 2009). ——(1931) Connecticut v. Massachusetts, Vol. 282, Case 660, http://supreme.justia. com/us/282/660/case.html, (accessed on 24 November 2009). Wapner, P., (1998) ‘Reorienting State Sovereignty: Rights and Responsibilities in the Environmental Age’, chapter 11 in K.T. Litfin (ed.), The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ward, V., (1998) ‘Sovereignty and Ecosystem Management: Clash of Concepts and Boundaries?’, Chapter 4 in K.T. Litfin (ed.), The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wolf, A.T., (1999) ‘Criteria for Equitable Allocations: The Heart of International Water Conflict’, Natural Resources Forum, Vol. 23, No. 1, 3–30. Zawahri, N.A., (2006) ‘Stabilising Iraq’s Water Supply: What the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers Can Learn from the Indus’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 6, 1041–1058.

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The multi-level governance of water and state-building processes: A longue durée perspective1 JEREMY ALLOUCHE

INTRODUCTION

This chapter focuses on state-building processes and their impact on the management of water resources and water-supply infrastructure. The chapter is divided into two sections: 1. Water and state-building through a historical perspective, and 2. Types of states and water management. The first section aims to understand how water played a role (or not) in the emergence of early forms of statehood in antiquity, then moves on to analyze whether and how water ownership became an element in the consolidation of the state. We will subsequently argue that the birth of the modern nation state had a profound impact on the management of and decision-making over water resources at multiple levels (local, national and international). In a second section, we will undertake a ‘typology of states’ analyzing, a) the role of the modern state and large-scale water projects, b) revisionist states in relation to border disputes, c) frontier states and the search for water, and d) finally failed states and the key issue of access to water. 1. WATER AND STATE-BUILDING: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Jaggers defines state-building as ‘the state’s ability to accumulate power’ (Jaggers 1992, 27). Tilly (1985) defines state-building as the process of eliminating or neutralizing the state’s rivals inside the state’s territory and imposing rightfully or not the state’s perceived legitimacy. According to both definitions, state-building includes: a) the development of both the economic and military capacity of the state, and b) the establishment of its political and institutional power. The accumulation of power by the state is primarily through the state’s capacity to monitor, circumscribe and control resources and people within its territory. This is usually undertaken with the setting up of an administration at all levels (from the local to the national) to guarantee the state’s power.

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Two key components of state-building are the process of centralization and the creation of legal rules over ownership and property rights. In the next paragraphs we will show the intimate link throughout history between state-building and water. Some authors (see, e.g., Steward 1955) have argued that particularly in the cases of arid and semi-arid regions, the need to co-ordinate irrigation provided both an opportunity and a driving feature for the emergence of early forms of statehood. Equally important was the issue of property rights, which became a key concern for state-building especially since Roman times as a result of the development of new legal doctrines and innovative technologies. The sections below analyze these two examples of the link between state-building and water by looking, first, at irrigation in semiarid regions as an opportunity for the establishment of despotic regimes, and second, at the link between the state and property rights. We will then look at how the creation of the modern nation state had a considerable impact on the management of water resources and water-supply infrastructure. 1.1 Hydraulic civilizations Karl Wittfogel’s book Oriental Despotism (1957) is one of the most imaginative works on fluvial civilizations. Wittfogel relies on Marx’s theory on the Asiatic mode of production, introduced by Marx in his 1859 monograph A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in which Marx had distinguished between several modes of production, namely: primitive communism, the Antique form, feudalism, the Asiatic form, capitalism and communism. Wittfogel’s thesis was that despotic rule emerged and thrived under so-called hydraulic civilizations: By underlining the prominent role of the government, the term ‘hydraulic’, as I define it, draws attention to the agromanagerial and agrobureaucratic character of these civilizations. (Wittfogel 1957, 3) Wittfogel argued that large-scale and state-directed farming created the condition for despotism to emerge in the Chinese, Egyptian and Indian civilizations. This type of large-scale, often state-funded irrigation (as opposed to smallscale, often collective irrigation) developed in arid or semi-arid regions where rainfall farming was problematic because of the inherent variability in precipitation, and therefore the difficulties this generated for economic and social stability (Wittfogel 1957, 12). The state therefore had an opportunity to establish its legitimacy and control through the political and economic subjugation of the hydraulic regime, and this was tolerated on account of the population’s desire for the stability and guarantee provided by the building and management of irrigation facilities (Wittfogel 1957, 17–19). The power of the state apparatus in this type of pre-industrial society (mainly rural economies) was unprecedented.

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The multi-level governance of water and state-building processes Government-managed heavy water works place the large-scale feeding apparatus of agriculture in the hands of the state. Government-managed construction works make the state the undisputed master of the most comprehensive sector of large-scale industry. In the two main spheres of production, the state occupied an unrivalled position of operational leadership and organizational control. (Wittfogel 1957, 47) However, Wittfogel’s central thesis is now under dispute. A number of studies are increasingly questioning the existence of centralized organizations in ancient civilizations. These studies have shown, first, how irrigation societies were in fact often characterized on a smaller scale, by co-ordination among village communities, and second, that centralization emerged later, and was not necessarily associated with the organizational demands of irrigation societies (Scarborough 2003; Gunawardana 1981; Butzer 1976). Therefore Wittfogel’s thesis on a causal relationship between natural conditions (arid and semi-arid) and the emergence of a particular type of political regime (despotism) is no longer valid. Nevertheless, Wittfogel’s study constituted an important hypothesis (currently rejected) to establish a link between water management and control in particular geographical areas, and the emergence of states. It remains a good starting point for a discussion on water and state-building, since what remains valid is the more general trend and link with how the rise and fall of many civilizations can be traced to the social organization and management of water. Empires based in Mesopotamia, Rome and the Maya civilization are famous for their success in establishing elaborate and sophisticated water-use systems, and also for the role that poor water management practices played in their final demise (Biswas 1970; Bonnin 1984; Trawick 2002). 1.2 States and property rights before the emergence of modern nation states One of the key characteristics of antiquity was the fact that all lands and waters belonged to the community (Caponera 1992, 13). For example, the civilization established in the Indus valley defined water in the Code of Manu as a common good (Caponera 1992, 19). The same applies to the Hebrew civilization and culture. Talmudic water law established that water was the common right of all people: ‘Rivers and stream-forming springs, these belong to every man’ (Hirsh 1959, 173). Public or private ownership of water did not exist. Nevertheless, the state as a new form of political organization started to play a role by providing a legal framework for water, usually through religious justifications. Caponera states for example that in ancient Egypt, ‘land and water belonged to the pharaoh who, as a living god on earth, granted its temporary use practically to whom he liked. Every community had to provide the Pharaoh with the produce of soil through its Xerp, or public officer in charge of a district’ (Caponera 1992, 14). Meanwhile, in China, individual

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irrigation and fishing could be practiced as long as they enhanced the general public welfare. However, it was the administration ultimately that was in charge of regulating water use and management, including navigation, flood control, floating, waterworks construction and upkeep, bridge control and water policing (Caponera 1992, 20–21). In the Roman period the question of ownership became much more complex. This can largely be explained by the emergence of the concept of property and private land, and also because the Romans developed important technologies in terms of water management, like aqueducts and reservoirs. As a result, water and land management became central issues in everyday politics, and legislation was therefore needed. The following box shows the three different types of ownership introduced in Roman law.

Box 1.1: Water ownership in ancient Roman law (Caponera 1992, 66) 1. Waters common to everybody (res comunis omnium), i.e., waters not capable of being the object of any ownership status. No one, whether the individual, the community or even the state or the sovereign could own these waters; together with air and the sea (shore), they could only be the object of rights of use. All flowing waters belonged to this category (emphasis added). 2. Public waters (res publicae), i.e., those belonging to a community, municipality or other public institution. The use of such waters was reserved to the institutions, which had a legitimate title over them. Institutions could, in turn, grant a right of use to other users. 3. Private waters, i.e., those privately owned. Only a small part of water resources were considered private: rainwater, groundwater and minor water bodies. Generally, the ownership of these waters was attached to the ownership of land. The landowner had an exclusive and unlimited right of use … over such waters, and this right of use was without any restriction, independently of the consequences that the use could cause to neighbouring lands (ius utendi et abutendi).

One can observe that all major rivers and aquifers were not considered as state property but were comprised within a broader definition that could be attached to the notion of common good or collective property. The following quotation attributed to Cicero clearly illustrates this general way of thinking: One cannot stop the river from flowing because it belongs to us all rather than anyone in particular. The same applies for the air which cannot be owned. (author’s own translation quoted in French in Paquerot 2002, 18) Property rights are ultimately underpinned by normative principles that are formalized into rules, rights and responsibilities. For example, the special

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The multi-level governance of water and state-building processes status accorded to water as a good to be shared by the community has been embraced since ancient times by philosophers and poets, including Plato, Ovid, and Virgil. In a chapter of the 17th-century books, De Juri Belli ac Pacis, entitled ‘Of Things which belong to Men in Common’, Grotius, a famous Dutch philosopher and lawyer, wrote: ‘Thus, a river viewed as a stream, is the property of the people through whose territory it flows, or of the ruler under whose sway that people is … [T]he same river, viewed as running water, has remained common property, so that any one may drink or draw water from it’ (quoted in McCaffrey 2001, 150). After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, most of the principles of Roman water law provided the basis for continental water law. In Spain, for example, watercourses were considered as a common good under the reign of Alfonso X (Teclaff 1967, 279). Interestingly, navigation provided the criteria for determining the public or private nature of watercourses. In European medieval law, all navigable watercourses and their tributaries were considered as public waters, while all the other watercourses were considered private (Caponera 1992, 47). In antiquity, water resources belonged to the community, and no strict regulation defined water in terms of property. The question of property rights and new technologies and, at a later stage, navigation gradually brought the state in to intervene in the regulation of water resources. In this regard the impact of state-building on water resources and water systems is not systematically linked with the advent of the modern nation state. However, there is evidence to suggest that the provision of water services, and water resources themselves, have been given or have acquired a new connotation following the emergence of the modern nation state, as we shall now see. 1.3 Nation state-building, water and the modern age The establishment of borders (and the related concept of sovereignty) modifies the state’s approach to water resources management and contributes to an inward-looking focus on territory (Kristof 1959). With force and war slowly becoming proscribed (especially since the 20th century), state-building efforts concentrated instead on the management of a territory bounded by border. Furthermore, the management of water resources became increasingly relevant for modernization and economic development, first in Europe through industrialization at the turn of the 19th century, and later through the development of hydroelectricity across the world and of modern irrigated agriculture (Allouche 2005). Following the emergence of the modern nation state, water resources have acquired a new connotation, a sense of country ‘ownership’ and attachment by people living inside the political unit, which is part and parcel of attachment to the land. This idea of water appropriation may be as fundamental to the establishment of a modern state as other more classical features, like control over its territory. An individual’s or citizen’s attachment to water feeds and is fed by the collective sentiment developed by nationalist ideas.

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If one understands state-building as ‘the accumulation of power and the elimination of state rivals’, state-building over water has operated in the modern era in three ways, all designed to further enhance the state’s control and power over water resources: first, the dilution of authority from the local level; second, the creation of a water identity at the national level; and third, the (initial) refusal to recognize the international character of transboundary river basins and riparians’ legal rights over the sharing of these basins. 1.3.1 The dilution of authority from the local level Local control over water was seen in many newly independent countries as a threat to the consolidation of a centralized state, at least in the early stages of nation state-making. One can distinguish three different processes that reinforced the state’s control over water resources at the expense of local control, management and ownership:
The first process concerned legal changes over water ownership with the disappearance of the concept of res communis.
The second related to centralization, following the construction of dams, which led to the creation of national water administration and reduced/removed the power of local authorities in terms of river basin management.
The third, more recently, related to environmental protection and regulation, which gradually blurred the line between public and private ownership and gave more control to the state. It appears that major changes regarding water ownership were a result of the Napoleonic Code. During that period, most European countries abandoned the concept of waters being common to everybody (see Box 1). The Napoleonic Code stated that water was either public or private. The Code was embodied into the French civil law system and was adopted in Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and other continental European countries. Later, due to colonization, this set of rules over water ownership was also adopted in most colonies. For example, the Portuguese water law system was introduced in the former Portuguese colonies of the Americas (Brazil), Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Sao Tomé and Principe) and in Asian territories. Dutch laws were introduced in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and South Africa, while Belgian legislation applied in Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi. Meanwhile, Italian water law principles were exported to Somalia and Libya. Since the end of the 19th century, there was a shift from property regulation according to religious and/or customary norms towards Western-inspired legislation on a national scale, which was introduced either by colonial powers (Mustafa 2001), or by governments of independent countries, committed to so-called ‘modernization’ and eager to assert centralized control over property formerly controlled by private individuals or groups.

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The multi-level governance of water and state-building processes Tunisia presents an example of this historical process. An interesting study was made by Habib (1985) on the oases of Jerid in Tunisia. It shows how the government took control of the water resources, contrary to local custom, which defined them as belonging to the people. Attia (1985) describes the expansion of central control through time and space, whereby both colonial and subsequent nation-building institutions used property as a means of control and centralization. In 1912 the French colonial government seized control of water management, an act which caused the eventual collapse of the old local oligarchies, and which led to the destruction of oasis societies and the ending of private ownership of water. In 1975, after independence, the Tunisian state finally abolished private water ownership and rights of use, and brought them under state ownership (Attia 1985, 85–106). A similar process took place in Pakistan (within the former British Indian Empire). The preamble of the Canal and Drainage Act of 1873 gave the state the right to administer all waters, thereby excluding any option for the private ownership of the resource beyond the micro-scale of a village watercourse. Similar examples can be found in Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Afghanistan, and Iran (Nader 1985, 2). In contrast to the cases of seawater and river navigation, which have now been recognized as a common heritage of mankind, water resources have been defined as either public or private. The nation state therefore approached water resources in a similar vein to territory (land). The gradual erosion and disappearance of the concept of res communis from the regulatory frameworks of these countries has ultimately played to the benefit of increased state control over water. Aside from the question of water ownership, the state has also successfully increased its power through the creation of a large central administration, and the erosion of local practices and customary uses. Power over the management of water resources has been progressively transferred to the national level. As Teclaff (1967) observed: With the French Revolution, or perhaps even earlier, with the passage of the American mill acts, law in Europe and the USA began to grant national administrations progressively more responsibility for water resources development. From the 1930s on, when the era of large-scale multipurpose water projects was ushered in, this process was speeded up and water development directed by administrative agencies and assumed basin-wide dimensions. (Teclaff 1967, 105) In his study of the turbulent infancy of American water agencies, Shallat showed how the deep involvement of the federal government in programmes on rivers and harbours triggered an important political struggle, which pitted central planning against local control (Shallat 1992, 5–25). In a similar vein, Black, who studied the Tennessee Valley Authority project in depth, noted

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that during the 1930s, ‘river valleys became a popular method of … establishing government authority’ (Black 1995, 1–14). However, this transfer did not only occur in Western countries. In the case of Mexico, Wester (2009) examined the hydraulic mission of the Mexican government as embodied in its hydraulic bureaucracy (hydrocracy). He describes how, in the late 19th century, the federal government began asserting its control over water, both to promote commercial agriculture and also to arbitrate in water allocation conflicts between large-scale landowners. Water development centralization accelerated after the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and continued until the 1970s (Wester 2009). Meanwhile in Central Asia the creation of the water administration served to remove authority from local institutions in terms of water resources management. The system of local mirabs (water masters) was replaced with centralized regional Soviet institutions, when, in 1923, the Soviet administration decreed that water management was to be taken ‘out of the hands of traditional elders and councils with whom it resided’ (Black et al. 1991). The new system was managed under the responsibility of the Regional Directorates of the Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Management. However, it is important to note that this centralization process superseded but never completely destroyed the local mirab authorities, which were able to coexist informally (Black et al. 1991). Centralization and increased control over water ownership were driven by the aim of consolidating the state and eliminating domestic threats and power struggles with regional and local rivals. This process of state consolidation was largely facilitated by the onset of technology; state dominance greatly increased in the 20th and 21st centuries, on the back of increased demand for regulation of water resources, and the related large investment programmes and technocratic expertise. As stressed by Caponera, In France and in many other civil law countries, the increasing intervention of the administration and the introduction of the ‘water use permit system’ are slowly rendering obsolete the former subdivision between public and private water ownership, and all water utilizations, independently from the legal nature of water, are being submitted increasingly to regulatory control. The category of private waters, either surface or underground, is slowly being either ignored or discarded in new water legislations. (Caponera 1992, 79) Moreover, in common law countries (such as the UK or USA), the sphere of customary law in the field of water was gradually restricted as a result of the development of water legislation and the onset of modern water policy and administration. The same can be said for groundwater: the control exercised by the state over groundwater has gradually increased over time, and groundwater has been incorporated within water law, when previously it was, for example, legislated for as part of mining concessions. The state’s ability to

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The multi-level governance of water and state-building processes bring groundwater under its control depended partly on the number of users and on its own strength. In most cases, the state managed to expand its area of influence over groundwater for environmental reasons; the exponential increase of groundwater abstractions and the gradual deterioration of aquifers made it necessary for the state to legislate. The introduction of strict permit zones and the declaration of special zones are examples of the basis of modern legal groundwater regimes. Although one can find examples of specific groundwater laws in a number of countries, the increasing trend is to deal with both surface and groundwater within the same legislation. These laws vest these resources in the collectivity, either by declaring them national property or by incorporating them into the public domain. This enables the state to have greater control (at least de jure) over all water resources, including groundwater. 1.3.2 Water as a national collective identity In the previous section, we discussed the state’s struggle to establish its dominance and power over local authority and customs, through the control and management of water resources. The result of this struggle was that in many cases decisions over water resource management were adopted at the national level. However, the state also exerted its control in a more subtle way, by slowly transforming water resources into a part of the national collective identity (in some cases, a new, or imagined/portrayed, identity). This was achieved in two ways: first, through the integration of the water landscape and sites as symbols of national identity (the symbolic landscape aspect), and second, through the territorialization of water resources (the spatial development aspect). Symbols are used to transform space into place, and territory into homeland (Anderson 1991); territory and landscape become a symbolic expression of the past and present of a nation. Symbols also play a crucial part in creating and/or strengthening a geographical identity, by imbuing ‘place’ with historical and mythical meaning. Maps and cartography play a pivotal role in this symbolic construction. Sironeau (1996), for example, highlights cases where water became an instrument of both pressure and propaganda for nationalist regimes: landscape features such as Lake Nasser in Egypt, Lake El Assad on the Syrian part of the Euphrates, Saddam’s dam next to Mossul on the Iraqi part of the Tigris, and the large artificial lake built by President Gaddafi in the Libyan desert. These examples show the willingness of the state to integrate water landscapes into the national territory. Examples are not limited to these particular regimes. Water sites or constructions (i.e. lakes, dams, etc.) are often ‘renamed’ so as to embody and symbolize the power of the state and national pride. For example, political leaders like Truman, President of the USA in 1950, at the inauguration of the Grand Coulee Dam celebrated ‘man’s ingenuity and perseverance [which] have dramatically transformed the energy of a

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mighty river into a great new source of national strength’ (Woolley and Peters, emphasis added). In India, Prime Minister Nehru called the Bhakra-Nagal project ‘a gigantic achievement and a symbol of the nation’s energy and enterprise’ (Biswas 1992, 207, emphasis added). This long-lasting process of using water sites/constructions, state territory and landscape in this emotional dimension has had, of course, a considerable impact on the resources and landscape themselves, because of their instrumental value. In particular, these natural elements acquire an anthropic value and character. In brief, Nature becomes our nature. As emphasized by Judith Rees, ‘resources are defined by man, not nature’ (Rees 1990, 12). The appropriation by humans has therefore politicized resources, which become, either, because of their economic value, an economic stake or, because of their symbolic value, a territorial stake, when challenged. The perception that people have of water is territorially bound and contextual. For example, current resistance to water privatization could be seen as an example of the special status that people grant to water. The symbolic and cultural value of water, linked to identity, can help explain the global resistance to seeing water purely as an economic good, which is reflected in the current anti-globalization movements fighting against the privatization of water services. This can help to explain the various resistance movements to water privatization all over the world, from Jakarta (Indonesia), to Cali (Columbia), Cochabamba (Bolivia), Johannesburg (South Africa) and Bahia Blanca (Argentina) (Vlachos and Braga 2001, 53). These are proxy indicators that provide an insight into the multiple meanings and functions that water holds for people (on this subject, see Petrella 2001). Water exports provide a new example of how water can be territorialized. This is reflected in the many debates sparked off as a result of the considerable popular resistance to the idea of ‘water exports’. Many politicians tread carefully around this concept. For example, Senator Len B. Jordan of Idaho asserted in 1965 that ‘not an acre-foot of water in the Columbia Basin for which there was “ever likely to be a use” could be regarded as exportable’. In a similar vein, Canada has expressed increasing reluctance, through several official spokesmen, to consider exporting any of its present water resources before assessing future potential needs, including estimates for the development of the North of Canada. Arthur B. Laing, Canadian minister of Northern Affairs and National Resources, clearly emphasized that, before any water could be exported, it would have to be proven surplus to Canadian requirements ‘for all time’ (Teclaff 1967, 191). Equally, when president Anwar Sadat of Egypt considered the possibility of selling Nile water to Israel after the signing of the Camp David accords, he was strongly criticized by the opposition party leader (Ibrahim Shahari) on the grounds that ‘holy Nile water must not be given to strangers’, even in return for full payment of its economic value (Kally 1993, 30). A plot was laid by the army to oust the Egyptian president, and when the (then) Defence Minister was informed of it, he stated that the loyalty of the Egyptian army could not be guaranteed if a coup was mounted ‘to stop 54

The multi-level governance of water and state-building processes Israel stealing the Nile’ (Darwish 1994); this resulted in the president abandoning the idea. Meanwhile, at present, there are some examples of agreements to purchase water by countries such as Hong Kong, from the People’s Republic of China, Singapore, from the Malaysian state of Johor, and South Africa, from Lesotho (Kally 1993, 59–60). However, the fact that these examples are the exceptions seems to confirm an inherent resistance to large-scale water exports to other countries. This resistance is now mirrored at sub-sovereign level in increased opposition to inter-basin transfers between regions. These examples have shown how water landscape and sites (and therefore water resources) are increasingly linked to the use of identity by the state. In the modern nation state, the last challenge in terms of state-building centres on the management of transboundary water resources. This will be discussed in the next section. 1.3.3 Water, state-building and international relations The third aspect of state-building relates to the international level, and more precisely to transboundary water management. The accumulation of power and the neutralization of rival power institutions adopt a particular significance at the international level. A state can decide either to co-operate, or to articulate an extreme view of its own sovereignty by denying or being slow to acknowledge the international character of the water resources flowing though its territory. As emphasized by Gottman, sovereignty embodies the link between nationalism and territory, since sovereignty is the manifestation of a state’s power over a geographical area (Gottman 1973, 48–49). The significance of state sovereignty has been extended to encompass other areas beyond the land. According to the principle of contiguity, state sovereignty has been extended both above and below land surface, to the air space above the land and to the bottom of the sea. Thus, territory has come to designate not just land, but rather ‘a portion of geographical space under the jurisdiction of certain people’ (Gottman 1973, 5). This portion of space includes the resources within it, such as groundwater, rivers and other natural resources. Sovereignty implies complete and exclusive authority over this territory. In the case of transboundary water management, this view of sovereignty has been embodied by the US Attorney-General’s view on the USA–Mexico case on the Rio Grande: The fact that the Rio Grande lacks sufficient water to permit its use by the inhabitants of both countries does not entitle Mexico to impose restrictions on the United States, which would hamper the development of the latter’s territory or deprive its inhabitants of an advantage with which nature had endowed it and which is situated entirely within its territory. To admit such a principle would be completely contrary to the principle that the United States exercises full sovereignty over its national territory. (Harmon 1895, 283)

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In this regard, water is used as a way to claim a territory. An opinion of the US Supreme Court observed that, although water is part of a state’s territory while it is within its borders, it will later become part of another state’s territory: it is therefore more akin to clouds, winds and migratory birds than to land (Missouri v. Holland case, quoted in Berber 1959, 4–5). This highlights the inherent paradox of water, compared to land, since water is mobile, not fixed, and a molecule of water flows and eventually evaporates into the atmosphere or is absorbed into the ground. Sovereignty over water resources remains an important concept that is rooted in government policy. India for example, at the beginning of the Indus water dispute in the 1950s, also took the Harmon doctrine as its first position, through its Attorney General stating that it had proprietary rights over the Indus and that it was entitled to exclusive use of the waters of the eastern rivers of the Indus system (Baxter 1967, 456). In 1959, Ethiopia declared that: Ethiopia has the right and obligation to exploit the water resources of the Empire … for the benefit of present and future generations of its citizens … [and] must, therefore, reassert and reserve now and for the future, the right to take all such measures in respect of its water resources, and, in particular, as regards that portion of the same which is of the greatest importance to its welfare, namely, those waters providing so nearly the entirety of the volume of the Nile, whatever may be the measure of utilisation of such waters sought by recipient States situated along the course of that river. (Whiteman 1964, 1011) Brazil, in its disputes with Argentina over the use of the waters of the Paraná River, constitutes another example of the construction of a dam, with each proposing dams at different geographical points. Argentina claimed that Brazil was under an international legal duty to provide Argentina with information, and that it should be consulted because of apprehension that the Brazilian Itaipú project, in conjunction with other hydroelectric projects in Brazil, would adversely affect the Argentinean project. Brazil in turn refused to recognize such an obligation, invoking sovereign right principles (Cano 1976). There are other contemporary examples where one can detect the claim of sovereign rights over transboundary resources. China, which is the upper riparian in the Mekong River, refused to negotiate over the use of the river with its downstream neighbours, and refused to become a member of the Mekong River Commission, established in the 1995 treaty (Hirsch 1999). India, a superpower in the Indian subcontinent, acted unilaterally vis-à-vis downstream Bangladesh and upstream Nepal, by constructing dams and barrages that adversely affected its neighbours. Both China and Turkey refused to recognize their duty, under international law, to co-operate with downstream users with respect to their shared rivers, and voted against the

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The multi-level governance of water and state-building processes 1997 Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses. The statement made by Turkey’s president, Süleyman Demirel on 25 July 1992, at the opening ceremony of the Ataturk Dam—the crown of the entire South Eastern Anatolian Project (Güneydog˘ u Anadolu Projesi— GAP), captures Turkey’s position as a (powerful) upstream state: Neither Syria, nor Iraq can lay claim to Turkey’s rivers any more than Ankara could claim their oil. This is a matter of sovereignty. We have the right to do anything we like. The water resources are Turkey’s, the oil resources are theirs. We don’t say we share their oil resources, and they can’t say they share our water resources. (BBC 2000) In terms of international law, the concept of full sovereignty over water resources has been strongly advocated. The Stockholm Declaration following the 1972 UN Conference on the Environment stated that each state has the right to exploit its own resources according to its environmental policy: States have, in accordance with the Charter of the UN and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental policies, and the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction. (principle 21 of the Stockholm Declaration) Since the 1972 Stockholm conference, there has been little progress to challenge ‘permanent sovereignty over water’. The 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development reiterated principle 21 of the Stockholm Declaration, proclaiming the sovereign rights of states to exploit their own natural resources, pursuant of their own environmental and developmental policies. Furthermore, in the drafting process of the Watercourse Convention, the Second Special Rapporteur of the International Law Commission (ILC), Stephen Schwebel, proposed defining water resources as ‘shared natural resources’ (Schwebel 1980, 132–36). Yet in 1984, following a change in rapporteurs, and in the face of rising opposition from certain ILC members, this new definition was replaced. The ILC rejected efforts to present the concept of international freshwaters as ‘shared property’. Underlying this refusal was concern about the implications that this new concept would have for the sovereignty of states and possible restrictions on a riparian’s rights of use (Fenet 1991, 91). The failure of past and more recent attempts of UN bodies to elaborate a generally agreeable definition of ‘shared natural resources’ can be explained by the reluctance of states to accept language that may suggest any ‘internationalization’ of natural resources in their territories, hence conveying a

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potential erosion of their sovereign rights over such resources. It seems, as Benenvisti has put it, that ‘the international system of sovereign states as a whole, failed to rise to the challenge of collective action to manage shared transboundary resources’ (Benvenisti 2002, 18), and that ‘there is little prospect for agreement on a global scale with regards to international norms restricting national sovereignty over the exploitation of “natural resources”’ (Benvenisti 2002, 19). 2. TYPES OF STATES AND WATER MANAGEMENT

In the previous section, we looked at the impact of state-building from a historical perspective. In this second part, we will describe various types of relationships that states have: to the natural world, to their riparians, to the unknown, or simply to their own failure. 2.1 The modernization state The ‘modernization state’ is undoubtedly the most dominant type of state in the current international system. Its purpose and raison d’être is to fulfil its so-called ‘modernization mission’, which is defined by constant progress and the improvement of human affairs. The impact of modernization theory on water resources management has been well documented. Swyngedouw (1999) for instance described how the modernization of Spain, inspired and led by the regenerationist movement, most notably Joaquin Costa, resulted in the hydraulic policy of large-scale river basin development over a number of generations. Technological advances have enabled states to ‘master’ nature, and most modern states have engaged in what Allan (2005) refers to as the ‘hydraulic mission’, an attempt to control and manipulate water resources of a country so that its constituents may meet their domestic, industrial and agricultural needs. The concept is wrapped up in the notion of national water, food and energy security. Planners and engineers designed and executed master plans with the dual purpose of controlling nature and optimizing the multiple tasks assigned to water and the benefits drawn thereof. Civilization, science and technology were meant to dominate nature. Most leaders, engineers and central planners believed that water had to be optimized in such a way that it should not be wasted to the sea. Whether in Spain, India, Brazil, Cuba, or the United Kingdom, leaders declared their willingness to ‘reconstruct’ nature according to human needs and desires. Stalin (in 1929) declared for example that ‘water which is allowed to enter the sea is wasted’ (Pearce 1992). Similar types of declaration were made by charismatic national leaders such as Winston Churchill, Mahatma Ghandi or Fidel Castro. Large-scale projects, and in particular large dams, are probably the best example of the embodiment of the hydraulic mission. Large dams are among the greatest single structures built by humanity. These serve as powerful symbols of modernization, national prestige, and human dominance over

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The multi-level governance of water and state-building processes nature (McCully 1996). The zeal of the dam-building efforts of the US Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation at the turn of the 19th century was emulated by other states, not quite as advanced in their statebuilding efforts, such as Selassie’s Ethiopia. Such developments took on not just a technical dimension, but also an ethnical/philosophical one, with the accompanying belief that man could now master nature. In British India for example, Gilmartin (2006) shows how high dams would allow the ‘subjugation of nature’, controlling flood and navigation, and the generation of hydropower, and the irrigation of land ‘under command’. As the World Commission on Dams (2000, xxix) noted: ‘from the 1930s to the 1970s, the construction of large dams became—in the eyes of many—synonymous with development and economic progress. Viewed as symbols of modernization and humanity’s ability to harness nature, dam construction accelerated dramatically’. In Greece, for example, the Marathon Dam became a symbol of the Greek state’s successful pursuit of modernization and its connection to the West through progress and technology. Greeks were encouraged to acquire bonds that were described as ‘the most patriotic investment that a Greek can ever make … since the support of large-scale infrastructure projects … guarantees the country’s social and economic progress’ (Kaika 2006, 287). For nascent states, obliged both to establish themselves and develop at the same time, the technology associated with the hydraulic mission allowed the state to benefit through mega-projects from all the associated political pay-offs. Successful implementation of a hydraulic mission may bring considerable legitimacy to governments that are in short supply of it, as well as political symbolism and prestige. As shown by Steinberg (1987, 333), large-scale technological projects can, first, demonstrate the capabilities and achievements of the state or regime, legitimizing or enhancing its image; second, give it high visibility, highlighting the key role played by the state or government; and, third, provide evidence of modernization, while providing a shared and unifying symbol. 2.2 Revisionist states Revisionist states may be defined as states that call into question the boundaries defined by international law, claiming territories that go beyond their accepted ones. Water projects are used here to create the conditions to recognize sovereignty on the ground. The border clashes between Israel and Syria in the 1950s provide an example. The National Water Carrier project was initiated in the demilitarized zone with three underlying objectives: to establish Israel’s sovereign status over the Jordan River; to establish sovereign status over the demilitarized zone; and to facilitate Jewish immigration and settlement in the Negev by providing water for irrigation (Troen and Lucas 1995). Following Syrian protest and under UN and US pressure, the project in this area was abandoned. In 1964, Israel feared for water from the Dan springs along the Syrian– Israeli border, on account of work by the Syrians to locate the flows of 59

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underground water (Medzini 1997). As reported by the British Ambassador in Tel Aviv, to the Foreign Office in London, regarding the causes of the clashes: The main purpose of this road is said to be to serve the ‘Dan Project’, a scheme for taking water for local irrigation. Nevertheless, there is also undoubtedly an Israel wish to confirm the frontier line. (Medzini 1997) The Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan is a more recent example. These two countries are embroiled in a legal dispute over a hydropower scheme that India is currently building on the Chenab River at Baglihar, in occupied Kashmir (Salman 2008). This again highlights how river control and the construction of water infrastructures are seen by both parties as a way to impose control over disputed territories. In summary, water infrastructure, symbolic springs, river constructions, rural settlements and agricultural activity have been used to show state territorial sovereignty and ascendency (Kimmerling 1983). In many cases agricultural settlers became as important as military officers in defending the inner territory of the state through agricultural expansion. Key water sites and rural settlements were used as instruments to establish control over territory. These projects were justified on the grounds of both ideology and national security : they would bring food and/or energy self-sufficiency— although their implicit objective was to guarantee state sovereignty or expand territorial claims on the ground. 2.3 The frontier state Frontier states are states that, for a number of reasons, are not fully able to control their territory, and/or their boundaries are not clearly demarcated. The idea of the frontier state was popularized by Frederic Jackson Turner in his essay ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (Turner 1893). According to Turner, American identity emerged as a result of the development of a culture of settlement and adaptability to a wild environment. The colonization and settlement process both inland and towards the West marked the idea of the ‘frontier state’, a state that expands through the discovery of new territories. This idea of the frontier state has a number of implications for water resource management. The transfer and transportation of water is seen as a tool to control new territories. As shown in Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire (Worster 1985), the conquest of the American West was not achieved through untrammelled freedom for pioneers in uncontrolled land; conquest was largely made possible by its gradually becoming a land of restraints and authority, class and exploitation, and, ultimately, of imperial power. This is because the settlement process was driven on the whole by the potential wealth of the region, and the passion to possess it. Water management was

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The multi-level governance of water and state-building processes the key element or ingredient in this expansion. Indeed, contrary to Turner’s (1893) thesis, which portrays the westward expansion as a saga of individual enterprise escaping civilization to carve a livelihood from nature, the aridity of the West made it necessary to use modern technological methods to establish domination over nature. The development of sophisticated canal systems represented a techno-economic order imposed for the purpose of mastering a harsh environment. As described by Worster (1985), irrigation and the state grew up synergistically, each supporting the other. The state was an agency for conquest, through canals, turnpikes, and railroads, to open a continent for exploitation. Worster (1985) sees this specific period of American history as an example of an ‘irrigation society’ based on a conquest of the environment, with intricate links between water control, social order and power. The so-called ‘hydraulic societies’ in California, Arizona, and other arid US states, were built at the urging of the industrial revolution, to dominate and repress all that is natural in nature and people (Worster 1985, 59). John Wesley Powell (1876), second director of the US Geological Survey, wrote in his book, the Arid Region: ‘All the waters of all the arid lands will eventually be taken from their natural channels.’ In the 1902 National Reclamation Act, the West, more than any other American region, was built though sheer state power, expertise, technology, and bureaucracy. Worster (1985) argues that, from the 1940s on, government and private wealth established a powerful alliance, bringing every major western river under their unified control and thus perfecting a hydraulic society without peer in human history. The frontier state marked the encounter between technology and wilderness, man and nature, the state and control over water resources. The following quotation by George Perkins Marsh in his book Man and Nature summarized the state-building logic of the ‘Frontier’ state: America offers the first example of the struggle between civilized man and barbarous uncultivated nature … In North America … , the full energies of advanced European civilization, stimulated by its artificial wants and guided by its accumulated intelligence, were brought to bear at once on a desert continent, and it has been but the work of a day to win empires from the wilderness, and to establish relations of governments and commerce between points as distant as the rising and setting sun. (Marsh 1864) 2.4 Failed states in post-conflict countries The last type of state discussed in this chapter is the ‘failed state’ in postconflict countries. Conflict and war destroy basic infrastructure, disrupt the delivery of core services (e.g. health, education, electricity, water, and sanitation) and impede the day-to-day routines associated with the operation of a state, and with making a living. In the worst case scenario, they lead to widespread suffering, massive population dislocation and humanitarian crises

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and epidemics, which overwhelm the already inadequate effectiveness of failed-state governments. Examples of failed states are: Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Congo, Mozambique, and Tajikistan, which are all faced with the question of reconstruction after civil war, and where both state-building and physical reconstruction (including water infrastructure) constitute core issues. The inability of post-conflict states to provide basic public goods and services has an impact on the immediate prospects for tending to citizens’ fundamental needs and for restarting economic activity. Ultimately, it also affects longterm prospects for assuring welfare, reducing poverty, and facilitating socioeconomic growth. Restoring (or in some cases creating) service-delivery capacity and initiating economic recovery are central to governance reconstruction agendas (see for example, UN Development Programme 2000). Since economic deprivation may have been a possible cause of the onset of conflict (particularly if associated with ethnic, religious or other kinds of social differentiation), it is vital to adopt speedy measures in the immediate post-war environment, in order to stimulate economic development that can improve the general welfare of the population at large, and thus weaken the economic foundations of political violence. However, there are clear obstacles, which may not only be financial, but also technical, institutional and political. In Mostar, Bosnia for example, the Bosnian Croats sought to obstruct the implementation of an agreement to rehabilitate and integrate the city’s divided water and sewage system (International Crisis Group 2000), as this measure would blur the so-called ‘ethnic territories and defined spatial identities’ within the city. The following table shows how populations in post-conflict countries suffer disproportionately from the lack of access to water supply, compared with other countries in the same region. The question of providing water and sanitation is therefore of utmost priority in post-conflict states. Unsafe water equates directly with worse health, yet the problem is that in these countries there is often a lack of adequate public revenues, government capacity and investor interest, which in the end results in failure to re-establish access to basic infrastructural services for the population. Outside investments in the water sector are considered too risky in post-conflict situations. A recent study by the World Bank, for example, has shown that private investment in water supply and sanitation tends to come later and is much smaller in financial terms than investment in other areas of infrastructure (Schwartz et al. 2004), yet the most effective public health intervention is safe access to water and sanitation.

Table 3.1 Percentage of population with access to improved water (Schwartz et al. 2004, 4) Sub-Saharan Africa, ConflictAffected

Sub-Saharan Africa, Non-ConflictAffected

Republic of South Africa

High-Income Countries

52

67

86

96

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The multi-level governance of water and state-building processes There are no clear answers in relation to access to water in the context of post-conflict state-building. In poorer, rural and peri-urban communities, one can observe the spontaneous emergence of largely unregulated, small-scale private water providers. A number of states are increasingly introducing new regulatory arrangements that acknowledge and legitimize these private providers, whereby efforts to co-ordinate unregulated providers become de facto an example of a state-building measure. This question deserves more attention and research. Water programmes, if correctly implemented, can increase both state legitimacy and capacity. Access to water in particular can encourage the return of internally displaced people and refugees, while reducing the strain and potential for conflict in bordering states. CONCLUSION

By taking a longue durée perspective (Braudel and Matthews 1982), this chapter has looked at the impact of state-building processes on the multi-level governance of water. We have argued that the emergence of the modern nation state has considerably altered the way in which water resources are managed, i.e. resource management has become more centralized and inward looking. This ‘territorial approach to water’ is now clearly called into question. On the one hand, one can see a shift towards a decentralized approach in water management, giving more responsibilities to the community and users. On the other hand, globalization is affecting the capacity of many states, especially in developing countries, to control and manage their water resources and infrastructure systems. Quite paradoxically, the state’s legal apparatus has never been as sophisticated as a result of new environmental protection measures. The different types of state discussed in the second part of this chapter lead us to wonder in which direction state-building will evolve with regards to water management. NOTES 1 The longue durée is an expression used by the French Annales School of historical writing to designate its approach to the study of history, which gives priority to long-term historical structures over events (see Fernand Braudel and Matthews Sarah 1982).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allan, Jonathan A. (2005) ‘Water in the Environment / Socio-Economic Development Discourse: Sustainability, Changing Management Paradigms and Policy responses in a Global System’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 40, Issue 2, 181–199. Allouche, Jeremy (2005) Water Nationalism: An Explanation of the Past and Present Conflicts in Central Asia, the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent? Geneva, Graduate Institute of International Studies (unpublished).

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Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and the Spread of Nationalism, London and New York: Verso. Baxter, R.R. (1967) ‘The Indus Basin’, in A.H. Garretson, R.D. Hayton and C.J. Olmstead (eds), The Law of International Drainage Basins, Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana, 443–485. Berber, F.J. (1959) Rivers in International Law, London: Stevens and Sons. Benvenisti, Eyal (2002) Sharing Transboundary Resources: International Law and Optimal Resource Use, Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biswas, Asit K. (1970) History of Hydrology, Amsterdam, and London: North-Holland Publishing Company. ——(1992) ‘Indus Water Treaty: the Negotiating Process’, Water International, Vol. 17, 201–209. Black, Brian (1995) ‘Authority in the Valley: TVA in Wild River and the Popular Media, 1930–40’, The Journal of American Culture, Vol. 18, Issue 2, 1–14. Black, C., L. Dupree, E. Endicott-West, E. Naby, D.C. Matuszewski and A.N. Waldron (1991) The modernization of inner Asia, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Bonnin, Jacques (1984) L’eau dans l’antiquité: l’hydraulique avant notre ère, Paris: Eyrolles. Braudel, Fernand and Sarah Matthews (1982) On History, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. BBC (2000) ‘Thirsting for War’, BBC World Service, Friday 29 September 2000 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/nglish/audiovideo/programmes/corrrespondent/newsid-946000/ 946916.stm). Butzer, Karl (1976) Early Hydraulic Civilizations in Egypt, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cano, Guillermo (1976) ‘Argentina, Brazil and the De la Plata River Basin: A Summary Review of their Legal Relationship’, Natural Resources Journal, Vol. 16, 863–872. Caponera, Dante A. (1992) Principles of Water Law and Administration: National and International, Rotterdam, Brookfield: A.A. Balkema. Darwish, Adel (1994) ‘Water War’, A lecture given to the Geneva Conference on Environment and Quality of Life (June). Fenet, A. (1991) ‘Droit de la mer, droit des cours d’eau internationaux: similitudes et convergences’, Annuaire du droit maritime et aéro-spatial (A.D.M.A), Tome 11, 89–107. Foucault, Michel (1973) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Science, London: Tavistok. Gilmartin, David (2006) ‘Imperial Rivers: Irrigation and British Visions of Empire’ in Dane Kennedy and Durba Ghosh (eds), Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World, London: Orient Longman, 76–103. Gottman, Jean (1973) The Significance of Territory, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Gunawardana, R.A.L.H. (1981) ‘Social Function and Political Power: A Case Study of State Formation in Irrigation Societies’ in The Study of the State, by H.J.M. Claessen and Peter Skalník (eds), Walter de Gruyter, Ch. 7. Habib, Attia (1985) ‘Water sharing in the Jerid Oases of Tunisia’, in Ann Elizabeth Mayer (ed.), Property, Social Structure and Law in the Modern Middle East, Ch. 3, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 85–106. Harmon, US Attorney-general (1895) in 21 Opinions of the Attorney General of the United States.

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The multi-level governance of water and state-building processes Hirsh, Abraham M. (1957) ‘Water Legislation in the Middle East’, The American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring), 168–186. Hirsch, Philip (1999) ‘“Natural Resource Conflict” and “National Interest” in Mekong Hydropower Development’, Golden Gate University Law Review, Vol. 29, Rev. 399. Horsman, Stuart (2001) ‘Water in Central Asia: Regional Cooperation or Conflict?’, in Allison, Roy and Lena Johnson (eds), Central Asian Security, London: Royal Institute of International Affairs. International Crisis Group (2000) ‘Reunifying Mostar: Opportunities for Progress’, ICG Balkan Report No. 90, 19 April. Jaggers, Keith (1992) ‘War and the Three Faces of Power: War Making and State Making in Europe and the Americas’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (April). Kaika, Maria (2006) ‘Dams as Symbols of Modernization: The Urbanization of Nature between Geographical Imagination and Materiality’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 96, No. 2, 276–301. Kally, E. (1993) Water and Peace: Water Resources and the Arab-Israeli Peace Process, Westport, CT: Praeger. Kimmerling, Baruch (1983) Zionism and Territory: The Socioterritorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics, University of California: Institute of International Studies. Kristof, Ladis K.D. (1959) ‘The Nature of Frontiers and Boundaries’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 49, Issue 3 (Part 1), 269–282 (September). McCaffrey, Stephen C. (2001) The Law of International Watercourses: NonNavigational Uses, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, Oxford Monographs in International Law. McCully, P. (1996) Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams, London: Zed Books. Marsh, George Perkins (1864) Man and Nature. Marx, Karl (1971; first pub’d in 1859) A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, by Maurice Dobb (ed.), London: Lawrence and Wishart. Medzini, Arnon (1997) The River Jordan: The Struggle for Frontiers and Water 1920– 1967, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of London (October). Mustafa, D. (2001) ‘Colonial law, contemporary water issues in Pakistan’, Political Geography, Vol. 20, 817–837. Nader, Laura (1985) ‘Introduction: Property, Power, and Law in Middle Eastern Societies’, in Ann Elizabeth Mayer (ed.), Property, Social Structure and Law in the Modern Middle East, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1–24. Paquerot, Sylvie (2002) Le statut des ressources vitales en droit international—essai sur le concept de patrimoine commun de l’humanité, Bruxelles: Bruylant. Pearce, Fred (1992) The Dammed, London: Bodley Head. Petrella, Ricardo (2001) Water Manifesto, London: Zed Books. Powell, J.W. (1878) Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, Washington, DC, House Doc. 73. 45th Congress, GPO. Rees, J. (1990) Natural Resources: Allocation, Economic and Policy, 2nd Edition, London: Routledge. Salman, Salman M.A. (2008) ‘The Baglihar Difference and its Resolution Process—A Triumph for the Indus Water Treaty?’, Water Policy, Vol. 10, Issue 2, 105–117. Scarborough, Vernon L. (2003) The Flow of Power: Ancient Water Systems and Landscapes, Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press.

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Schwartz, Jordan, Shelly Hahn, and Ian Bannon (2004) The Private Sector’s Role in the Provision of Infrastructure in post-Conflict Countries: Patterns and Policy Options, Social Development Papers, Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction, Paper No. 16, August, Washington, DC: The World Bank. Schwebel, Stephen (1980) ‘Second Report on the Law of Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses’ reprinted in International Law Commission Yearbook, Part 2, 132–136. Shallat, T. (1992) ‘Water and Bureaucracy: Origins of the Federal Responsibility for Water Resources, 1787–1838’, Natural Resources Journal, Vol. 32, 5–25. Sironneau, Jacques (1996) L’eau, Nouvel enjeu stratégique mondial, Paris: Editions Economica. Spruyt, Hendrik (1994) The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Steinberg, Gerald M. (1987) ‘Large-scale National Projects as Political Symbols: The Case of Israel’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 19, No. 3 (April), 331–346. Steward, J.H. et al. (1955) Irrigation Civilizations, Washington, DC: Pan American Union. Swyngedouw, Erik (1999) ‘Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890–1930’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 89, No. 3, 443–465 (September). Teclaff, Ludwik A. (1967) The River Basin in History and Law, The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Tilly, Charles (1985) ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 169–191. Trawick, Paul (2002) The Struggle for Water in Peru: Comedy and Tragedy in the Andean Commons, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Troen, S. Ilan and Noah Lucas (eds) (1995) Israel: The First Decade of Independence, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Turner, Frederic Jackson (1893) The Significance of the Frontier in American History. United Nations (1972) ‘Conference on the Human Environment’, UN Doc. A/ CONF.48/14, 2–65. UN Conference on Environment and Development (1992) ‘Rio Declaration on Environment and Development’, UN GAOR 47th Session, Agenda item 9 at 1, UNCED Doc. A/CONF.151/5 Rev. 1. UN (1997) ‘The Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses’ (annexed to U.N.G.A. Res. 51/229, 21 May). UNDP (2000) Governance Foundations for Post-conflict Situations: UNDP’s Experience, New York: United Nations Development Programme, Management Development and Governance Division, Bureau for Development Policy. Vlachos, Evan and Braga, Benedito (2001) ‘Les Défis de la gestion de l’eau urbaine’ in: Cedo Maksimovic, José Alberto Tejada-Guibert and Pierre-Alain Roche, Les Nouvelles frontières de la gestion urbain de l’eau—Impasse ou espoir? Paris, Presses de l’école nationale des Ponts et chaussées, Ch. 1. Weinthal, E. (2002) State Making and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic and International Politics in Central Asia, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wester, Philippus (2009) ‘Capturing the Waters: The Hydraulic Mission in the Lerma– Chapala Basin, Mexico (1876–1976)’, Water History, 1(1), 9–29. Whiteman, M. (1964) Digest of International Law, Washington, DC: United States Department of State, 1964, vol. 3, p. 1011.

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The multi-level governance of water and state-building processes Wittfogel, Karl (1957) Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, Michigan: Yale University Press. Woolley, John T. and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project (online at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=13485&st=Grand+Coulee+Dam&st1=). Santa Barbara, CA: University of California. World Commission on Dams (2000) Dams and Development, London: Earthscan. Worster, Donald (1985) Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Hydrosolidarity as water security in the Okavango River Basin PÅL ARNE DAVIDSEN

INTRODUCTION

The Okavango River Basin in Southern Africa straddles the borders of Angola, Namibia and Botswana. In an otherwise dry and hostile environment, the river and its resources give life to a number of communities and activities along its way from the Angolan highlands to the world famous Delta in Botswana. The sensitivity of policy aspects relating to water management in the Okavango is demonstrated by Wolf et al. (2003, 46), having declared the river basin as being ‘at risk’, suggesting a potential for political stress or conflicting interests in the coming years. This chapter seeks to examine some of the political ramifications of perceived water scarcity by exploring the implications of framing access to and control over water resources in the grammar of security. The Copenhagen School of International Relations, most notably Wæver (1995) and Buzan et al. (1998) have conceptualized the social construction of threats and vulnerabilities through the theory of securitization. ‘Security’ becomes a speech act (Austin 1962; Searle 1980), in which a securitizing actor attempts to take politics beyond the established rules of the game by framing an issue as a special kind of politics or as above politics. Contextualized to the river basin under consideration, it is anticipated that the securitization of water resource management contributes to a state of affairs that creates antagonistic identities of ‘friend and enemy’ (Schmitt 1985 [1934], 1996 [1932]) and that this process unfolds and is best encapsulated through a conceptualization of security as a phenomenon located within, though not confined to, different sectors (Buzan et al. 1998). Wallensteen (1992) avows that differences in user patterns in international river basins can ignite disputes and conflicts between riparian states, facilitating upstream–downstream dilemmas where each part sees the other part as blocking current and future development projects. A distinction can be made between overexploitation of a given resource for the same purpose, herein competition, and overutilization of resources for one purpose that excludes all other uses, herein monopolization (Wallensteen 1992, 53). How this dynamic plays out is the focal point of analysis in the controversy around the Popa Falls hydropower station. 68

Hydrosolidarity as water security in the Okavango River Basin Building on the assumption that the securitization of transboundary water resources is an undesirable outcome of perceived resource scarcity and crisis (Turton 2003a, 83), it becomes important to delineate various ways and attempts to unmake security representations. This process is enacted through the idea of desecuritization, whereby belonging is mediated in a continuous political process that recognizes those who have been subjected to securitizing processes as part of a public sphere of existence (Munster 2004, 26). In the area of water resources management, Turton (2004) and Phillips et al. (2006), among others, have put forward the idea that a conceptual and political move away from a narrow focus on water-sharing to a broader focus on the sharing of benefits between the riparian states of a river basin can be conducive to the desecuritization of hydropolitical relations. According to Conca (2002, 14), institutional arrangements for co-operative resource management are on the increase in Southern Africa. Acknowledging the necessity of sustainable and co-ordinated management of the Okavango River Basin, the riparian states established the Permanent Okavango River Basin Water Commission (OKACOM) in Windhoek, Namibia on 16 September 1994. Among the objectives of OKACOM is to act as technical adviser to the riparians on matters relating to the conservation, development and utilization of water resources of common interest (OKACOM 1994), thereby contributing to increased co-operation and trust between the riparian states. Having analyzed processes of securitization and desecuritization, the overarching aim of this chapter will be to show how this nexus both sustains and changes the hydropolitical power relations between and within riparian states. DISCOURSE MATTERS

According to Buzan et al. (1998, 176), the obvious method to study processes of securitization and desecuritization is discourse analysis. Discourse involves all kinds of practices in terms of speech, writings, images and gestures that social actors draw upon in their production and interpretation of meaning (Torfing 2005, 7). Discourse puts perceptions at the centre stage of attention. When built on the assumption that perceptions affect policies and decisionmaking, discourse matters and can provide considerable insights into the intricacies of securitization studies. Howarth (2005, 336) makes a useful distinction between discourse theory and discourse analysis. The former provides the underlying ontological and epistemological assumptions, while the latter consists of a range of techniques for analyzing discursive structures. The fundamental task becomes not to assess whether an issue is ‘really’ a threat or not, but rather to analyze how issues are securitized and the likely effects of such. With regard to securitization, this implies searching for rhetorical structures of enmity, threats and vulnerabilities. Conversely, with regard to desecuritization, the task is to analyze social constructions of amity, trust and co-operation.

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Discourse analysis derives part of its momentum from the concept of deconstruction. This often entails revealing that a policy discourse is to be understood as a series of unintended consequences; disclosing that seemingly neutral, technical positions conceal highly normative commitments; subsequently investigating who fulfils this role and which institutional arrangements support and endorse these positions; and ultimately revealing that they have significant political consequences (Hajer 1995, 55). Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1994) have developed a theory of discourse which puts forward the idea that social phenomena are systems of meaning that are contingent and can never completely exhaust a field of meaning. Therefore, the inherent dynamics of a social field will generate a constant battle over the definitions of society and identity. A river might represent an obstacle to rapid economic development, it might be viewed as a unique ecosystem, or a symbol for a nation’s threatened natural heritage (Howarth 2000, 9). Laclau and Mouffe (1994) introduce the logic of equivalence (LOE) as a function that creates equivalential identities that express a pure negation of a discursive system and the logic of difference (LOD), which does the exact opposite by expanding a given system of differences by dissolving existing chains of equivalence and incorporating disarticulated elements into an expanding order (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000, 11). For Laclau and Mouffe (1994, 130) the former implies a simplification of political space, which reduces the number of possible subject positions, while the latter leads to an increasing complexity and diversity of possible subject positions to be adopted. Depending on which of these logics is dominant, social space is divided in different ways. Clohesy (2005, 183) asserts that, while the former establishes unity within by positing the existence of a common threat outside, the latter seeks to break down frontiers through discursive co-optation, by including disarticulated elements into an expanding order. Politics might be seen as a struggle for discourse hegemony in which discursive battles occur when several different actors claim the right to represent the correct solutions of a given problem (Hajer 1995, 60). In this regard Hajer (1995) has introduced the concept of discourse coalition to explain that the political power of a text does not come from its consistency, but from its multi-interpretability (Hajer 1995, 61). Discourse coalitions arise from discursive affinities, meaning that arguments vary in origin but share a similar way of conceptualizing the world. For instance, in pollution politics there is a discursive affinity shared by the environmentalist argument that protection is ‘the right thing’, the economic idea that pollution protection is cost effective and the scientific argument that nature is a complex ecosystem that should not be fiddled with (Hajer 1995, 304). Successful discourse coalitions will not only draw boundaries between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, defining membership by identifying a common enemy or ‘other’, but will also attempt to cover over internal differences within the coalition (Griggs 2005, 119). How power relations affect the outcome of such processes is the topic of the next section.

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Hydrosolidarity as water security in the Okavango River Basin POWER AND TRANSBOUNDARY WATER DISCOURSE

While the power of language lies in its capacity to do things with words (Austin 1962), power in discourse is here conceived in terms of political acts of inclusion and exclusion that create social antagonisms and political frontiers (Laclau and Mouffe 1994). Power is the capacity, through various tactics, of one part to get the compliance of another. Allan (2003, 21) has introduced the useful concept of sanctioned discourse to water management, pointing to how policymakers put self-serving assumptions and information on the agenda, while unwelcome information is demoted, relegated to appendices or ignored. This materializes in its most powerful form when things appear as fixed, normal or unproblematic, implying a naturalization of a given discourse, which becomes an effective way of steering away potentially opposing forces. The sanctioning of a discourse becomes important in understanding the emergence of discursive hegemony, where actors establish their political and ideological aspirations as the dominating world view. According to Lukes (1992, 2005), power can be conceptualized in three dimensions. The first dimension draws attention to who actually prevails in decision-making through studying concrete, observable behaviour. This can be conceptualized as structural power, which is the equivalent of the French term puissance (Turton 2005). Structural power lies within the state and depicts its capacity to possess and mobilize political, economic and military capabilities. When applied to the area of water resource management, power will herein be decided by riparian position, riparian size, and value of territory (Warner 2005). The second facet of power incorporates both decision-making and non-decision-making, referring for instance to how demands for change in the existing allocation of benefits and privileges can be suffocated before they are even voiced (Bachrach and Baratz 1974, 44). This dimension of power can be termed bargaining power or power as a relation, coined by the French term pouvoir (Turton 2005). Hydropolitical bargaining power is generally derived from discussions leading to agreements, obligations and establishment of the moral high ground, all of which lead to the construction of legitimacy (Zeitoun and Warner 2006). Drawing upon Daoudy (2005), bargaining power can display how purportedly disadvantaged riparians, often downstream in a river basin, are often not as weak as they may appear. Exemplifying the third dimension, Lukes (1992, 24) refers to the way in which power can prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions and preferences in such a way that they accept the status quo, either because they can see or imagine no alternative, because they see it as natural, or because they value it as beneficial. As Lukes (2005, 480) puts it; ‘the features of agents that make them powerful include those that render activity unnecessary. If I can achieve the appropriate outcomes without having to act, because of the attitudes of others towards me or because of a favorable alignment, my power is surely all the greater’. This third dimension of power largely coincides with the concept of soft power as

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advocated by Nye (e.g. 1990, 2004). Subsequently, Nye (1990) makes a distinction between hard power, most notably referring to economic and military capabilities resting on inducements (carrots) and threats (sticks), and soft power, which creates the desirable effects by co-opting people rather than coercing them. HYDROSOLIDARITY AND THE POWER OF THE MORAL HIGH GROUND

The discourse of goodness (Loga 2003, 2005) entails concepts such as ethics, solidarity, tolerance and justice. Attention is drawn towards idealistically centred values and norms, which are seen as the Durkheimian cement set to avoid the dissolution of society. Loga (2003, 68) points to the various ways in which the discourse of goodness displays relations of power. The power of the discourse comes from its obviousness: it entails concepts that most actors can agree on. Those actors who for instance endorse sustainable development, stakeholder participation and integrated river basin management are seen as good, while opposing forces are portrayed as egocentric, cynical or even evil. The way in which the discourse of goodness crystallizes in contemporary debates on transboundary water management is perhaps best captured by the concept of hydrosolidarity. Falkenmark and Folke (2002, 4) define hydrosolidarity as ‘reconciliation of conflicts of interest with a solidarity-based balancing of human livelihood interests’. Hydrosolidarity is seen as a way to counteract perceived ‘hydro-egoism’ or self-interest among stakeholders in the water sector (SIWI 2002, 18). Hydrosolidarity represents ethically based water resource management, which ultimately stands in contradiction to ‘hydrocide’ whereby downstream stakeholders are left with polluted and unusable water (Lundqvist 1998). The notion of hydrosolidarity has been criticized on a number of accounts, both on conceptual and political grounds. Gerlak et al. (2009, 315) voice concerns with regard to the applicability of the concept, stressing that it needs clear benchmarks for both measurement and achievement. Davidsen (2006) has revealed how publicly announced commitment to hydrosolidarity among the political élite in the Orange River basin has tacitly maintained the status quo in the basin, giving South Africa the upper hand in deciding who gets what, when and how with regard to water. This draws attention to the fact that dominant basin states are unlikely to embark on political endeavours or power-sharing arrangements that might jeopardize the maintenance of the status quo. As such, the political application of hydrosolidarity can conceal disparate power relations within a river basin. Zeitoun and Warner (2006) have established a framework analyzing transboundary water conflicts and co-operation through the theory of hydro-hegemony. This shows how actors in international river basins engage in a range of compliance strategies to advance their interests, ranging from coercive threats to constructive co-operation.

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Hydrosolidarity as water security in the Okavango River Basin THE OKAVANGO RIVER BASIN—THE ‘JEWEL OF THE KALAHARI’

The Okavango River Basin covers an area of about 413,550 sq km with the world famous Delta in Botswana compromising roughly 15,844 sq km (Ashton and Neal 2003, 33). The largest portion of the basin lies in Angola, followed by Namibia and Botswana. Turton et al. (2003a, 9) maintain that the Okavango River Basin is the last near-pristine river system in Africa, being only slightly affected by human intervention. However, the Global Environment Facility (2002, i) asserts that mounting socio-economic pressure in the riparian countries threatens to change its pristine character, something which in the long term may result in irretrievable environmental breakdown and consequent loss of domestic and global benefits. Essentially, the basin is strategically important to a range of diverse stakeholders; it is perceived as an ‘Oasis in the Desert’ (Earle and Mendez 2004), representing a vital resource in an otherwise dry and hostile environment (Mbaiwa 2004, 1) and holding diverse and sometimes conflicting values for its riparian states (Mendelsohn and el Obeid 2004, 28). For Angola, the river mainly represents a potential hydropower and irrigation resource for reconstruction of areas that were devastated by the Angolan civil war and Namibian war of liberation. As Angola is recovering from the 27-year-long civil war, diverse stakeholders in the region as well as internationally are taking a keen interest in the country, hypothesizing whether development plans will require increased water use and what the potentially detrimental effects of such will be on the integrity of the Okavango River Basin as a whole (Porto and Clover 2003, 65). The need to resettle internally displaced people in the river basin implies that resources from the river will be under increased pressure in the future (Mbaiwa 2004, 5). For Namibia, being one of the most arid countries in the world (Day 1997, iii), the Kavango River as it is called locally is one of the very few and most important sources of perennial water available in the entire country (Turton et al. 2003a, 9), making water abstraction from the river an important backup when it comes to supplementing supplies to the central area of the country. As identified by Mendelsohn and el Obeid (2004, 44), the soils in the basin are poorly suited to agriculture on account of low nutrient levels and poor water retention. Nevertheless, many Namibians perceive the Kavango river valley as a potential breadbasket (Mendelsohn and el Obeid 2004, 59), underpinning the endeavor of the Government of Namibia in making the country self-sufficient in food. The Okavango is the only perennial river flowing on the national territory of Botswana (Turton et al. 2003b, 354), and the Government of Botswana makes all possible efforts to keep the Delta a prime tourist destination based on a low-volume–high-cost policy (Pinheiro et al. 2003, 110). As much as 94% of the total amount of water entering Botswana comes from exogenous sources (Gleick 1993, quoted in Turton 1999, 8). This amplifies that the economic as well as ecological vitality of the Okavango Delta is entirely dependent upon the detailed character of volumes, timing, duration and quality of the

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annual flow regime that is generated in Angola and passes by Namibia before reaching Botswana (Thabeng and Balapi 2001, 8). The Government of Botswana acceded to the Ramsar Convention declaring the Okavango Delta a Ramsar site of international importance in April 1997 (Pinheiro et al. 2003, 110). In this regard, Botswana is required to promote the conservation and wise use of the Delta, a demand that cannot easily be seen as isolated from the actions taken by the upstream states and from the fact that the Okavango Swamp supports some 120,000 people living in or close to the wetlands. According to Ashton (2003) the diverse water users in the riparian states, together with their current and future needs, provide an archetypal example of the complex and conflicting demands between human development aspirations and ecological interests. Ashton and Neal (2003, 55) stress that the absence of sufficient information regarding the scale, significance and resilience of the ecosystem to decreased inflows and human intervention makes it extremely difficult to predict with any accuracy or certainty their effects; this should be seen as a strong warning that the system could face serious risk of irreversible damage.

Map 4.1 The Okavango River Basin Source: Mendelsohn and el Obeid 2004.

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Hydrosolidarity as water security in the Okavango River Basin TO SECURE OR NOT SECURE—THEORIZING SECURITY

Discourses on hydropolitics are increasingly being draped in the language of security (Turton 2001a), a tendency reflected in much of the contemporary literature on transboundary water resources management. The Copenhagen School of International Relations (CoS), the most influential scholar of which being Ole Wæver, has come up with a sophisticated and coherent approach studying security as a speech act, encircled by the concepts of securitization, security sectors and desecuritization (Wæver 1995, Buzan et al. 1998). The aspects of the CoS approach that are central to this chapter are how securitization can reduce multifaceted aspects of transboundary water resources management to a dichotomous antagonism between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’, and how issue linkages and the CoS theory of security sectors reveal a comprehensive picture of the securitization of international rivers. This chapter additionally considers how the concept of desecuritization, when operationalized as benefit-sharing, can aid a more co-operative river basin environment, but simultaneously throws many of the inherent assumptions in contemporary transboundary water management discourse into sharp relief. SECURITIZATION

Security, according to Wæver (1995, 55), can, with the help of language theory, be regarded as a speech act. By saying the word ‘security’, a securitizing actor moves a particular development into a specific area, claiming a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block a threatening development. Just as danger is not an objective condition that exists independently of those to whom it may become a threat (Campbell 1998, 1), there are no security issues in themselves, only issues created as such by securitizing actors (Buzan et al. 1998). In other words, security becomes a matter of survival, which arises when an issue is presented as posing an existential threat to a designated referent object (traditionally, but not necessarily, the state, incorporating government, territory and society). The special nature of security threats justifies the use of extraordinary measures to handle them. The essential quality of existence will vary greatly across different sectors and levels of analysis; therefore, so will the nature of existential threats (Buzan et al. 1998, 21–22). The distinguishing feature of securitization is a specific rhetorical structure including such issues as survival, priority of action and urgency, because ‘if the problem is not handled now it will be too late, and we will not exist to remedy our failure’ (Wæver 2000, 6). While Buzan et al. (1998, 31) stress that no one decisively holds the power of securitization, they also maintain that the capacity of actors successfully to mobilize security expectations is biased in favour of the state and statesmen, both of whom historically have been endowed with security tasks. However, Butler (1999, 122) stresses that it is possible to speak with authority without

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being authorized to speak. Therefore, the CoS argues that the practice of securitization and the subsequent logic of action should be the focal point of investigation (Buzan et al. 1998, 41). M. Williams (2003, 515) shows that the specificity of security as a particular kind of speech act in the CoS framework is underpinned by an understanding of the politics of enmity, decision and emergency, which has deep roots in German legal jurist Carl Schmitt’s understanding of political order. Schmitt (1996, 29 [1932]) claims that the political is the most intense and extreme antagonism and every antagonism becomes more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of a ‘friend–enemy’ grouping. For Schmitt (1999, 203 [1930]), the political, correctly understood, is only the degree of intensity of a unity. Accordingly, to borrow a label from Žižek (1999), it is this ‘ultrapolitics’: the division between amity and enmity and the authority to decide when a threat to a human collective has reached the threshold of ‘emergency’, requiring the suspension of normal political rules, that makes up Schmitt’s concept of the political (M. Williams 2003, 516). Similarly, as for the concept of securitization, economic well being, water scarcity or identity are not security issues unless they are placed within the category of existential threat, that is, cast in terms of friends and enemies (Wæver 1995). Wæver (2000, 10) theorizes that security is a generic term with a distinct meaning, but that its form fluctuates. Accordingly, security, herein survival, will mean different things depending on the specific referent object perceived to be threatened. Moreover, different referent objects will also engender different dynamics with regard to threats and vulnerabilities. Buzan et al. (1998) allege that the security of human collectives and principles is affected by factors located in five different sectors: the political, military, economic, environmental and societal. As advocated by Buzan et al. (1998, 141), political security refers to the organizational stability of social order(s), herein primarily threats to state sovereignty. Usually, threats to political security will involve the denial, partly or fully, of recognition, support or legitimacy either of political units or of the essential patterns among them. Likewise, state élite and government representatives will usually be the main actors endowed with the authority successfully to securitize, meaning that the process of securitization will be relatively structured, predictable and institutionally bound. To speak security within the political sector will usually involve the articulation of such words as ‘territory’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘border’ and ‘control’. For individuals, economic security refers to basic human needs such as food, water and shelter. Buzan (1991, 242) argues that threats to the economic security of a state can be seen as a national security issue, since relative economic growth is a key determinant of the power of states within a given system. A general trend in Southern Africa is that the population distribution tends to be concentrated in areas that have far from stable supplies of water. Economic matters cast in the language of security often surround what in engineering parlance is known as security of supply, where the construction of

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Hydrosolidarity as water security in the Okavango River Basin pipelines and sophisticated interbasin transfers make up the core (Turton 2003a, 86). Correspondingly, Turton (2003a, 87) refers to the hydraulic mission of society as the official state policy that seeks to mobilize water as a foundation for social and economic development, which are also key elements of national security. Buzan et al. (1998, 71) maintain that the environmental sector demonstrates more clearly than any other the propensity for dramatic and emotional securitizing moves, but with small securitizing effects leading to extraordinary measures. Securitization of the environment legitimizes itself on the basis of everyday fears: visual representations of littered or dried out riverbeds, dead trees or animals. In such cases, perceived threats are often represented as disease, dirt or pollution (Campbell 1998, 81). Different categories of environmental threats include disruption of ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, deforestation and pollution, energy problems, and food problems stemming from environmental degradation. While states can and often do securitize nature, the environmental sector is one that is most open to other actors and Vale (2003, 170) notes that ecological communities have become powerful secondary sites of securitization in Africa. Wæver et al. (1993, 23) define societal security as being about the sustainability, within acceptable conditions for evolution, of traditional patterns of language, culture, association, and religious and national identity and custom. Furthermore, societal insecurity arises when communities of whatever kind define a development as a threat to their survival as a community. Securitizing actors may speak of security itself, or instead describe threats to the identity of the group through the articulation of synonyms such as ‘die’, ‘perish’, ‘wither’, ‘weaken’ or ‘decline’ (Roe 2004, 289). While the key referent objects are tribes, clans, nations, herein minorities and indigenous groups, religions and race, the media plays a decisive role in defining the situation, constructing simple yet appealing stories of ‘us versus them’, and thus operating as a securitizing actor (Buzan et al. 1998, 123). Security practices can have detrimental effects on social relations by evoking exceptional politics of crisis and emergency (Wæver 1995; M. Williams 2003), reinforcing an exclusive logic of ‘us versus them’ (Leonard 2004, 12) and ultimately igniting a threat defense drama between stakeholders in international river basins (Phillips et al. 2006). This makes Wæver (2000, 7) stress that security should not be idealized; it is never innocent, politically, or analytically, to frame a problem in the grammar of security. Desecuritization should be the optimal long-range goal, since securitization implies that one has failed in dealing with the issue as normal politics. DESECURITIZATION

The task of desecuritization entails challenging, reordering or deconstructing assumptions that are based on the premise that politics entails distancing from or eliminating a perceived enemy. Desecuritization thus becomes a process

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whereby belonging is mediated in a continuous, transformative political process that recognizes those who have been subjected to securitizing processes as part of a public sphere of existence (Munster 2004, 26). Aradau (2004, 402) claims that what is needed is a process of disidentification, a rupture from the assigned identity and a partaking of a universal principle. By appealing to such a universal principle, the exclusionary trap of securitization can be avoided. When the above-mentioned assertions are contextualized to the arena of transboundary water resource management, Turton (2003b, 113) concurs with Wæver (1995) that desecuritization is desirable. For Turton (2003a, 91) desecuritization is preferable, representing a healthy disclosure, because it opens up the discourse and allows for a wider range of stakeholders to become involved in discussions and debates. P.A. Williams (2003, 3) claims that asymmetrical physical interdependence on water resources in international river basins forms a large barrier to constructing a sense of common fate. Accordingly, the shift from focusing on water-sharing to focusing on benefit-sharing in the discourse on international rivers is stressed by several academics (Phillips et al. 2006, Qaddumi 2008). When contextualized to the Okavango river basin, Turton and Earle (2003, 5) claim that a water-sharing approach is likely to increase tensions, since there is simply not enough water to satisfy the legitimate needs of each riparian state without causing significant harm to the downstream Delta. Turton (2004, 2) claims that while water-sharing as an approach under conditions of endemic scarcity is a driver of conflict because it cuts the pie into pieces, benefit-sharing can create a bigger pie to share, laying the foundations for an equitable win-win situation among stakeholders. Zeitoun and Warner (2006, 452) have identified that mutually beneficial shared-water projects have proven an effective incentive for co-operation, which can lead to more stable hydro-relations within a river basin. Sadoff and Grey have provided a simple, yet viable framework for analyzing benefit-sharing initiatives in international rivers. They distinguish between four kinds of co-operative benefits that are available to various degrees in river basins: environmental, economic, political and catalytic. Co-operation can yield better management of ecosystems, providing environmental benefits to the river. A healthy river can improve the availability and quality of resources from the river and pave the way for benefits of the second category, such as food production, hydropower and better sanitation (Sadoff and Grey 2002, 393). Moreover, co-operation might also reduce costs because of the river, as long term tensions, disputes and conflicts between riparian actors will generate costs if not prevented or resolved at an early stage. More indirect and less apparent benefits might come from rivers being catalytic agents, paving the way for increased interaction and perhaps even integration among states, thus generating benefits beyond the river. Ultimately, benefit-sharing is possible if riparian states believe and perceive the value of co-operation to be higher than the associated costs. As benefit-sharing can increase the value of such co-operation, it emerges as an important variable when it comes to the desecuritization of water management.

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Hydrosolidarity as water security in the Okavango River Basin Zeitoun and Mirumachi (2008, 300) have identified that this concept is currently being applied in negotiations in the Nile, Mekong and Orange river basins among others. Qaddumi (2008) deals with practical approaches to transboundary water benefit-sharing, but does not linger with the utility of the concept as such. For that reason it is essential to look at the political ramifications of the concept as well. Davidsen (2006) has, with reference to the Orange river basin, demonstrated how benefit-sharing can be hijacked by the basin hegemon. South Africa, being buttressed by a discursive consensus among the hydropolitical élite in the basin, has through technical co-operation depoliticized contentious issues of water-sharing with neighbouring Namibia, as a result sustaining the status quo in the basin. The often vague and ambiguous nature of benefits to be reaped draws attention to problems of measurement and operationalization, which underscores the need to be realistic with regard to the political applicability of the concept. A MODEL FOR ANALYSIS

As summarized by Buzan et al. (1998, 23–24), any public issue can be located on a spectrum ranging from non-politicized (meaning the state doesn’t deal with it, and it is not an issue of public debate), through politicized (meaning the issue is part of public policy), to securitized (implying that the issue is presented as an existential threat). Drawing upon Neumann (1998, 17), the spectrum can be further expanded by including the category of violization (where violence takes place on a certain scale). By also adding the corresponding processes of depoliticization, desecuritization and deviolization, the following model can be sketched out (see Figure 4.1). SECURITIZATION—THE POPA FALLS HYDROPOWER STATION

The proposal by the Namibian power corporation NamPower to build a 20 megawatt hydropower station approximately 50 km upstream of the Okavango Delta near Divundu came up on the national political agenda in 2003 in order to meet growing demands for power in the country and ensure reliability of supply to the populous northern regions (EcoPlan 2003). The Namibian plans triggered widespread and doom-laden perceptions in Botswana, as well as regionally and internationally, that the project would lead to the destruction of the Okavango Delta. A January 2003 newsletter of the World Conservation Union in Botswana (IUCN Botswana 2003) refers to the Namibian project, claiming that ‘the Okavango Delta, home to over 100,000 people and the mainstay of Botswana’s burgeoning tourist industry, is faced with a serious new threat. The Delta, in its current diverse and dynamic form, will be irreversibly changed for the worse if plans to build a dam at Popa Falls on the Okavango River in Namibia go ahead … it would alter two natural processes that together would have a devastating impact on the Okavango, its potentially far-reaching

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Figure 4.1 Security—A new framework for analysis. According to the Copenhagen School, the nature of an issue can range from non-politicized to securitized. Additionally, Neumann’s concept of violization has been included together with the respective antonyms.

consequences demand that it be regarded as the most serious threat the Okavango has faced this century’. The intentions of the Namibian Government also attracted the attention of Ngami Times, a local newspaper in Maun, Botswana. The newspaper addressed the Popa Falls case in a number of articles, reports and comments during 2003. Number 154 (Ngami Times, 2003a/2003b) features headings like ‘Stop Rape of Delta’ and ‘Delta Danger—Namibia Wants to Dam the Okavango’, and states that: ‘our government, despite protestations over the years that it would never harm the Delta, now appears to be quite happy with the development, even if it does affect the livelihoods of 100,000 people and lead to the eventual destruction of one of the world’s great tourist destinations’. Number 157 (Ngami Times, 2003c) follows up with a front page title that reads, ‘Death of Delta if Project Goes Ahead’: ‘Damming the Okavango River in order to generate power, will mean the death of the delta and turn Maun into a ghost town. Maun residents fear that construction works will result in erosion, leading to the river failing to contain the desert’.

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Hydrosolidarity as water security in the Okavango River Basin The war metaphor is present in number 193 (Ngami Times 2003e), putting forward allegations that the low Okavango water level causes ‘War of Words’: ‘There’s been no violence, but “water wars” have broken out over water levels in the Okavango. Angola says it is not its fault that the volumes are so low and many in Botswana believe that the building of a hydroelectric scheme by Namibia will make things even worse in the years ahead. It has resulted in a war of words between Angolans and Batswana, who are accusing the former of constructing dams and using the water for irrigation’. Some of the direst warnings by Botswana actors to the proposed hydropower station have to be assessed in the light of previous frosty relations between the two countries because of the Namibian plans to complete the Rundu–Grootfontein pipeline as part of the Eastern National Water Carrier (ENWC) in the basin in 1997. In this case the acute situation of lack of security of water supply made the Namibian government accelerate proposed water abstractions from the Okavango, fuelling widespread perceptions of threat among different Botswana actors. With the proposed Popa Falls project, history repeated itself in the eyes of Botswana residents. Once again, the hydraulic mission of Namibia materialized in a security of supply discourse, when the hydropower station had to be built in order to meet growing demands for power in the country. Securitization in Botswana has primarily come from environmental non-government organizations (NGOs), the tourism industry and the media. The commonality among most of these actors in Botswana is that the hydropower station threatens the Okavango Delta; however, while some attempt to securitize through the environmental sector, others do so through the economic and societal sectors. The logic of equivalence works so that actors in Botswana have been able to downscale internal differences by portraying themselves as ‘victims’ opposed to the Namibian ‘perpetrator’. This depicts how the coalition attempts to create unity among different interests by relating them to a common project and by establishing a frontier to define the forces to be opposed (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000, 221). Accusations by securitizing actors in Maun that Namibia or Angola are blocking channels upstream in the river, thus impeding the free flow of water into the Delta, add up to an argument that goes as follows: at first sight, it might seem that nature threatens society and this is securitized; however, where the means to handle natural threats are thought to exist, the logic of security works less against nature than against the failure of the responsible human systems, these systems being located within as well as outside Botswana. When cumulative threat perceptions blur the distinction between natural and human-induced hazards (Buzan et al. 1998, 81) in this way, the logic of environmental security can indeed be seen as threats with enemies. Likewise, in such cases the claim that environmental threats are threats without enemies has a shallower resonance. Campbell (1998, 81) notes that danger can be experienced positively as a way of constructing boundaries, demarcating space by privileging certain accounts of history instead of others. The Okavango Delta thus appears at the

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centre stage of identity formation for people in Botswana, constructing an ‘imagined security community’ (Conca 2002), telling people who they are and what they’re not. DESECURITIZATION—THE PERMANENT OKAVANGO RIVER BASIN WATER COMMISSION

The Agreement of 16 September 1994 that establishes the OKACOM stipulates that it is ‘conscious that cooperation between the Contracting Parties with regard to the judicious development of joint projects in respect of the water resources of common interest in the Okavango River Basin will contribute towards the prosperity and welfare of their peoples, desirous to consolidate the existing friendly relations by promoting coordinated and environmentally acceptable regional water resources development objectives’ (OKACOM 1994). At a workshop of the Okavango Pilot Project in Maun on 13 September 2002, former President of Botswana Sir Ketumile Masire stated that, for the resources of the basin to be utilized in a sustainable manner to ensure maximum benefit, it is ‘vital that Angola, Namibia and Botswana cooperate in the management of the resource’ (Daily News, 13 September 2002). Likewise, the Botswana Minister of Minerals, Energy and Water Affairs, Boometswe Mokgothu, while attending the first OKACOM workshop for ministers responsible for water and environment in Maun in May 2003, cautioned that ‘the resources of the Okavango River basin must be utilized in an environmentally sound, economically beneficial and sustainable manner. Together we must ensure that we move forward in a way that all of our interests are taken into consideration and that ultimately we all share in the benefits that this international treasure which we are entrusted can afford us’ (Daily News, 9 May 2003). Considering the disputes over the Eastern National Water Carrier and the Popa Falls hydropower, it is evident that the pressure of problems in the Okavango River Basin is perceived to be fairly high by most actors. In this respect, Lowi (1993) argues that the factor that will almost invariably lead states to seek co-operation is that of acute need for water resources and/or dependence upon a specific, shared body of water. The failure to establish a water-sharing regime would be considered threatening to the state’s continued survival (Lowi 1993, 198). Captivatingly, this string of reasoning shows a salient resemblance to what Buzan et al. (1998, 86) have termed the securitization of effects in environmental discourse. A remark by Piet Heyns, one of the Namibian OKACOM commissioners, serves as a luminous example of how this relates to the OKACOM case: ‘we’ve spent considerable time and energy on these river basin commissions, it is therefore important that they do not die an early death’ (Heyns 2005). Swatuk (2000, 181) claims that in the Okavango basin, co-operation has emerged in a fairly ad-hoc manner, driven by the response to a crisis rather than by an overarching desire to co-operate. When Namibia hastily initiated plans related to the finalization of the ENWC 82

Hydrosolidarity as water security in the Okavango River Basin in 1996, the country effectively bypassed the OKACOM as a consultative organ, making the latter appear as no more than a paper tiger (Ramberg 1997). As a consequence, Botswana promptly applied to UNESCO to have the Okavango Delta declared a Ramsar Site in 1997 (Turton 1999, 9). As resentfully illuminated by Piet Heyns (2000, 4), this was done without prior consultation with the other delegations in the OKACOM. Swatuk (2003, 127) also affirms that the act was based on narrow national interests in so far as perceived upstream threats to the Delta, in particular the perceived devastating effects of the Rundu–Grootfontein pipeline, could be located within and possibly prevented through a framework of global environmental interests. Decisively, President Festus Mogae of Botswana stated that the 1997 accession was not divorced from national self-interest and security strategies, as the economic sustainability of Botswana was very much dependent on revenues generated from tourism in the Delta (Mogae 2006). In this way, the logic of difference can work so as to merge the ‘common good’ of environmental protection with the national security strategy of the Botswana Government, creating a sanctioned discourse where environmental protection is the order of the day. Paradoxically, on the one side it is possible to see the Okavango Delta Ramsar Site as both a form of institutionalized securitization established to counteract recurrent threats (Buzan et al. 1998, 27) and as a venue for desecuritization, providing benefits to the river through protection and conservation. Equally, on the other side, it is possible to view the OKACOM as an arena for desecuritization through the harmonization of national policies, but also as a regime that has been inherently securitized from the moment of its inception since, ultimately, a failure to provide for integrated river basin management would be considered a threat to the river and its riparians (Lowi 1993, Scudder 2005). Eventually, behind all the diplomatic and co-operative language, a hidden menace lurks: the threat of unco-ordinated river basin management. This explains why the initially disparate processes of securitization and desecuritization appear simultaneously on the discursive arena under the common panoply of OKACOM. Turton and Earle (2003, 6) emphasize that one of the core problems in the Okavango is the general absence of trust between the parties. This observation is consistent with, among others, Dr Hartmut Krugmann at the United Nations in Luanda stressing that, ‘for OKACOM, a good secretariat is essential because there is still mistrust among the riparians’ (Krugmann 2005). Furthermore, lack of uncontested basin-wide data is hampering efforts to develop policy options in the basin for the mutual benefit of all riparian states (Turton et al. 2002, 15). Swatuk (2003, 129–30) portrays Angola as playing a relatively inactive role in the Commission and, on a more general basis, lack of, or poor, communication between and within OKACOM member governments is considered a problem. Several actors concur with the abovementioned, stating that,

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‘Angola is not interested in the OKACOM’ (Heyns 2005) or that, ‘Angola is not putting serious efforts into the OKACOM’ (Quintino 2005). An explanation is partly given by the Angolan OKACOM Commissioner Isidro Pinheiro, saying that, ‘we derive mainly hassles and very few benefits from the river. Botswana has the upper hand in the whole basin and they can come and build lodges in Angola, but it is a problem that Namibia wants to fetch water in Angola and use it in Namibia’ (Pinheiro 2005). Similarly, the Executive Director of the Angolan NGO Associação de Conservação do Ambiente e Desenvolvimento Integrado Rural (ACADIR), Antonio Chipita, affirms that, ‘trust is difficult when one part is eating when the other is not. One can talk of equality in sharing, but in reality some benefit more than others’ (Chipita 2005). A more encouraging attitude is disclosed by Heyns (2000, 1), stating that the OKACOM has taken important steps towards IWRM (integrated water resources management), that activities that are, and have been, taking place have built confidence, mutual understanding and trust between the parties. This is in accord with Turton et al. (2003b, 358) who claim that a high level of goodwill exists among the so-called ‘hydropolitical élite’ from all three riparian states, particularly among OKACOM commissioners. The overarching question, though, is whether this perceived high-level ‘goodwill’ is sufficiently strong to overcome perceived asymmetrical benefit-sharing conditions within the OKACOM as well as within and between the basin states. SECURITIZING WATER—THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THREATS AND VULNERABILITIES

Lee (2002, 17) suggests that public awareness relating to a problem can affect the level of sensitivity, and subsequently the degree of securitization of an issue. As noted by Campbell (1998, 2), events or factors identified as dangerous come to be recognized as such only through an interpretation of their various dimensions of dangerousness. Caspar Bonyongo at the Harry Oppenheimer Okavango Research Centre (HOORC) in Maun emphasizes that ‘Botswana is worried about the unknown impacts of upstream water abstraction. There are very poor water supplies in Maun and developments are already suffering because of water shortages. This year, 2005 has been particularly bad’ (Bonyongo 2005). This narrative draws attention to a point captured by Beck (1995, 46), claiming that environmental destruction and protest are isolated from one another by cultural inclination to accept devastation. Acceptance wears thin only where people see their way of life jeopardized in a manner they can both know and interpret. The calming modus operandi of technology has precisely the opposite effect, clarifying why perhaps those most gravely affected do not fight most tenaciously against a proposed development (Beck 1995, 47). For this reason, ecological protest, herein environmental securitization, becomes a matter not of natural, but of cultural fact and interpretation.

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Hydrosolidarity as water security in the Okavango River Basin The Okavango River Basin, herein most notably the Delta, is being constructed as ‘unspoilt, untouched, pristine and virtually unexplored wilderness’. While being mediated by geographical scale and proximity, it is precisely the everyday visibility of potential threats, the image of a littered and polluted Okavango Delta and the picture of dried-out riverbeds that lead people in Maun to conclude that ‘the river is not what it used to be’ and ‘we must find out who’s responsible’, be it upstream Namibian or Angolan communities. Securitization is sustained on account of the lack of uncontested basin-wide data in the Okavango River basin, fuelling conflict particularly under conditions of drought. As advocated by Buzan et al. (1998, 84), the environmental sector provides a lens that highlights the root causes of existential threats that become manifest in other sectors. The linking of different security issues that are held together by the discursive cement of ‘Okavango’, and that ignite different securitizing moves as a threat to the Okavango, can become a matter of national security, herein also economic security for the Botswana Government, a matter of economic security for safari operators, a matter of environmental security for environmental communities and ultimately, a matter of societal security for local communities in the Delta, which ‘will no longer be what they are’ if perceived destructive developments are initiated. These issue linkages made Caspar Bonyongo at the HOORC conclude that ‘the security situation is extreme in Maun’ (Bonyongo 2005). By transcending internal antagonistic divisions, the abovementioned groups have created a discourse coalition centered on the protection of the Okavango Delta (Swatuk 2001). Notions of ‘pristine nature’, constructed as ‘fragile nature’ being vulnerable to dam construction, forms the basis of this coalition, which attracts substantial support from international environmental communities as far away as California (the International Rivers Network). In this regard it is essential to remember the shelving of the Southern Okavango Integrated Water Development Project (SOIWDP) in 1992 as a result of heavy environmental lobbying. The project was initiated by the Botswana Government, which aimed to develop large-scale commercial agriculture in the Okavango Delta, but after a report by the World Conservation Union (IUCN), which concluded that the environmental costs by far outweighed the benefits of the scheme, the government chose to suspend the project (Scudder 2005). Eleven years later a similar situation arises with regard to the Popa Falls, but now the perceived threat comes from Namibia. The reaction by Roger Hawker at Birdlife Botswana is indicative of the environmental security discourse taking place in the Delta: ‘as we all know, the Okavango is far too beautiful and a precious resource for it to be damaged. One does begin to wonder how many times we have to keep fighting these battles as there seem to be constant threats from ill-thought out schemes both within and outside the country’ (Ngami Times, 2003d). Another aspect that intensifies securitization in the Okavango (Delta) is the difference in user patterns between Namibia and Botswana. Water for the

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purpose of tourism in Botswana and irrigation in Namibia strengthens perceptions of monopolization of use (Wallensteen 1992): that tourism and agriculture are ultimately incommensurable. This aspect is delicately brought up by Piet Heyns in the Namibian Department of Water Affairs when commenting on the Okavango Delta Ramsar Site: ‘A Ramsar site doesn’t say the river can’t be utilized. Indirectly we accept Botswana, but we do not accept that all the water evaporates in the Delta when Namibia has water shortage. If Botswana wants conservation then income from tourism should be divided. Namibia can then irrigate and Botswana can sit under a tree’ (Heyns 2005). As Laclau and Mouffe (1994, 125) claim, antagonisms arise out of a blockage of identity, and, as previously revealed, these are most powerful when working through the logic of equivalence, where clear cut divisions exist between those to fear and those to trust. HYDROSOLIDARITY AND THE POWER OF THE MORAL HIGH GROUND

The decisive question is to what extent the social construction of nature has implications for the degree and nature of benefits to be harvested from transboundary water resource management. Allan (2003, 19) argues that water institutions are transaction cost-reducing, but that policy reforms facilitating such cost-reducing may not be perceived in such a way by either policy-makers or those that might be affected by the intervention. Furthermore, protecting a water resource may also be transaction cost-reducing, but the nature and scale of benefits of cost reduction are impossible to define and quantify at the level of community or state. This incapability in defining and quantifying future benefits is identified by Allan (2003, 19) as being one of the most serious impediments to water policy reform and the implementation of such reform. While it is relatively easy to identify how a dam stabilizes waterflow downstream, it is not so straightforward to tell if and when exactly the environment has been protected and conserved. Similarly, how does one operationalize and measure more long-term and ambiguous benefits such as trust and regional integration that may be derived from the OKACOM? This complicated matter has crucial implications for desecuritization, considering that stakeholders in international river basins are unlikely to embark on any co-operative efforts if the costs of such are perceived to outweigh the benefits. Accordingly, in most cases the most serious obstacles to successful international river management appear not at the technical, but at the political level (Bernauer 2002, 2). Several bureaucrats working in the OKACOM stress the way in which these measures created trust between the riparian states, and that this was a long-term process. As tellingly put by the Namibian OKACOM commissioner Piet Heyns, ‘the development of river basin commissions is a long term process, but you can’t really wait until you need them’ (Heyns 2005). Consistent with Sadoff and Grey (2005, 423), a perception by all riparian actors that co-operative basin management maximizes overall benefits in a fair and equitable way will be decisive in motivating the endorsement of

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Hydrosolidarity as water security in the Okavango River Basin benefit-sharing as a concept per se. Nevertheless, while benefits have been identified as important measures in enlarging the ‘pie’ to be shared, a larger pie will not necessarily satisfy all actors if their particular ‘slice’ of the pie is not larger (Sadoff and Grey 2005, 423). As already identified by Phillips et al. (2006, xv) there is a need to specify, conceptualize and measure benefits more closely, as some parties, mainly basin hegemons, are already seeking to exploit the concept, imposing their will on other co-riparians in the disguise of benefits for all, win-win situations and the common good. Such co-optation (Laungaramsri 2002) enacted through the logic of difference is specifically pertinent in situations where benefits are ambiguous process outcomes, such as trust and regional integration, to be reaped at some unidentifiable stage in the future. In such cases, benefit-sharing may be little more than a facade behind which a hegemon may continue its former practices (Phillips et al. 2006, 31). The concept of benefit-sharing envisages how hydro-hegemony is a political relation in which the hegemon has the ability to draw upon a range of compliance mechanisms in order to ensure that its interests are served, some of these mechanisms being more covert and appealing to shared interest than others. The benefit-sharing scenarios in the Okavango River Basin mirror the hydropolitical power relations between the riparians in the basin. Nonetheless, as identified by Warner (2006) this is often a two-fold, janusfaced condition, as it is in the interest of a hegemonic actor to deny any conflicts, claiming that its policy is beneficial to all riparians, while it is in the interest of non-hegemonic actors to play the victim, presenting grievances as loudly as possible in order to rally external support. The Okavango has played a peripheral role as recipient basin of large-scale infrastructure schemes on account of the prolonged civil war in Angola, but also because of the way in which the river, especially the Delta, has been constructed as a nearly untouchable entity to be protected and conserved. How this has affected the total amount of benefits derived from the river is captured by Obonetse Masedi at the International Waters Unit (IWU) Botswana, saying that ‘every cloud has a silver lining. There was no development in the Angolan part of the basin during the civil war and this, the silver lining, left the basin largely untouched. The silver lining legacy still exists, and because of this not many activities have taken place in the basin yet’ (Masedi 2005). As for the Okavango, the concepts of protection and conservation have gained significance as a common good, endorsed by a range of stakeholders from all three riparian states. As stressed by Manuel Quintino (2005), National Coordinator for the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in Angola; ‘We need to be wise; by the end of the day the ecosystem must be preserved because we can create damage; we need to fight for the preservation of the Delta’. While Sadoff and Grey (2005, 420) maintain that it is entirely rational that states will have a ‘national agenda’ for a river that they share with other states, what is momentous in the Okavango is the way in which environmental security and preservation has tacitly become linked with the national security of Botswana. This is avowed by the Press Secretary of the Botswana

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President stating that, with regard to the riparian position of Botswana in the Okavango, environmental protection and national security aspirations are not mutually exclusive, and ‘at any rate all of the SADC [Southern African Development Community] states are committed to cooperation. We thus have multilateral riparian management agreements governing all our shared watercourses’ (Ramsay 2006). The interesting aspect of this relates to the almost incontestable value of environmental conservation in the Okavango basin, allowing Botswana to enjoy political clout far greater than its hard power would suggest, as it defines its national interests to include the attractive cause of ‘environmental protection’. Turton maintains that water regimes such as the OKACOM are durable manifestations of hydrosolidarity because they institutionalize conflict potential and generate consensus on critical issues by providing a common platform for the development of trust. As such, regimes desecuritize water resource management while enhancing the security of supply for each riparian state in a shared river basin (Turton 2001b, 4). Accordingly, as the concept of environmental protection displays a moral authority that has gained resonance internationally, other countries enthusiastically follow Botswana in protecting the Okavango Delta, thus underpinning the national security strategy of that country. This shows how Botswana has effectively utilized its ideational power or third dimension of power, taking advantage of the widespread hydrosolidarity in the basin states, and stressing that whatever development project is initiated, it must not challenge the environmental integrity of the Delta. Soft power does not reside in the hands of governments to the same degree as hard power, and non-governmental groups can utilize the former in such a way that it may reinforce or be at odds with official foreign policy goals (Nye 2004, 17). The potency and relative success of the environmental lobby in the context of the Okavango Delta can partly be ascribed to the broad discourse coalition between the Botswana Government, safari operators, indigenous groups and the international environmental lobby, making environmental protection the lingua franca par excellence. The notion of discursive exposure involves making this powerful and invisible moral superiority visible and explicit, revealing that it serves some interests more than others. Ultimately, this draws attention to how nature, as a common good, is an ideal case for defining what is perceived to be good for all and where, tellingly, national security strategies can portray that water can be a driver of securitization if they are perceived to be threatened, but, simultaneously, a source for benefit-sharing and desecuritization. CONCLUSIONS

This chapter has sought to delineate the complex dynamics between securitization and desecuritization in the context of perceived water scarcity in the Okavango River Basin in Southern Africa. The analysis has centered on the ways in which access to and control over water resources has been filled with as well as purged of the potency of security.

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Hydrosolidarity as water security in the Okavango River Basin The Okavango River Basin displays a broad array and diversity of securitizing actors such as the state élite and bureaucrats, but also environmental epistemic communities and local tribes in the Okavango Delta. The friendversus-enemy dichotomy central to Carl Schmitt’s political theory is at its strongest when securitization is prolonged and threat perceptions find support in everyday life. Securitization has varied ramifications, being used by a diverse discourse coalition so as to unify public support for the protection of the Okavango Delta. The Botswana Government implicitly plays a crucial role in this coalition and has been able to forge an alliance where the ‘common good’ and morally appealing cause of environmental protection is used as a ‘fig leaf ’ safeguarding the country’s national security strategy. Securitization in the Okavango River Basin has aggravated tensions between the riparian states by heightening perceptions that access to water depends more on its use or misuse by neighbouring states than on domestic consumption or on the vagaries of nature. This reveals how securitization leads to policy responses informed by a desire to protect the ‘here’ from the ‘elsewhere’. While much of the contemporary literature on international rivers and securitization gives resonance to securitization only if it is acted out through national security, this chapter shows that the securitization of water resources is in fact a multifaceted phenomenon. Securitization in the Okavango River Basin involves the political, military and economic, as well as the societal and environmental sectors. While benefit-sharing entails certain prospects for the unmaking of security, it is at its most effective when it serves the strategic interests of dominant actors. Benefit-sharing appears as an easily exploitable aspiration, having disquieting effects by often failing to address crucial and contentious issues of power relations. The concept is easily co-opted and thus contributes to the preservation of the status quo, herein maintaining asymmetrical relations of power as well as lopsided access to and control over water resources. Environmental protection has been successfully articulated as benefit-sharing and hydrosolidarity, partly on account of the fact that the latter coincides with the national security strategy of Botswana. BIBLIOGRAPHY Allan, T. (2003) ‘IWRM/IWRAM: A New Sanctioned Discourse?’ Occasional Paper 50, London: SOAS Water Issues Study Group, School of Oriental and African Studies/ King’s College. Aradau, C. (2004) ‘Security and the Democratic Scene: Desecuritization and Emancipation’, Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol. 7, No. 4, December, 388–413. Ashton, P. (2003) ‘The Search for an Equitable Basis for Water Sharing in the Okavango River Basin’ in Nakayama, M. (ed.) International Waters in Southern Africa. Ashton, P. and Neal, M. (2003) ‘An Overview of Key Strategic Issues in the Okavango Basin’ in Turton, A.R., Ashton, P. and Cloete, E. (eds), Transboundary Rivers, Sovereignty and Development: Hydropolitical Drivers in the Okavango River Basin. Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Transboundary water interaction: Reconsidering conflict and co-operation MARK ZEITOUN

AND

NAHO MIRUMACHI

INTRODUCTION—A SHIFT FROM CONFLICT TO CO-OPERATION?

The ‘water war’ weathervane continues to spin round. Upon his return from a visit to war-ravaged western Sudan, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in September 2007 penned his opinion for the Washington Post, stating that ‘Darfur is an environmental crisis—a conflict that grew at least in part from desertification, ecological degradation and a scarcity of resources, foremost among them water’ (Ki-Moon 2007). Ki-Moon’s foray into the determining effects of the environment on conflict has drawn sharp criticism from those who understand the political, ethnic, historic and religious roots of the tensions between the Fur, Zaghawa and other peoples of the region (see e.g. El Tom 2007; de Waal 2007). Those who oppose the thesis that scarcity of resources causes violent conflict do so both on the grounds that there is little evidence to support the claims and that— more importantly—such claims have the effect of depoliticizing the conflict. If Darfur was heavily forested and as awash in water as it is in unexplored oil, after all, would we expect to see peaceful relations between the government in Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army? And would the conflict be resolved if aid agencies drilled deeper boreholes into the fractured sandstone under the shale deposits? The view that water is an increasingly likely source of violent conflict appears to be part of a very broad and pervasive mindset, perpetuated in part by sensationalist media pieces (see e.g. The Independent, 28 Feb 2006) and UN Secretaries General. The international water academic and practicioner community has taken a deeper perspective. Assertions of water-related aspects of environmental determinism (e.g. Fearon 1995; Homer-Dixon 1995a, 1995b; Butts 1997) have been generally discredited (e.g. Levy 2001; Hartmann 2002). Water wars themselves are generally viewed as unfounded hyperbole, thanks in large measure to the path-breaking work of Aaron Wolf, which demonstrates that there are many more instances of states co-operating over shared water resources than struggling over them (Wolf 2004, 2007). Indeed, 96

Transboundary water interaction judging by the mood and statements at the numerous international water fora these days, the looming spectre of water wars appears to be gradually being replaced by a feeling that tensions over transboundary waters are subsiding. The 2006 UN World Water Development Report, for example, asserts that Increasing sensitivity about the need to integrate competitive demands and stakeholders’ interests, in addition to the evolving need for political accommodation and the proactive stance in avoiding conflict, have all contributed to a shift from confrontation to cooperation, from monologue to dialogue and from dissent to consensus. (UN 2006, 388, emphasis added) While this understanding of progress towards increasing transboundary water co-operation serves to counter the water wars hype, we assert that it runs the risk of swinging the pendulum back too far. All is not quiet on the waterfront. Conflicts of distribution, co-management, and utilization persist, of course, along the Nile, Mekong, Tigris, Jordan, Indus, Ganges, Amu Darya and several other transboundary rivers and aquifers. Confident but unexamined assurances of co-operative developments in some basins carry with them the risk of unexpected outcomes and generally poor policy. The assurances reflect the international academic and practicioner communities’ crude understanding of the interplay between co-operation and conflict, and its under-appreciation that transboundary water interaction is an inherently political process. Towards transboundary water interaction Tensions over transboundary waters are too sophisticated and complex to be adequately captured by pithy expressions such as ‘the absence of war does not mean the absence of conflict’ (Zeitoun and Warner 2006, 437). Water conflict varies significantly in intensity across basins and across time, and ranges in form from stymied fuming to very public displays of hostility, affecting all levels of society, often even in distant non-riparian circles. Perhaps most significantly, various forms of conflict over water occur almost without exception alongside various forms of co-operation. The idea that elements of co-operation and conflict co-exist is well understood by any who survive a relationship. It has certainly been noted in the literature of political psychology (e.g. Mac Ginty, Muldoon and Ferguson 2007), conflict resolution (e.g. Vasquez et al. 1995), transboundary environmental negotiations (e.g. Najam 2002), and management practice challenges (e.g. Moench et al. 2003; Falkenmark et al. 2007; Wolf forthcoming). Most projects and research directed at improving management of relations over transboundary waters, including many that the authors have been involved in, insist on the co-existence from the outset. However, when it comes to the

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analysis, the two are inevitably treated separately. That separation usually means that the less ugly faces of conflict and less pretty faces of co-operation are overlooked, and the political aspects of the interaction routinely ignored. A more robust and subtle understanding is required for analysis and policy to reflect the nuance of transboundary water conflict and co-operation. This paper seeks to contribute to that task, delving deeper into the matter and insisting that a) conflict and co-operation co-exist, and more insight and understanding will be gained if they are thought of jointly in terms of interaction, and b) transboundary water interaction is above all a political process, subject to the whims of power like all political processes. We find that the political context is determining to the point that some faces of co-operation may serve to perpetuate conflict rather than resolve it. The following paper examines the role that power plays in strategic uses of conflict and co-operation. Transboundary water interaction refers here to relations of co-existing cooperation and conflict between communities, groups or states over international or sub-national waters, with a focus here on interstate interaction. The paper begins with a review of transboundary water conflict literature and the rather relatively under-theorized world of water ‘co-operation’. Analysis of the dual nature of transboundary interaction is then shown to be both possible and very insightful, through the work of Kistin, Daoudy and, in particular, Mirumachi’s ‘Transboundary Water Interaction NexuS’. The paper ends with a foray cataloguing the faces of transboundary water interaction according to subjectively positive, neutral or negative valuations, and linking them with their drivers. RECONSIDERING TRANSBOUNDARY WATER CONFLICT AND CO-OPERATION

The purpose of this section is to unearth some of the inherent weaknesses with common conceptions of transboundary water conflict and transboundary water co-operation. The most widespread analytical tool—the continuum—is shown to be methodologically compromised for fleshing out the nuance of the complexities involved. Inter-disciplinary work on transboundary hydropolitics is still grappling with identification of its place in academic and policy circles. Lowi (1993) reminds us that politics over water is generally subordinate to the ‘higher’ political picture. The work of researchers at Oregon State University led by Aaron Wolf on the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (TFDD) and Basins at Risk project (which yielded the Water Event Intensity Scale (WEIS, Figure 5.1)) has helped analysts of global water co-operation and conflict leap forward in bounds. The summary analysis of the TFDD impressively dispels the water wars myth, with more than two-thirds of over 1,800 water-related ‘events’ falling on the ‘co-operative’ scale of the WEIS. Of the less than one-third of events considered conflictual, most are rated only as ‘mild’ (Wolf, Yoffe and Giordano 2003). 98

Transboundary water interaction

Figure 5.1 Three Continua of Conflict ! Co-operation: a) NATO’s ‘Stages of Conflict Development’ (1999); b) Delli-Priscoli’s ‘Continuum of Alternative Dispute Resolution Techniques’ (1996); and c) Yoffe et al.’s ‘Water Event Intensity Scale’ (2003).

Researchers at International Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) are extending the quantitative examination of water co-operation by according dozens of indicators that qualify the signatories of transboundary water treaties. Brochmann and Gleditsch (2006), Hensel and Brochmann (2007) and Brochmann and Hensel (2008), for instance, examine the geographical, economic and political aspects in such indicators as political alliances, major power, length of river and gross domestic product. Conca’s (2006a) qualitative analysis examines the nature of treaties, asking how many include aspects of environmental protection, principles of international water law or stakeholder participation. In doing so, he questions the assumption that the existence of a treaty on a basin is evidence of co-operation—an issue that we will return to. Sadoff and Grey move beyond water conflict prediction and cataloguing to lead the policy-relevant implications of water conflict and co-operation. Starting from the point that ‘international rivers in some cases become a powerful catalyst for conflict, or a powerful catalyst for cooperation’ (Sadoff and Grey 2002, 291), they discuss four main types of co-operative benefits regarding international rivers. The work has developed the concept of

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‘benefit-sharing’, which appears to have taken some root, at least in the Nile Basin Initiative (UNESCO 2004). Sharing of benefits derived from the river (e.g. hydroelectricity), the argument goes, may be more politically feasible and therefore more likely than actual sharing of the transboundary resource itself. Tensions arising from the distributional nature of water conflicts—that is, scrambles for a larger share of the pie—would be reduced, as the pie itself is enlarged. Gerlak (2007) reviews the Global Environmental Facility’s own performance reviews after spending over US $700m. on transboundary water programmes. The results of the seed money designed to encourage co-operation through the ‘creation of a shared vision’ are mixed, with a failure to identify the root causes of the conflict listed as one of the concerns. The links between water scarcity and conflict have also evolved, with the initial inadequate conceptions of physical scarcity (e.g. Falkenmark and Rockstom 2000) later refined by Ohlsson and Turton (1999), Mehta (2001) and Falkenmark et al. (2007) to incorporate the very relevant social dimensions. Obstacles to collective action over environmental issues (such as physical or constructed water scarcity) are, after all, primarily social, requiring indepth context-specific understanding (Ostrom 1990). Waterbury (2002), for instance, ably showed nationalism and state interests to preclude collective action between Nile Basin states. Theoretical work on the transformation of transboundary water conflict to co-operation has been conducted by the US Army Corps of Engineers, which identifies 17 trends pushing towards co-operation (USACE 1996). Sadoff and Grey (2005) emphasize varying degrees of co-operation, noting that these may be incremental in an evolution from unilateral action ! co-ordination ! collaboration ! joint action. Similarly, the UNDP (UN Development Programme) 2006 Human Development Report identifies the range of co-operation, as ‘coordination (such as sharing information)’, ‘collaboration (developing adaptable national plans)’ and ‘joint action (which includes joint ownership of infrastructure assets)’ (UNDP 2006, 224). Wolf (forthcoming) spots opportunities for improvement through greater ‘efficiencies’ rendered by focusing on the lag between the start of a conflict and the conclusion of an agreement, and on the rather more violent sub-national contexts. Scheumann and Alker (2008) follow the same approach for addressing transboundary groundwater issues in Africa. The emphasis on transformation to co-operation is further supported by the work of Green Cross International (e.g. GCI 2000), the Woodrow Wilson ICS Environmental Change and Security Programme’s (ESP) Navigating Peace Initiative (e.g. Conca 2006b), and UNESCO’s From Potential Conflict to Co-operation Potential programme (e.g. UNESCO 2004). The problems with the ‘either/or’ approach to conflict and co-operation This rich body of work is wholly aware of the very complex set of circumstances under which interaction over transboundary occurs, notably the

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Transboundary water interaction complexity of time, space and changing political regimes. There is furthermore very broad consensus that conflict and co-operation co-exist. However, the fall-back analytical method is to examine the two as distinct phenomena. The most common analytical tool that the body of work relies on is the continuum, three variations of which appear in Figure 5.1. Analysis is greatly facilitated when conflict and co-operation are viewed under separate microscopes, and complexities are (at least temporarily) discarded. The use of a continuum forces one to compare various issues in terms of their relative significance. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) continuum (Figure 5.1a) sees the relations as ‘stages’ towards or away from war. While US–Cuban relations are famously poor, for example, the current tolerance of deviation from official rhetoric of both sides would suggest that the neighbours are somewhere between ‘unstable peace’ and ‘crisis’ with each other (and yet far from either stable peace or war). Delli-Priscoli (1996, 1998a, 1998b) employs the same device from the perspective of the US Army Corps of Engineers to characterize the difference between consensual (‘hot tub’) and adversarial (‘war’) approaches to collaboration for management of transboundary water disputes (Figure 5.1b). In plotting the general relation between two river basin organizations (RBOs) along the continuum, the author demonstrates, the analyst is obliged to characterize the communication patterns and trust between the parties. At some point (right of point ‘C’) relations may be so poor that the parties themselves may not be able to manage their dispute, and external involvement may be required for arbitration. The most detailed measure of co-operation and conflict directly applied to transboundary water contexts is Yoffe’s Water Event Intensity Scale (Figure 5.1c). The scale ranks events related to conflict and co-operation at any one of fifteen points. The tool simplifies and enables large-n analysis of transboundary water interactive events based on existing databases of river basin physical and administrative characteristics, notably Wolf ’s Freshwater Transboundary Dispute Database (2004) and variations of it. The Water Event Intensity Scale has proven useful for many of the studies previously discussed, as well as for Wolf et al. (2005), Zeitoun (2006, 2007), and Cascao (2003). However, as our brief review of the literature has shown, the use of continua to analyse interaction between actors over water issues may narrow our reflections, confining our thinking at the risk of over-simplifying complex situations. Continua make it difficult to represent the variations of relations over time and through changed political contexts (as the recent massive political transformations in Iraq have affected relations with Turkey and Syria on the Tigris, for example). Even more importantly, the unidimensional analysis may tend to obscure the multiple political dimensions of interaction. States or trans-national actors may be co-operating in data gathering (‘3’ on the WEIS), for instance, even while their leaders dispute openly and their armed forces clash (‘-4’, as in the case of Palestine and Israel (Jägerskog 2003)).

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Ethiopian and Egyptian water ministers work to transform the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) into a commission (nearly ‘4’ on the WEIS), while the tensions arising from the 1959 Sudan-Egypt Treaty (‘-1’, retaining the zero allocation of flows to Ethiopia) are in effect excluded from the discussion (Cascao and Zeitoun forthcoming). Elisabeth Kistin (2007) noted that this reliance on continua may have unintentionally led to a paradigmatic view that all conflict is ‘bad’ and that co-operation is inherently ‘good’. The tendency has led to policy assuming that relations over transboundary waters may be improved simply by promoting movement along one direction or on one element of the interaction, rather than addressing the broader context as a whole. However, considering the many less benign faces of co-operation, it is not always clear in which direction matters should be pushed. FACES OF TRANSBOUNDARY WATER CO-OPERATION

‘Co-operation’, it appears, is more complex than we generally tend to think. The purpose of this section is to reveal that co-operation has several ‘faces’, many of which are not habitually recognized. Lessons from the development, international relations and geography literature are drawn upon to explain the difficulties that we have with critical evaluation of co-operation, and the political and strategic faces of co-operation are discussed in light of the dominant perception that ‘any type of co-operation is good’. International agreements are generally seen as the pinnacle of co-operation. As Wolf et al. (2003, 30) emphasize ‘once cooperative water regimes are established through treaties, they turn out to be impressively resilient over time, even when between otherwise hostile riparians, and even as conflict is waged over other issues’. There is certainly evidence to support the observation. But if important components of the agreement are not implemented, or favour one actor at the expense of a collective win, the result would likely be rated as some form of ‘poor’ co-operation, or even ‘non-co-operation’ (Zawahri 2008). Some unimplemented treaties may stand for so long that their words and the evolving (or devolving) reality experienced on the ground are hopelessly distant, such as the Mahakali treaty between India and Nepal (Gyawali 2001). Fischhendler’s (2008) discussion of the deliberate ambiguity built into the water clauses of the 1994 Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty demonstrates that the treaty’s resilience may ultimately be less important than its failure to confront the distributional issues which drove the parties together in the first instance. Analysts are thus confronted with the problem of evaluation of treaties. Daoudy and Kistin (2008) suggests four criteria to measure the effectiveness of treaties (and which may be applicable to broader ‘co-operation’ in issues other than water): compliance, goals, interests and problem-solving. By looking at the criteria, we can identify cases like the Zambezi and Mekong river basins where, Fox and Sneddon (2007, 237) argue, ‘agreements are offered and legitimized as a means to advance ecological and human security, [but] they instead often

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Transboundary water interaction promote state-centric environmental securitisation’. Indeed, they go on to assert that ‘In both basins genuine environmental security is … being actively undermined by the codification of rules and principles contained in regional agreements. While often cast as environmental agreements, accords over transnational basins—particularly in the Global South—primarily serve as vehicles to promote the development goals (e.g. hydroelectric production and irrigation expansion) of their signatories’ (Fox and Sneddon 2007, 239). Kistin (2007, 8) calls us to move ‘beyond the notion of cooperation as treaties to a more dynamic view of transboundary water cooperation as an on-going and non-linear process in which state and non-state actors establish, challenge, modify and legitimize multi-layered governance structures’. Indeed, the circuitous process challenges the linear logic we employ to maintain deeplyheld beliefs—the idea that conflict is inherently ‘bad’, for example. Tensions may lead to resolution of conflict and thus be considered in a positive light. Wolf ’s ‘unstable cooperation’, for example, acknowledges that solutions to tensions over waters may lead to productive confrontation of other political disputes (Zawahri 2008). Jagerskög (2003) addresses the same nuance when invoking Keohane on the importance of distinguishing between harmony and co-operation, and for understanding that some conflict is necessary for ‘real’ co-operation. But just as tensions may lead to reduction of conflict, aspects of co-operation— such as treaties, river basin organizations or regimes—may reinforce it. Oran Young (2003) attributes the role that institutions play in causing environmental problems to issues of fit, interplay and scale, for example. The political context within which the co-operation occurs is the key to a final judgment on its merits. Arnstein’s (1969) foundational study of asymmetries of power in citizens’ participation in co-operative processes provides useful insight into the less considered aspects of co-operation. She provides a scale of levels of participation related to power-sharing, as shown in Figure 5.2a. These range from ‘non-participation’ processes, such as being manipulated, to powersharing structures where control is shared. Token participation, in the form of processes such as ‘consultation’, ‘informing’ and ‘placating’ occupies the large space in between the extremes. Bruns (2003) builds upon Arnstein’s ladder and other scales, applying them to water tenure reform. His extended ladder (Figure 5.2b) fleshes out the ‘power’ end of the spectrum, noting the improved results that derive from two-way shared responsibility and co-operation (rung no. 5, for example) compared to one-way communication and imposed decisions (bottom rung). Arnstein and Bruns’ continua differ from Yoffe et al.’s Water Event Intensity Scale (WEIS) for acknowledging the nuance of political processes active in co-operative events. An inherent weakness of the WEIS is that the definitions leave no space for those cases of established co-operation where some actors are effectively excluded from treaties, or their grievances are ignored through relatively low-impact gestures such as minimal data-sharing or collection, which may resemble token gestures of co-operation. Brown and

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Figure 5.2 Two Scales of Participation: a) Arnstein’s ‘Ladder of Participation’ (1969), and b) Bruns’ ‘Extended Ladder of Participation’ applied to water tenure reform (2003).

Ashman reinforce this view, noting that ‘Cooperation must span gaps in culture, power, resources and perspective. … Effective cooperation requires some degree of mutual influence that allows all the parties to influence and be influenced’ (1996, 1467, emphasis added). Several disciplines have grappled with the complexity of interpersonal, inter-group or interstate co-operation. In examining the role of the private sector in environmental governance, for example, Falkner (2003, 73) insists that ‘it needs to be distinguished from mere cooperation between private actors. Cooperation requires the adjustment of individual behaviour to achieve mutually beneficial objectives’. Brown and Ashman (1996, 1473) discuss the problems related to more powerful players framing the issues in transboundary environmental regimes. Co-operation, likewise, may have hidden, strategic aspects—what Daoudy and Kistin (2007) refer to as ‘strategic interaction’ and Sosland (2007) as ‘tactical functional cooperation’. Barrett (1998) has detailed the strategic behaviour during the pre-negotiations stage of environmental co-operation, noting that actors have their own reasons to stall, hinder, threaten or otherwise obstruct attempts at discussion or negotiation over shared waters. Not all co-operation is pretty Analysis runs the risk of being off-mark if the complexity of co-operation is not explicitly considered in detail. By focusing on the existence of data-sharing

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Transboundary water interaction between some Indian and Bangladeshi institutions, instead of on the very active political nuances of interstate relations related to the water conflict on the Ganges River, for example, one might well be convinced that co-operation is occurring. Indeed, on hearing the passionate plea for greater bilateral or multilateral co-operation over water data and projects made by a Bangladeshi representative at a recent water round-table—to temper the tragic consequences of drought and flood cycles—the Indian representative’s response was ‘but, we are cooperating’ (SIWI 2006). While the veracity of the statement is not in question, the foundational issues that underpin the water conflict (which cannot in any case rationally exclude upstream Nepal) remain ignored. The value of co-operation over select issues should be understood within the political context of riparian interactions. The cases highlighted as examples of co-operation in the 2006 UN World Water Development Report serve to demonstrate the limitations with approaches that do not take into account the political conditions in which the co-operation occurs. Table 11.2 of the report highlights key recent examples of ‘conflicts and cooperation’ from South America to Central Asia. Referring to the Friends of the Earth—Middle East’s (FOEME) Good Water Neighbours project, which managed to bring together Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli mayors of Jordan River riparian villages to advocate on the river’s behalf, the report states that ‘A variety of cooperative programmes have been set up in Jordan, Palestine and Israel to promote exchange of information and ideas between different communities in the region. These programmes have also furthered the campaign to protect the Jordan River, which brings stakeholders from the entire region together to work on sustaining the flow of this important river’ (UN 2006, 380). The campaign for protection of the Jordan River through unprecedented transboundary co-operation merits the attention given, and one certainly hopes the co-operation would extend to the higher political echelons. However, the report makes no mention elsewhere of the intractable conflict on the river, which also involves upstream Lebanon and Syria. Taken out of context, the report’s single reference to the Jordan River dispute leaves the reader with the impression that relations between the states over water issues are decent, or at least improving. Conclusions of a similar nature are reached in Feitelson’s (2006) liberal analysis of the political economy of the Israeli–Palestinian water conflict, and Sosland’s (2007) liberal international relations analysis of Jordan–Israel transboundary water relations. These studies make scant, if any, mention of the highly asymmetric 90%– 10% distribution of transboundary flows between Israel and the Palestinians, or the (somewhat less asymmetric) distribution between Israel and Jordan. The actual co-operation between Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli NGOs and mayors could be judged less significant than the more enduring actual conflict at the national level (which has been characterized for over a decade by the Israeli state’s refusal to quantify the Palestinian water rights that it recognized in the 1995 Oslo II Agreement). Upon studying the Israeli-Palestinian

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Joint Water Committee’s licensing procedure for water projects inside Palestine—which secures an effective veto for Israel if water projects (including basic drinking water projects, such as rainwater cisterns in certain areas) are deemed to threaten state political or military interests—Selby (2003) insists that this is not co-operation, but ‘domination dressed up as cooperation’, while Dombrowski (2003, 741) considers it a ‘disguise of cooperation’. Thus is another, less pretty, face of co-operation exposed. Policy implications The collaboration between mayors from three out of five sides of the Jordan River—like the minor data-sharing between Bangladesh and India—are examples of co-operation in practice. But, as our cursory review has highlighted other less visible faces, we argue that interaction—whether predominantly conflictual or co-operative (Daoudy 2004)—be considered in the light of the particular political context in which it occurs. Unquestioned support for any form of co-operation will not allow policy makers to recognize, let alone deal with, the shortcomings and detrimental effects of asymmetrical co-operative arrangements (Kistin and Phillips 2007). As Daoudy and Kistin (2008) point out, ‘the mere existence of co-operative arrangements is often celebrated as a sign of progress, with little or no interrogation of their influence’ over the intended goals of the co-operation. The advice given to lending and implementing agencies in the 2006 UNDP Human Development Report is a case in point: Co-operation [over transboundary waters] need not always be deep—in the sense of agreeing to share all resources and engaging in all types of cooperative ventures—for states to derive benefits from rivers and lakes. Indeed, given the different strategic, political and economic contexts in international basins, it makes sense to promote and support cooperation of any sort, no matter how slight. (UNDP 2006, 228) With continued support for unquestioned ‘co-operation’, one might expect to observe attempts to resolve the conflict give way to attempts to manage it, or worse, promote co-operation ‘of any sort’, as if the risks of reinforcing conflict did not exist. The problems with unquestioned promotion of co-operation ‘of any sort’ run deep. With an uncritical mindset the normal indicators of ‘cooperation’—such as river basin organizations (RBOs), riparian meetings, annual conferences, joint publications—may be misunderstood as evidence of the existence of ‘co-operation’ itself, just as we have discussed with the existence of treaties. The existence of an RBO, like the existence of a treaty, does not necessarily mean the existence of ‘co-operation’. There is evidence to suggest that the polarized approach to conflict and co-operation may result in policy where co-operation of any sort itself

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Transboundary water interaction becomes the goal. Feitelson (2006, 320), for example, asks as a main theoretical research question related to the Palestinian–Israeli water conflict, ‘what are the impediments to reaching agreements on the management of shared aquifers, and how can these be overcome?’. The focus is on how to reach an agreement (the qualities of which are not discussed), and not on the effective management of the aquifers. In fairness, the same author had worked on precisely this issue in Feitelson and Haddad (2000). The fact that there are less visible (or less emphasized) faces of co-operation explains how de-emphasizing the root tensions of a conflict may in fact be taking a step away from its resolution. If we are poorly equipped with an incomplete understanding of ‘co-operation’, we may be dissuaded from investigating or acting in those important cases where water conflict also exists. Furthermore, if we plan interventions assuming that co-operation predominates, and ignoring the original cause of conflict, we may in fact perpetuate a wholly inequitable and unsustainable order. An analytical method appreciating the dual nature of the transboundary water interaction is required to help us avoid such pitfalls. TRANSBOUNDARY WATER INTERACTION

Under the paradigmatic either/or mindset, Zeitoun (2007) discussed the socalled ‘co-operation vs conflict paradox’, seeking to explain the fact that some analysts perceive conflict on a river basin while others see co-operation. However, there really is no paradox. Though researchers are aware that conflictual events and dynamics almost inevitably exist alongside co-operative ones, they are limited in their ability to grapple with and express this fact. Mirumachi’s (2007a) conception of the Transboundary Waters Interaction NexuS (TWINS) opens up the path to dealing with the dual nature of interaction. Transboundary water interaction may be understood, examined, analyzed and explained by considering positions on a two-dimensional matrix rather than at discrete locations on a spectrum, as in Figure 5.3. The tool is founded on Craig’s (1993) argument, which recognized that there are high and low levels of both co-operation and conflict, plotting them on a 2 x 2 cell matrix (Mirumachi and Allan 2007). The matrix has been expanded to 5 x 4 cells to allow for more detail, and employs labels derived from hydropolitical and security theory for the conflict and co-operation scales, as shown in Figure 5.3. The co-operative (x) scale in the TWINS matrix incorporates elements of responsibility and power in much the same way that Arnstein’s ladder does for participatory processes. Political or strategic intentions to create consensus or goals of joint action increase the intensity of co-operation. The scale ranges from ‘confrontation of the issue’ at the low extreme, and ‘risk-taking’ interaction at the other extreme. The mid-scale labels of ‘ad hoc’, ‘technical’ and ‘risk-averting’ enable the analyst to distinguish interactions based on the intent and act. One may plot the difference, for example, between interaction

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Figure 5.3 Transboundary Water Interaction NexuS (TWINS) matrix.

that ‘just happens’ (i.e. ad hoc agreement between ferrymen and traders on either side of a boundary-forming river, without external government or outsider interference) and co-operation that has occurred following mutual agreement (i.e. risk-taking projects deriving from the EU Water Framework Directive or global environmental compacts). The conflictual (y) scale in the TWINS matrix draws upon security theory of the Copenhagen Schools, which Warner (Warner 2004) applied to the interaction over water-related issues. According to Figure 5.3, an issue or a state of affairs may be perceived within a range from non-politicized (‘off the radar’, i.e. not an issue, such as minimal river off-takes by small farms) to politicized (the event or state of affairs is an issue, or is being made an issue, such that it requires reallocation of national resources and considerations). This may extend to an issue being securitized (it is now reframed in existential terms, e.g. state security, as in the case of Israel and the 2002 Wazzani Springs dispute with Lebanon (Allouche 2004)) and ‘violized’ (where the issue has passed beyond the realm of normal politics and into the realm where extreme measures, such as warfare, are taken). The TWINS matrix of conflict and co-operation, applied to hydropolitical bilateral relations over time between Sudan and Egypt The case of relations between two major riparians on the Nile River serves briefly to exemplify the utility of the tool. Cascao’s plot in Figure 5.3 of the Egyptian-Sudanese relations onto the TWINS matrix shows the dynamics in these relations, perhaps most remarkably in the period prior to and following the signing of the 1959 Nile Treaty (path 1!2!3!4 in Figure 5.3). There has not in recent history been a period when the Nile flows were nonpoliticized. Prior to Sudanese independence (point no. 2), Egypt was engaged in undermining the Sudanese government, supporting a coup d’état. The 1959 treaty was signed favouring Egyptian interests such as the construction of the High Aswan Dam and the Jonglei Canal (in Sudan, to increase the water flow to Egypt), with a distribution of the flows (roughly 75%–25% in

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Transboundary water interaction Egypt’s favour). Sudanese experts generally regard the agreement as unfair, attributing Sudanese acquiescence to it to a pro-Egyptian regime in Khartoum and poorly-prepared negotiators. A generally more co-operative period followed signing of the treaty (point no. 3), with the Roseries Dam completed within Sudan and the Jonglei Canal project started. The Sudanese civil war upset stability and once again changed the nature of the interaction towards more intense conflict. Relations were tense over the 1980s and 1990s, with threats, counter-threats and the destruction of the Jonglei Canal, and were cut off altogether following an attempted assassination of Egyptian President Mubarak in 1995. Relations were restored in 1999, the same year as the establishment of the NBI. Egypt was for the first time obliged to engage in multilateral relations over the Nile, supporting ‘benefit-sharing’ projects such as hydropower (path 5 to 6). The Egyptian and Sudanese governments since that time have stood united on most water issues (Takele 2004, Eissa 2008), in defiant opposition to the expressed wishes of the upstream riparians. During ongoing negotiations of the new Nile legal framework, Egypt is taking a firm stand against potential re-negotiation of the 1959 treaty that was so favourable to its position. While the other states remain willing to co-operate through the NBI, tensions over the original inequality of the treaty remain palpable (Kameri-Mbote 2006), meaning the current plot of relations at point no. 6 may be moving back left or downwards. The TWINS method allows operationalization of one of the goals of this paper—that analysts acknowledge, think and work with the dual nature of transboundary water interaction. The selection of scales on both axes of TWINS also allows the political faces of the interaction to emerge, with the explicit recognition that particular faces of co-operation have neutral or less desirable features along with the positive ones. Obliged to plot a position against the opposing axis, the analyst is forced to question the political context that allows differing intensities of conflict and co-operation to co-exist. One can understand upon viewing the trajectory how a ‘co-operation’ event does not change the status quo of a water regime, or how contained conflict may be sustained. (The TWINS plot of Nepalese-Indian relations over the Ganges, for example, supports the view, and demonstrates very little movement in any direction, especially when compared to the plot of the Nile, above (see Mirumachi 2007)). Consequently, the political context determining different combinations of conflictive and co-operation interactions becomes a very important analytical focal point. THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF WATER INTERACTION

This final section intends to demonstrate that transboundary water interaction is beset with the interests, power games, illusions and distrust that accompany all political processes. The various faces of interaction that we have thus far seen are captured and linked together, in a first approximation, in a location on the TWINS tool and by their potential driving forces.

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As a political process, transboundary water interaction may serve strategic purposes, for example to attract external funding, or to share the burden of clean-up costs (Bernauer and Kuhn forthcoming). Strategy may draw on power asymmetries, of course, particularly if one of the more neutral or less pretty faces of co-operation is in place. Thorough evaluation of transboundary water interaction should thus consider the effects of power asymmetry. As this point is out of the scope of this paper, it suffices to mention here that power asymmetry is usually present, and sometimes this is extreme. Along with saliency, power asymmetry serves not only to describe the outcome of a conflict, but to describe the actual interactions established. There are reasons explaining, for example, why the clauses of treaties are not enforceable and may be skewed or lie dormant, while the institutions derived from the treaties are mere ‘paper tigers’ (Bernauer 2002). We have stated that the political context determines the process of interaction. We can capture the political nature of the various faces of co-operation and intensities that we have discussed thus far. These may usefully be categorized into the value-based categories: negative, neutral and positive, as catalogued in Table 5.1 and described below. Negative interaction is defined as interstate interaction, inducing a significant degree of resentment in one or more of the actors, and negatively affecting the broader political context. Traditional conceptions of conflict, as well as the dominative, coercive and exploitative ugly faces of co-operation that we have seen, may (contestably) be considered negative interaction. Neutral interaction is defined as interstate transboundary water interaction that may have no inherent effect on the broader political context. Neutral faces of co-operation that we have discussed include token, ‘non’ (Zawahri), narrow (Falkner), tactical functional (Sosland), ad hoc, self-interested and unstable (Wolf) co-operation. Neutral intensities of conflict correspond with mild verbal expressions from the WEIS. Such forms of co-operation may be most susceptible to seeds sown for conflict transformation (or to potential ‘efficiencies’, to refer to Wolf ’s term). Positive interaction is defined as interstate interaction that generally tends to meet the interests of the actors, and contributes to improvement or sustained relations at the broader political level. The so-called ‘pretty’ faces of cooperation that we have seen—i.e. ‘effective’, or equitable co-operation—may (again, contestably) be considered positive interaction. To ‘effective’ co-operation (Brown) we may add ‘broad’ co-operation (meaning co-operation across many issues, perhaps not all directly water-related) and ‘co-operation on equal terms’, whereby the co-operative structures are the result of an inclusionary deliberative process, such as that established along the Jordan River by FOEME. The examples given are by no means exhaustive, yet we may note some general features. Most faces of co-operation, for example, are subjectively neutral. That is, co-operation in and of itself proves neither manipulation nor pure intent, and is subject to the broader political context. The TWINS nexus assists in positing the interaction within that context, as shown in Table 5.1.

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Transboundary water interaction Table 5.1 Types and faces of transboundary water interaction (a first approximation) Characterization Types of of Interaction Interaction NexuS (TWINS) Low Conflict– High Co-operation

Low Conflict– Med. Co-operation

Low Conflict– Low Co-operation

Med./High Conflict–Low Co-operation

Examples of Interaction

Putting in place and exercising principles (i.e. equitable use, no harm); Creation of transboundary regimes; Negotiation of a treaty based on IWL; Conclusion of an effective treaty (Kistin) [Neutral Interaction] Joint pollution Narrow co-operation management; (co-operation on select Joint infrastructure; issues); Benefit-sharing based on Token co-operation; agreements; Creation of Mild verbal expressions RBOs of conflict [Neutral Interaction] Minor information Minimal or no exchange; interaction; Ad hoc Technical co-operation; commissions or meetings Self-interested cooperation; Tactical functional co-operation; Unstable co-operation [Negative Interaction] Contained conflict; Securitized Conflict; Negotiation of treaties Coercive Co-operation; not based on IWL; Resource capture; Dominative CoUnilateral operation; environmentalism Violent Conflict (Fischhendler) [Positive Interaction] Co-operation on equal terms; Co-operation across a broad range of issues; Tensions reduced through deliberative processes

Potential Driving Forces (nonexhaustive) Benefit sharing / expanding the pie Reduction of environmental uncertainty Economic / developmental Goals Issue linkage Mutual distrust Improvement of international reputation Sharing of resources Changes in power symmetry Control of resources

The table situates transboundary water interaction within the interaction nexus frame, giving examples, and speculating as to what may drive actors under the different circumstances. Table 5.1 reflects the intuitive association of ‘positive interaction’ with situations of low conflict and high co-operation. The so-called pretty faces of co-operation may result from or be driven by the establishment of an effective treaty based on internationally recognized principles, and may be driven by one party’s or all parties’ desire to reap benefits ‘beyond the basin’, to use Sadoff and Grey’s expression. It might be argued that the customary watersharing principles codified in international water law are more likely to be practised in situations of low conflict and high co-operation.

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The neutral forms of interaction are generally associated with those situations that may be described as minimally co-operative and conflictual, which is the case of the bulk of basins globally. Neutral faces of co-operation might develop under such circumstances when self-interests of the actors align, or where it occurs in an ad hoc fashion. Such informal co-operation based on coincidentally-aligned interests could start off with discussion of principles and, were the broader political context to allow it, eventually lead to the negotiation of a fair and effective treaty. The conflict transformation approaches of UNESCO, the Woodrow Wilson ECSP and the Global Environment Facility are expected to be most successful in such contexts. As a counterpoint, we have negative interaction associated with combinations of high conflict and low co-operation. Examples from the Tigris and Jordan rivers in Zeitoun and Warner (2006) show that this may result in or be driven by attempts to capture control of the resources or to contain an asymmetric outcome. This paper has discussed similar outcomes along the Nile and Ganges. Efforts aimed at conflict transformation in these contexts run a higher risk of actually perpetuating the root causes of the conflict, if blind to the political context. Towards drivers of co-operation The relative success of any potential drivers of interaction is inherently dependent on the state of relations between the actors. Dombrowski (2005) applies game theory to consider the effect of mutual benefits as incentives for co-operation, and further investigations into this area are required. Further ‘in-basin’ drivers might include benefit-sharing, reduction of uncertainty and economic or development goals. Speculatively, these drivers may induce broader co-operation or self-interested and tactical co-operation. ‘Out-of-basin’ drivers might include negotiations strategies (such as issue-linkage), or changes in power asymmetry (where one side increases its capacity to meet its commitments and responsibilities). Both of these sets of drivers might lead to more ‘effective’ cooperation, or co-operation on equal terms, and may be encouraged from external forces. Drivers of negative interaction may result from the desire to gain or maintain control of a transboundary water resource, or historical distrust of riparian neighbours. These drivers will be linked with power-related features and elaborated upon in the following paper in the series, and are less readily influenced by external parties. Table 5.1’s approximation requires refinement. Perhaps the most interesting feature is that the riparians can choose to emphasize a certain conflictive or co-operative face of interaction, thereby evading attention that may be given to the other face. The implications for analysts of transboundary water politics is that, in retaining our assumptions that any form of co-operation is good, we may miss the hidden stories and determinants of conflict. The implications for policy-makers is that time, effort and funds may be mis-spent working on the trappings of co-operation if the broader context of interaction is ignored.

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Transboundary water interaction CONCLUSION

This paper has sought to shed new light on conflict and co-operation in transboundary waters. We have demonstrated how much of the academic community has evolved well beyond the simplistic notion of environmental determinants of conflict, generally refuting claims such as Ki-Moon’s that water is at the heart of the violence in Darfur. We have asserted that analysis of transboundary water dynamics should be considered in the broad terms of political interaction rather than in the polarizing ‘either/or’ terms of conflict or co-operation. The unidimensional terms, we have argued, may unintentionally mask the nuance that exists in the majority of contexts, where conflict and co-operation in fact co-exist. It also discourages consideration of the less benign faces of co-operation, leading to unquestioned simplistic mantras such as ‘any form of co-operation is good’. We have reinforced the theoretical relevancy of the ‘TWINS’ approach to analysis of such co-existing conflict and co-operation. The approach permits the unmasking of co-operation that may actually be containing conflict, or of low-level conflict that drives towards its resolution. The co-operative side of interaction has been developed to reveal its multiple faces. Effective co-operation based on riparian compliance, goals, interests and problem-solving characteristics has here been differentiated from the unchallenged typical indicators of co-operation, such as the signing of a treaty or establishment of a river basin initiative. We have seen that ‘token’ cooperation, on the other hand, may serve to veil or perpetuate conflict. Coercive co-operation may deepen it. The classification of faces of such transboundary water interaction has been related to the driving forces of interaction, and has demonstrated its strategic uses. The drivers may allow an actor perceiving highly co-operative relations to de-emphasize the uglier faces of co-operation. The implications for analysts and policy-makers alike is that neglecting the nuance may lead to incomplete analysis and ineffective policy. The paper has insufficiently addressed three issues. First, although we noted the influence of power asymmetry in relation to situations of low conflict and lowto-medium co-operation, we have not examined an adequate evidence base to support it. Similarly, our identification of the strategic features of co-operation has not been substantiated. The third underdeveloped issue that this paper has introduced is that of the drivers of interaction. We have started to compare the types of drivers, such as expansion of benefits, which open up political space for interaction, with the rather more closed stance of not being willing to relinquish control of the resources. The power-related and strategic features of co-operation, as well as the drivers of interaction, will be developed in detail in a following paper. Given the breadth of the task, they may be the subject of several more. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Republished, with minor modifications and permission, from Zeitoun, M. and N. Mirumachi (2008), ‘Transboundary Water Interaction I: Reconsidering

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Conflict and Cooperation’, International Environmental Agreements 8, 297–316. This paper derives from the participants and ideas of the ‘Third International Workshop on Hydro-Hegemony: Power, Conflict and Cooperation,’ held at the London School of Economics and Political Science, May 2007. Special thanks are due to Tony Allan, Ana Cascao, Marwa Daoudy, and Jeroen Warner. Further thanks to Ana Cascao for her assistance plotting the TWINS matrix. BIBLIOGRAPHY Allouche, Jeremy (2004) Water Nationalism: An Explanation of the Past and Present Conflicts in Central Asia, the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent? Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales, PhD thesis, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. Arnstein, Sherry R (1969) ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’, JAIP, 35 (4). Barrett, Scott (1998) ‘On the Theory and Diplomacy of Environmental Treaty-Making. Environmental and Resource Economics’ 11 (3–4), 317–333. Bernauer, Thomas (2002) ‘Explaining Success and Failure in International River Management’ Aquatic Science, 64, 1–19. Bernauer, Thomas and Patrick M. Kuhn (forthcoming) ‘Who’s Your Neighbour? Insights from International Water Pollution’. Brochmann, Marit and Nils Petter Gleditsch (2006) ‘Conflict, Cooperation and Good Governance in International River Basins’, International Conference–Governance and the Global Water System: institutions, actors, scales of water governance facing the challenges of global change, Bonn, Germany, 20–23 June, Global Water Systems Project. Brochmann, Marit and Paul R. Hensel (2008) ‘Peaceful Management of International River Claims’, Paper prepared for the 49th annual Conference of the International Studies Association, San Francisco, CA, 26–29 March. Brown, David L. and Darcy Ashman (1996) ‘Participation, Social Capital, and Intersectoral Problem Solving: African and Asian Cases’, World Development, 9, 1467–1479. Bruns, Bryan (2003) ‘Developing an Extended Ladder of Participation’, RCSD Conference—Politics of the Commons: Articulating Development and Strengthening Local Practices, Chiang Mai, 11–14 July. Butts, Kent Hughes (1997) ‘The Strategic Importance of Water’, Parameters—US Army War College Quarterly (Spring), 65–83. Cascao, Ana (2003) Hydropolitics in Ethiopia, Master’s Thesis, Lisbon University, Lisbon, Portugal. Cascao, Ana Elisa and Mark Zeitoun (forthcoming) ‘Power, Hegemony and Critical Hydropolitics in the MENA Region’, in Earle, Anton, Anders Jägerskog, Joachim Ojendal and Karin Lexen, Transboundary Water Management: From Principles to Practice, Earthscan. Conca, Ken (2006a) Governing Water: Contentious Transnational Politics and Global Institution Building, Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. ——(2006b) The New Face of Water Conflict, No. 3 in the Navigating Peace series, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Environmental Change and Security Programme, July. Craig, J.G. (1993) The Nature of Co-operation, Montreal: Black Rose Books.

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Hydro-hegemonic politics: A crossroads on the Euphrates-Tigris? JEROEN WARNER

INTRODUCTION

‘Hydro-hegemony’ is an increasingly but rather loosely used term to describe power play in river basins. It is a convenient epithet to lambast the behaviour of regional great powers in international river basins. At the global level, a transnational hegemonic conspiracy is assumed—such as the International Rivers Network’s identification of ‘the world water mafia’ (IRN 2003) to describe what it perceives as overly cosy relations between water companies and policy-makers who impose a business-friendly global agenda. This chapter first seeks to develop a better understanding of hegemony as a control strategy that is qualitatively different from dominance. The fact that a water war has not happened between Turkey and its neighbours, can, among other reasons, be attributed to Turkey’s hegemonic role in the region (e.g. Zeitoun and Warner 2006; Erickson 2004). While dominance is predominantly based on ‘hard power’, the ‘soft power’ underlying hegemony promises ‘a way to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion’ (Nye 1990, 10). This part of the article delves a little deeper into ideas explored in Zeitoun and Warner’s ‘Framework of Hydro-Hegemony’ (2006). Second, it introduces hegemony as a layered, multilevel phenomenon (global hegemony, regional hegemony, river basin hegemony, state-society relations), the layers of which impinge on each other, a concept first introduced in Warner (2008). This approach remedies to a degree the correct criticism of state-centricity levelled at hydro-hegemony analysis (Selby 2007; Davidsen-Harden et al. 2007) through its attention to transnational actors as being perhaps even more important than state actors. Rather than identifying hegemonies and their nature, this article will suggest that Turkey’s hegemony is contested at multiple scales and constrained from different sides, not least at home. While there is a kind of ‘basin regime’, the prospect of a pervasive pax aquarum is still way off. It also argues that Turkey’s domestic and regional water politics is also subject to hegemonic games at the global level. As the unitary Republic of Turkey was opening up to internal diversity and international investment, the Fifth World Water Forum in Istanbul was a focus for multiple ongoing struggles.

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Section 2 explores the meaning of hegemony as a public good. It delves into the different evaluations of hegemony at different levels. Section 3 introduces and discusses neo-Gramscian thought on domestic and international hegemony as applied to the water sector. Section 4, applying the building blocks developed in the earlier sections, analyses the Turkish hydraulic power strategy and the counter-hegemonic strategies to Turkish hydraulic ambitions, in their ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power manifestations. A conclusion closes the chapter. APPROACHES TO HEGEMONY

Hegemony as a public good Science-for-policy, which water scholars often are involved in, especially runs the risk of entanglement with hegemonic values. The example of US social scientists worrying about hegemonic decline of the USA in the 1980s and 1990s—ceding ground to the USSR and, later, Japan—may illustrate the identification of science with safeguarding hegemonic interests. This concern about declining US power gave rise to Robert Keohane’s landmark ‘After Hegemony’ (1984) and prompted Susan Strange (1987) to decry the ‘myth of lost hegemony’. Developing a strategy to maintain international stability in the face of the perceived decline of US predominance in the global political arena was perceived as vital. Would it be possible for the USA to maintain its pole position but assume fewer military responsibilities, for example, through delegation of power and side payments? In the realist school of international relations a coercive power is needed to achieve some sort of order—after Hobbes (1651): a Leviathan. However, hegemonic theory (Lustick 2002) argues that the degree of coercion may vary without the ‘top dog’ necessarily losing control. While hegemony is frequently mixed up with dominance, there are clear differences between the two types of rule. In this article, in line with Gramscian thinking, dominance is defined as leadership buttressed by coercion, and hegemony as leadership buttressed by authority (see also Zeitoun and Warner 2006). A hegemon can force others to do what they would otherwise not do. However, the coercive aspect of such hegemonic control has different degrees of indirectness (‘degrees of removal’), ranging from gun-point to a situation where power and sanctions are only implied, as the shadow of hierarchy (Jessop 1997) in modern state rule—up to a point where the desired behaviour is so internalized that there is no need for enforcement. Each of the degrees of indirectness is associated with a certain degree of governing. The ambition to project one’s power regionally or even globally cannot easily be realized without running a tight ship at home. Weber (1947) likewise saw legitimate power as power that is regarded as legitimate. A congruence between power and beliefs, values and expectations, provides its justification. For this, people consider what an economist would term the opportunity costs of acceptance: the costs of accepting this

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Hydro-hegemonic politics arrangement rather than another. Hegemony can be bought by popular actions, promises, or kickbacks, but Rush (1992, 21) suggests that fear, apathy, or cynicism also promote acceptance. Coercion and persuasion, bribes inducing envy, all help to bring about hegemonic compliance. Legitimacy, then, combines the idea that there should be (justified) difference between dominant and subordinate actors with a (perceived) common interest between the two (Beetham 1991, 72). This latter element is important to the discussion of how this common interest (and the resulting sense of solidarity) is constructed in hegemonic strategies. As hegemony is always contestable, it can call forth a counter-hegemonic thrust (see also Cascao 2008). Hegemony needs to be continually reproduced and is always (potentially) contested, so hegemons need to keep enrolling or forcing other stakeholders to accept their solution and not that of others. This point is considered further below. Hegemony: good, bad, ugly? In the following sections, I will look into the tenets of both the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ views of hegemony and apply them to the water sector. I undertake this because many accounts of hegemony carry a strong value connotation: hegemony is either perceived as something quite vital (‘hegemony is legitimate’ as hegemons and their political consultants would argue), or something devious and repressive. The positive connotation of hegemony, emphasized in the realist tradition of international relations, is vested in (global or regional) leadership. Without leadership, a political constellation can fall into anarchy, which in realist theory is the worst of all states of play. Someone has to lead, and hegemons regard it as their moral duty or natural right to lead. There are significant transaction costs however in taking responsibility—which is part of the explanation why non-hegemonic actors comply with hegemony. Non-hegemonic actors will accept and comply with leadership, even if it is unpopular, when they see benefit in not having to assume the burdens that come with leadership. A leader has to provide stability of expectations, thus reducing transaction costs in providing an international public good: say, free trade, stability, law and order. A protection relationship with a hegemon, such as Japan’s relationship with the USA after the Second World War, allowed Japanese free-riding and thus cost-saving (see also Kindleberger 1986). While hegemony provides stability of expectations, the relationship between hegemons and non-hegemons is not necessarily peaceful or co-operative. The term hegemonic stability only tells us that there is no overt conflict. Indeed, Keohane (1984) argues that there are very few examples of hegemonic stability. How the stability is evaluated depends on how happy the non-hegemons are, and whether they perceive benefit in the status quo. ‘Co-operation’ does not mean that there is no underlying conflict or power imbalance. The way states ‘co-operate’ with each other may be suspiciously like the way a detainee 121

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‘co-operates’ with his captors. At the same time, all involved may happily cooperate in the continuation of a conflict, which takes on aspects of a ritual, as well as bringing attention and, potentially, donor funds. Prys (2008) feels that the realist view neglects the importance of acceptance and non-hegemon followership. She captures hegemony in terms of what may be called the ‘4 Ps’: Predominance (political, economic and/or military), (Self-) Perception, Projection, Provision. Hegemons, she notes, tend to display a strong sense of responsibility, of entitlement or exceptionalism, perceiving themselves as ‘above the law’ because they are ‘chosen’ to establish order. Thus, the justification for the USA acting as a global policeman was the global ‘public good’ or relative peace (pax Americana), representing the US good as the global good. South Africa mirrored this aspiration for its region (Turton 2005): At the same time hegemonic powers may pursue a ‘strategy of denial’, being apologetic about their pre-eminent position and emphasizing partnership. However, both types of hegemon, the aggressive and self-effacing type, tend to ‘project’ their hegemony and display regional activities that promote and ‘socialize’ their vision and values so as to establish a support base for this vision. Finally, a hegemon ‘provides’ public goods such as security and development, often unilaterally (Prys 2008). Much 1980s US international relations (IR) scholarship on regime formation was concerned with the maintenance of global US hegemony. However, a different, critical tradition is concerned with its overthrow. From the perspective of non-hegemons, the above attitudes are precisely the attributes that make ‘hegemony’ a euphemism for ‘empire’ (Ferguson 2003) or ‘domination’ (Selby 2003). Hardt and Negri (2000) for example argue that ‘pax americana’ in fact means the suppression of actors that do not co-operate with the USA’s global strategies in a permanent state of exception. It should be noted that, for mainstream IR, there does not necessarily need to be one hegemon to create stability. The so-called ‘English school’ in international relations has explored how a ‘balance of power’ can work as an antihegemonic strategy (Clark 2009). Liberal internationalists have wondered if reform of the mechanisms of multilateral management could save the day, thus ‘flattening’ the pyramid; as hegemony obstructs trade; hegemony should be plus-sum and over time disappear as interdependencies grow (Dougherty and Pfalzgraff 1997) While hegemons make the rules, non-hegemons have considerable scope to obstruct or co-opt the hegemon. If the hegemonized think they stand to gain from the terms of hegemony, they may calculate that it is not worth resisting (Haugaard and Lentner 2006). Indeed Watson (2007) notes that, while hegemonies are often imposed, hegemons and non-hegemons negotiate the terms

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Hydro-hegemonic politics of hegemony continuously. The hegemonized can withhold acceptance of the public good that the hegemon wants to provide, increasing the costs of compliance—especially if that good cannot be provided by the hegemon alone. Opponents to hegemony promote counter-hegemonic strategy (displacing the existing hegemon by a better one). However, for hegemony to be resisted the hegemonized have to be aware of their subaltern position, and decide that enough is enough. Intricate forms of power (Lukes 2005 [1974]) may prevent them from developing a social consciousness. Furthermore, is the state really the seat of power? As Selby (2007) has pointed out, a Gramscian approach to hegemony has some different answers to these questions. The next section explores this in some detail. A GRAMSCIAN TAKE ON HYDRO-HEGEMONY

While many US political scientists draw on the Machiavellian heritage of Mosca’s work on hegemony (how to stay in power), Europeans find inspiration in Gramsci, who turns Mosca on its head (how to undermine power) (Finocchiaro 1999). This is of consequence to scholars: critical scholars point out the moral duty for ‘organic intellectuals’ within the hegemonic system, working in policy circles, in research-for-policy, education and the press, to play an important role in this, in taking sides in support of the oppressed, the underdogs, to raise consciousness of their disadvantaged position and claim to represent non- or counter-hegemonic perspectives. Scholars who cultivate strong roots in their community, working to maintain links with local issues and struggles that connect to the people and their experiences—that make a group a social actor—give the group coherence and an agenda. ‘For any oppressed group, the primary task is to overcome the moral authority of the sources of their suffering and to create a politically effective identity. … [They should] reverse the kinds of solidarity among the oppressed that aids the oppressor … [and] participate in their own empowerment.’ (Moore 1978, 87) Realism as a belief system relies on the notion that states have always existed (Ayoob 2002) and have a tendency to reduce a country to its government. Charles Tilly (1990) has famously shown that states are in fact a relatively recent and mostly European (Westphalian) phenomenon (though see Wittfogel, below). As a result, the state sector needs to secure and defend its position vis-à-vis other actors within the territory. States tend to result from quite violent processes, and are not sure of their continued existence. They came into being by uniting the country in an external war (‘states made war and wars made states’), helping them to survive and consolidate their position domestically, so that they did not need to subdue or repress their population. Next, they offered their subjects protection deals (contracts), which—as Tilly sees it—more often than not turned out to be protection rackets.

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While in the East the (hydraulic) state was everything (Wittfogel 1957), civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in liberal states, civil society institutions may act as the conduits of hegemonic power rather than the agencies of the state itself. ‘When the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was … only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks’ (Gramsci 1971, 236–38 (Q7§16)). This indicates that the role of normative hegemony should not be overlooked. The same people who pronounce themselves as anti-American or anti-British may identify with and reproduce those nations’ cultural artefacts (e.g. Levy’s 2003 account of jihadists). Norms, customs, and, ultimately, the law are ways of ‘normalizing’ citizens such that they can be more easily controlled. Modern hegemonies also maintain themselves through cultural institutions—the media, art, education, religion, and civic institutions ‘often with “voluntary” membership, such as the law abiding citizens’. The state’s legislative, executive and judicial functions can all help to maintain the state’s primacy, especially where they are not as independent of each other as Montesquieu would have liked them to be. A hegemonic actor or coalition has considerable power to (re)write the rules of the game: metapower, to set or keep issues off the agenda, i.e. putting them on the non-agenda (Bachrach and Baratz 1970). A hegemon’s material power undergirds its power to represent the world in a particular way. The capacity of hegemons to maintain their pole position, other than through repression, depends on their capability to persuade subordinate actors not just to accept their authority, but to adopt and internalize the hegemonic values and norms to privilege one solution over the others, to get them to accept a state élite’s problem definition. Hegemonic states are involved in imagebuilding in the press, public information campaigns, education and cultural life, so that others believe and subscribe to their authority. These images are supported by rhetorical devices, if ultimately underwritten by the state’s disposal of the means of violence. Neo-Gramscians see foreign policy orientation as the result of a particular class formation and strategy within that country. Gramscian hegemony is the capacity of a social group to present its interests as the general interest. It is a class compromise, based on a particular model of development, regulated by institutions. Gramscians especially analyze how, within a ruling class formation at the national and international levels, land-based capital fractions (agriculture, industry) compete with international fractions (banking, air transport), and try to improve their position through different hegemonic strategies (‘comprehensive concepts of control’). In charting the rise of global capitalism, van der Pijl (1992) describes the rise and fall of global hegemonic powers. Land-based powers (France, Germany, Russia, Ottoman Turkey) tended to compete with, and lose out to, sea power (Portugal, Netherlands, Britain, the USA) which were content to ‘rule the waves’ even if that sea power did not have the military power to establish

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Hydro-hegemonic politics government elsewhere. What may be called remote control or delegated hegemony implies that others will carry out the hegemon’s plans, or at least not act contrary to them, because they have accepted and internalized its maxims. Hegemony saved costs (‘colonialism on the cheap’), making rule in far-flung areas easier. Global hegemons were always champions of free trade; their military and economic superiority gave them a competitive edge, as well as the power to make the rules (van der Pijl 1992). The Spanish, Dutch, British and Americans could afford to become Lockeian, liberal, free-trading states on the strength of their overpowering stature. Their competitors needed to be Hobbesian, authoritarian, controlling, protectionist states to catch up. They induce what Gramsci calls a ‘passive revolution’—those who first rejected or were too slow in picking up the original (economic, technological) revolution, carry through reforms containing elements of the original, in a top-down manner to stay alive. We will encounter such passive revolutions below. It is notable that neo-Gramscians do not set so much store by the state nor its overthrow, but rather by the formation of an international élite forming hegemonic blocs to pursue their preferred ‘regime of accumulation’. This, it can be argued, is also taking place in the internationalizing water sector, in the slipstream of what the leading World Bank development economist John Briscoe (1997) has identified as the hegemony of the market model of development, and the corresponding move to using market-like and market-friendly instruments for managing all elements of the economy (including water). While water management was traditionally a local, regional or, at best, national concern, French, British and US water companies have expanded their ambits in the 1990s and negotiated contracts in developing countries, forming alliances with construction companies and investment banks to secure different permutations of Build, Operate, Transfer, or continued management of dams, hydro-electricity power plants and water supply and sanitation schemes. But, given the risky nature of such investments, they require the backing of states and multilateral institutions. International water companies seeking the profits of privatization of the water delivery sector do not work in a vacuum, as donor governments help investors and infrastructure constructors working in a competitive world market by providing easy export credit guarantees. From a critical Gramscian perspective, this constitutes a successful transnational alliance of ‘fractions of capital’ in the world market. In this line of analysis, a hegemonic state lends space to the social basis that supports it to internationalize. The hegemonic élite are now a transnational coalition, and international organizations such as the World Bank can act as transmission belts to socialize the élite from the periphery according to the norms of the hegemonic order, so that leaders in the South start to believe that it is in their interest too, as Biersteker (1992) has argued in order to explain the popularity of the neo-liberal ‘Chicago’ school of economics with the Southern élite. The ‘soft power’ is in the attractive discourse of these alliances that institutional reform will bring peace and prosperity for the privatizing regions. In the case study below I will argue that the privatization of Turkey’s

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water sector can be explained as a passive revolution in response to the consolidation of liberal capitalism on a global scale—freeing up funds, albeit a ‘gift’ with strings attached. A public-private alliance bailed Turkey out of it financial straits, at the cost of opening up its water sector to international business. This critical tradition reminds us that the ability to define truth and meaning produces and is a product of power. The powerful élite seek to impose their vision upon everyone else. Critical discourses that question this liberal agenda may seem irrational and deviant when regarded from the perspective of the hegemonic discourse, going against ‘a prevailing common sense … that informs values, customs, and spiritual ideals and induces “spontaneous” consent to the status quo’ (Peet 2002, 60). They warn us that hegemonic discourses are reproduced in international fora. Organizing expert conferences gives the initiator of those events a favourable international aura, and controlling the agenda helps him spread certain visions and builds images of strength (e.g. Wegerich 2008 for Central Asia). However, Khagram (2004) argues that a transnational counter-coalition of grassroots movements and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has become a common future of world politics. Anti-globalists routinely organize Alternative Fora, such as the Alternative World Water Forum in Istanbul alongside the official one in March 2009. International fora like these are sites where the international élite from states, the private sector and organized civil society meet and attune ideas. They are therefore also battlegrounds where countervailing ideas are rejected, accepted or co-opted. The 2009 Forum was in fact the focus for many layers of struggles, expressed in angry words and shouting. Let us look at the multiple layers of these struggles in the Euphrates and Tigris basin to apply the conceptual inventory outlined above. THE CASE OF TURKEY

Turkey: in search of internal and external security The Euphrates-Tigris river system, located in the Fertile Crescent, feeds and quenches a dry area mythically known as the cradle of civilization. On average, Syria and Iraq are outside the danger zone for water scarcity in terms of Malin Falkenmark’s rule of thumb for water stress. By those standards, the Euphrates-Tigris basin has never been a convincing case for the Malthusian water wars hypothesis. Still, intermittent droughts can cause considerable problems, and conflicts abound at domestic, fluvial and regional level, some violent, some ‘cold’, some ‘silent’ (Zeitoun and Warner 2006). ‘Downstream states are normally the first to develop, being located on fertile floodplain and estuaries. Upstreamers manifest themselves later, but take advantage of geography. The ability of upstreamers to use their infrastructure to induce droughts (by stocking up on water) or floods (by releasing water in dam reservoirs) makes downstreamers look for a stronger hand. As a rule,

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Hydro-hegemonic politics upstreamers use water to get more power, downstreamers use power to get more water’ (Warner 2004). The relationship between water and hegemony likewise runs both ways. Hydro-hegemonic states need water to maintain hegemony, and deploy hegemonic strategy to get hold of water. Indeed Iraq and Syria started building dams on the rivers before Turkey did, and almost went to war over it in 1975. As a water-rich country in a water-scarce region, upstream Turkey has the political stability to exploit and deliver it. Tapping these riches incentivized a development presaged by Atatürk, a 1970s plan for ‘seven earrings’ (reservoirs), three of which were merged into the enormous Atatürk reservoir. From there the water is guided through 24m-long tunnels into the vast Harran Plains. Under President Özal, Turkey began building a series of 22 dams in the 1980s. Syria and Iraq set aside their own long-standing differences over the river and mobilized the Arab League against the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP). This has set off a series of linkage strategies between water and non-water issues. Syria has many issues with Turkey, including the province of Alexandretta (Hatay), which was given to Turkey by its colonial French rulers.1 Turkey, meanwhile, has an historic claim on the oil-rich Northern Iraqi region of Mosul and Kirkuk, which less prudent Turkish politicians, specifically President Özal at the time of the Gulf War, have at times revived. Both downstreamers pose as a victim of unilateral Turkish decisions on the river. Their governments protested against each new dam as a matter of course, complaining of failed harvests and interrupted water services in Damascus as a result of the closing of dams. Syria made much noise about Turkey’s late prior notice of the filling of the Atatürk Dam in 1992, for which it closed off the river for a month. After a further series of dams on the Euphrates, Turkey has now begun building on the Tigris, which will especially affect Iraq. In 2009, Iraq, the land between the two rivers (in Greek: Mesopotamoi) experienced its second very dry year, and was feeling the water pinch. The Iraqis demanded 150 cu m/s (cubic metres per second) extra in a recent trilateral meeting. However, a complicating factor is that before reaching Iraq, the rivers cross Syria, which itself takes water (not very efficiently). Over two-thirds of the water coming into Iraq is controlled by upstreamers, Iran, Syria and Turkey. However, downstreamers are far from powerless. Shapland (1995) has inventoried successful downstream strategies. In the Syrian case, this has ranged from repeated protests and threatening letters to foreign investors and constructors involved in GAP, to active linkage with the Kurdish issue. The Kurds living in Turkish territory reasserted their claim for independence when in 1984 the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) started a violent campaign against Turkish targets, including the Atatürk Dam. The Turkish army struck back hard, but the Kurdish militants could count on external support. Syria first used Lebanon’s Biqa’a valley as a training ground for Kurdish (and Turkish) radicals of the left, then, when Turkey protested, moved the Kurds to northern Iran. This way, Syria continuously taunted Turkey, calling its bluff (MacQuarrie 2003) until Turkey finally found itself 127

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compelled to flex its mucles. In 1998, the rhetoric of war flared up again, resulting in Syria co-operating with ‘Apo’ Òcalan’s extradition in October 1998 and the two countries signing co-operative agreements. The fear that Turkey basically (if not very practically) has the ability to cut off Euphrates water for six months has been a source of acute discomfort for downstream countries. The dams may reduce available water for downstreamers, but will also regulate the river. The dams regulate the hydrological regime of the Euphrates and Tigris to coincide with downstream agricultural needs, preventing or cushioning the kinds of floods and droughts that happened in the 1950s and 1970s. In Iraq, for example, snowmelt in March can cause torrential flooding in April, the harvest month, which necessitated early diking, canalization and diversion works in Iraq (see: www.livius.org/men-mh/ mesopotamia/tigris.html). In 1987, in the context of a protocol for co-operation, Turkey promised to release an average of 500 cu m/s across the Turkish– Syrian border, an amount raised to 900 cu m/s in 1995, and it has (on average) not flagrantly defaulted even in dry years. In mid-2009 Turkey increased the flow of the Euphrates river into Iraq by 50% (UPI 2009) – though it should be noted that this was only about half the 2000 level. This state of affairs creates a stability of expectations which can be seen as an international public good, though downstream neighbours do not usually see it this way. The non-hegemons feel that they do not draw sufficient benefit from hegemonic stability, criticizing Turkey for its arrogance in positing Turkish self-interest as the regional common good without conferring with its neighbours, including in respect of flood regulation for Iraq. While Syria and Iraq may well benefit in this sense, they object to Turkey unilaterally setting the terms. Turkey’s co-riparians do not (or profess not to) like the terms of the hegemonic contract which they, if they felt taken seriously, might otherwise accept. While Turkish regulatory decisions such as the occasional arrest of the flow to impound reservoirs have been perceived by downstreamers as unilateral and self-serving, their threats have always stopped short of actual bloodshed. Bilateral and trilateral technical teams on the Euphrates-Tigris have met on and off despite recurring political threats of military action, a pragmatic acceptance of the faits accomplis on the part of the downstream neighbours. Since 1998 the mood has changed perceptibly towards conciliation after the Syrians extradited Öcalan. Kibarog˘ lu (1996, 2002) has argued that there are unmistakable signs of regime formation in the Euphrates-Tigris, citing technical co-operation between Turkish GAP and Syrian GOLD development projects as a sign of win-win configuration. Turkey proposed the so-called Three-Stage Plan. Daoudy (2005) notes in this context that the depoliticized ‘new hegemon’s discourse’ is all about benefit-sharing (after Sadoff, Whittington and Grey 2002). However, while there seems to be a movement from realist going-it-alone to forms of co-operation, this new stable equilibrium remains within a context of hegemonic power relations. Mutual co-ordination means that Turkey is willing to consult with Syria, but also that Syria resigns

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Hydro-hegemonic politics to Turkish hegemony—since there is hardly equal power between the partners. While there are promises and de facto patterned behaviour, there is still no basin treaty. Turkey has repeatedly made water offers to states outside the EuphratesTigris basin: to the Gulf states, Israel, Syria and now Palestine to build so-called ‘peace pipelines’. In 1987 Turkey suggested it build a three-armed peace pipeline to provide water for the whole region. However, the recipientswere not necessarily thrilled to be dependent on Turkish water. Turkey made a similar offer to countries in Central Asia, which is also a very dry area indeed, but without concrete outcomes. However, Israel has had serious negotiations to buy water: in 2004, the countries discussed a contract for giant ‘Medusa bags’ or super-tankers filled with water from the Manavgat river to go to a port in Israel, but the deal stalled on account of internal Israeli debate about its merits. Unlike the Trojans of old, who couldn’t resist accepting, but in doing so found themselves beleaguered from the inside, they may look a gift horse in the mouth. Turkey’s room for manoeuvre is increased but also constrained by its desire to join the European Union and be friendly with the USA, Turkey has made considerable concessions. It made profound concessions to Europe in 2000– 2005 to keep the door open to membership of the European Union. Converting Öcalan’s death penalty into a life sentence is only one of the many European demands for reform that Turkey swallowed whole. Turkey investigated how it could the meet the provisions of the European Water Framework Directive (Hermans 2005). Since 2004 Turkey’s Islamist government seems to be losing patience with Europe’s tardiness and to be looking East. However, Turkey is very aware of the need to make friends with both the Great Powers and their middle-power allies. Turkey is one of the USA’s long-standing top recipients of aid, and the country has been a cornerstone and stalwart of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). However, there are limits to the degree to which Turkey is willing to antagonize Iraq—for example, when Turkey occasionally needed the Iraqis to allow ‘hot pursuit’ of Kurdish rebels on Iraqi territory, which was often granted as Saddam had his own Kurdish problem. While Turkey willingly lent its territory to the alliance against Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait, it refused to do so in the last war. Also, Turkey reportedly refused to block the Euphrates in 1991, despite Allied requests to do so, arguing that ‘water is life’ and therefore it would not use water as a military instrument. After the allied capture of Saddam Hussein, Turkey immediately declared its intention to respect the boundaries of Iraq, despite its territorial claims on Mosul and Kirkuk. The hegemonic overlay of the global over the regional arena is economic and ideological as much as it is political. When Turkey launched the first GAP design in the 1960s, it was primarily a ‘hydraulic mission’-style regional development project, in line with the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) model practiced in the United States, the Mekong, and Spain. A development

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project seemed a harmless strategy to kill multiple flies in one swat. A desire for self-sufficiency and stronger export position (currency), coupled with a skyrocketing energy bill in the 1970s may well have been key economic reasons for Turkey to speed up the ambitious and financially crippling plan. The GAP was personally backed by two Presidents steeped in engineering, Turgut Özal and Suleyman Demirel. But the enormous development project also addressed the Kurdish question as an economic problem. Bringing wealth and prosperity to an economically backward region and modernizing feudal land tenure relations would undermine Verelendung-induced Kurdish violence. As Swyngedouw (1999) has shown for Spain, a hydraulic mission can serve as a strategy to overrule traditional quasi-feudal tenure relations and class divisions. However, Atatürk’s radical land reform vision to break the power of the agas was watered down by liberal successors with landowning stakes, and has not been all that successful in the Turkish GAP area (Mutlu 1996). Jacoby (2005), moreover, has argued that the enduring military presence in Anatolia has made Turkey a two-nation state, an authoritarian (Wittfogelian?) East and a liberal West. The ‘Fordist hydraulic class compromise’ was at best a mixed bag in Turkey. Turkey has always maintained that the GAP project benefited peace and prosperity in the basin. While the modifications in GAP won Turkey plaudits in the international water world, Turkey does not have the same status in the development sector as Egypt. It is in no position to make the rules internationally. The water world is keen to invest in peace initiatives on the Nile; Egyptians populate the higher ranks of the World Bank and water system. Turkey, on the other hand, had an early run-in with the Bank when it failed to gain the consent of downstream neighbours, a precondition for obtaining World Bank loans. Faced with an acute shortage of project funds, Turkey needed to co-opt the global hegemony of liberalization and privatization in the water sector: faced with obstacles to access to international funds, the Turkish liberalized the water sector overnight as a way out in 1994. Privatization means important erosion in the state’s primacy over public services. In the case of Turkey, multilateral backing for GAP was lacking, and, as funds ran out dramatically, an expensive legal process, as well as a change in the constitution, was needed to secure loans from the international private sector—a passive revolution under the pressure of global hegemonic forces. Still, Turkey can afford to be less forthcoming in the face of external pressures such as complying with international law while there is as yet no universally agreed water legislation; upstreamers keep claiming sovereignty, and downstreamers equitable (and, where expedient, prior) use (McCaffrey and Neville, this volume). However, Turkish President Özal’s 1990s reasoning that the Euphrates-Tigris doesn’t have to be shared because it is a ‘Turkish river’ (the ‘absolute sovereignty’ approach to international water law) is undermined by Turkey’s refusal to accept Syria’s sovereignty over the Turkish section of the Orontes (Asi), which (now) originates in Syria. Still, as the Orontes enters Turkey as a polluted trickle, the Turks whom I spoke to in May 2009 feel that the Syrians should not complain about the Euphrates (numerous interviews, 2009).

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Hydro-hegemonic politics Turkey can afford not to accept internationally hegemonic principles of international water law because water law is so weakly established. It did not sign up to the 1997 convention on the non-navigable use of UN Watercourses – the only other naysayers are upstreamers Ethiopia and China. Mentioning the UN Convention on Navigational Watercourses, which Turkey failed to sign, and calling the Euphrates-Tigris an international river basin caused Turkish uproar in a session at the 5th World Water Forum. Internationalism was not the only rude word that caused noise in Istanbul. A UNESCO presentation on ‘dams and diversity’ was banned by the organizers of the Forum, as it was bound to touch on controversial construction projects in the South-east. Such knee-jerk responses betray a hegemonic taboo (‘sanctioned discourse’) within Turkish water policy circles, which appear married to the Kemalist ideal of the unitary republic. However, these water circles show cracks in their unified front. The following section explores the contested nature of several hydro-hegemonic axioms. CONTESTING HYDRO-HEGEMONY?

Counter-hegemonic initiatives: contesting the Ilisu dam Turkey’s strategy of hydrodevelopmental attraction (soft power) mixed with threats (hard power) in Kurdish majority areas has met with considerable international resistance. The ‘soft power’ attempting to develop the Kurdish majority region into a pan-Turkic identity was underpinned by the deployment of ‘hard power’ in a campaign to crush the PKK and other militant groups. The issue of repression of Kurdish identity as a way of extending Turkish control was highlighted by the opposition to the Ilisu Dam on the Tigris (see Figure 6.1) on a human and cultural rights platform (Warner 2008). This proved instrumental in strengthening the international anti-GAP coalition on a platform that also drew on environmental and cultural issues (the drowning of the historic town of Hasankeyf). While overnight privatization procured access to foreign funds, it exposed Turkey to an international anti-dam lobby that had switched focus from the World Bank to bilateral investment guarantees backing up the private sector companies carrying out the project. An astute international NGO campaign influenced international backers to pull out of the Ilisu dam twice over. For this, the campaigners used heavy verbal artillery: to them (e.g. Monbiot 1999), the dam constituted a human rights violation and an environmental and cultural disaster, and the Ilisu Dam would precipitate war in the Middle East rather than the peaceful effect Turkey expected. After intensive lobbying, the UK dropped its export guarantee in 2001/02, and investors pulled out of the Ilisu project shortly afterwards. However, in 2005 Siemens (a global electronics and electrical engineering group headquartered in Germany) formed a new international consortium to revive the Ilisu project, with construction to be started in October 2005. Notably, the Istanbul World Water Forum’s

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Map 6.1 The location of the Ilisu Dam in Turkey.

sponsors were the Turkish partners in the Ilisu dam, DSI (Turkeys State Hydraulic Works) and engineering companies Nurol and Cengiz. Local (e.g. Kurdish Human Rights Association, Goc-Der) and international NGOs, such as German WEED (now GegenStrömung), Berne Declaration and Friends of the Earth, have been keeping a close watch on proceedings (see www.ilisu.org ). Some Turkish and international water professionals also spoke out against the merits of the dam, the need to submerge archaeological sites and villages, and the resettlement plan (Warner 2010), and they have now won the support of Turkish Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk and of internationally well known singer Tarkan (Deutsche Welle 2009). Anti-dam protests like those against Ilisu had a considerable pedigree. An anti-hegemonic campaign against large infrastructural projects enjoyed success in the 1990s. The Indian Narmada Dam, Malaysian Pergau Dam, Nepalese Arun Dam and Lesotho’s Highlands Project were all successfully confronted by an international NGO lobby with increasing resonance in jittery multilateral institutions. These gains set the scene for the anti-Ilisu campaigns targeting export credit guarantors, which bore fruit in 2002, when the original consortium pulled out, and again in 2009, when Germany, Austria and Switzerland were dissatisfied with progress made on the Ilisu Dam’s social preconditions. This must be galling, as Turkey has made considerable efforts to catch up with the international conventional wisdom on integrated water resources management (IWRM). The eloquent GAP director, Olcay Ünver, has made many daring modifications by including socio-economic, environmental, educational

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Hydro-hegemonic politics and participatory facilities (Kibarog˘ lu 2002). Such initiatives earned it a prize at the Stockholm Water Symposium for its innovation. Belatedly accepting the World Commission on Dams guidelines—another passive revolution?—the Turkish government demanded a better resettlement plan for the displaced villagers and environmental measures from the Ilisu consortium (Scheumann 2008). However, the reforms failed to convince NGOs and donors, so that the hydro-electrical power plant (HEPP) project will now have to be self-funded and, as a consequence, considerably delayed. This second victory in the ‘counterhegemonic movement’ against Ilisu, itself an unlikely alliance of NGOs and downstream states, has not been final; two Turkish banks, Akbank and Garanti Bank, have stepped in, while there are persistent rumours in the NGO community that the Government is turning to China for support for Ilisu. However, even abandoning the dam may now not be such a headache for the current Turkish government, which is set to change Turkey’s course as will be discussed next. Whither now? Water as an issue-area is deeply linked (passively and actively) with wider non-water struggles. We should therefore not isolate water politics from ongoing national and international developments. In Turkey, the governing Islamist Justice and Development party’s (AK party) continuing success in the polls has called into question many Kemalist certainties. Abdullah Gül was the first president elected without the blessing of the military-civilian élite. The guardians of the secular Republic in the army and bureaucracy had maintained an etatist concept of control based on state primacy, secularism, ethnic homogeneity and integrity of borders, that was protective of the middle class. Gradual economic liberalization led to independent press and foreign influence, giving expression to liberal, nationalist and religious challenges to the definition of the unitary republican state. Political pluralism, Kurdish nationalism and the rise of Islamism have eroded this etatism. The loss of presumed state dominance in society allowed the erosion of hegemonic identity and has elicited an identity crisis, a loss of the presumed definition of national identity. A neo-Ottoman strand, more focused on soft power, active engagement with the wider region, and détente with the Kurds (Taspinar 2008) arose under President Turgut Özal (1983–93), who announced that the 21st century was going to be the Turkish century (Zürcher 1998), hinted at Turkish claims on Iraq’s oil-rich Mosul and Kirkuk areas, and initiated the first liberalization drive. The Turkish Army, by contrast, insists on keeping Turkey within its present borders, stifling adventurism and containing the Kurds, while many in the water department DSI—which historically has close connections with the Army—are strongly opposed to water privatization, which may extend to as many 12 Turkish rivers (Global Water Intelligence 2007). As a result, different concepts of control slug it out for Turkey’s state role at home and abroad, affecting water politics. Three issues are briefly singled out below:

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Kurdish issue: AK party’s (AKP) Diyabakir deputy, Arslan, proposed eradicating the problem by talking to the PKK and offering its members employment. Discussing the Kurdish as a problem is to break a taboo. AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an met with the leader of the proKurdish party DTP in summer 2009; appearing to believe that the PKK cannot be destroyed, the AKP leader seemed ready for compromise, claiming that one should separate PKK terrorism from the Kurdish problem (Turkishpress 2007; Today’s Zamen 2009). However, the normalization of relations with the Kuridish minority has caused fisticuffs in the Turkish Parliament, and the careful rapprochement received a setback when DTP was closed down in December. Structural linkage between the Euphrates and Jordan politics: A key focus of change in Turkey’s foreign policy is Turkey’s relationship with the Israeli state. Turkey forged an alliance with Israel in 1997. This antagonized Arab neighbours. However, these alliances have changed with the increasing strength of the Islamist AKP. A Turkish-Israeli arms and water deal fell through in 2006 and in 2009 Erdog˘ an publicly insulted Israel at the economic summit in Davos, Switzerland. Israel, it was claimed during the 5th World Water Forum session in Istanbul, has put pressure on Turkey to give more water to Syria, to ease the pressure on itself in its own water negotiations with Syria on the river Jordan. Turkey cannot be seen to pander to external interests. However, its relations with Israel and Syria puts Turkey as mediator in the Syrian-Israeli peace process, which in part revolve around the Golan Heights, where three headwaters of the river Jordan originate. Privatization and the GAP: The AKP, despite its strong base in small and medium-sized enterprises and among villagers, has continued to privatize public services. In July 2007, during the water scarcity in Istanbul and Ankara, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Hilmi transferred the operational rights for the water of a dozen rivers and small lakes to the private sector, to help overcome water problems in agriculture in a public-private partnership. The plan opens up competitive bidding for build-operate-transfer (BOT) management contracts for dam management to private companies, including foreign ones. This privatization drive is resisted by Turkish and international human and environmental rights NGOs and also by Turkish professional organizations fearing a sell-out of Turkish water and sovereignty. These groups found each other in two alternative fora in Istanbul. Again diversifying its options, the AKP government, which is deeply interested in nuclear power as an alternative to hydropower, went ahead with a tender for a nuclear plant at Akkuyu in late 2008, enlisting Russian technical co-operation (Eurasia Daily Monitor 2008; Cumhürriyet 2009). This may

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Hydro-hegemonic politics de-emphasize the economic importance of hydropower, and of Southeast Anatolia, to Turkey’s future, while this broadening of options allows the state to sidestep counter-hegemonic pressures. CONCLUSION

This chapter has depicted the power play over the management of the Euphrates-Tigris constellation as a layer cake of struggles at different levels (over global, regional, river basin and state rule), which impinge on each other. The implication of such an analysis would be that, while hydraulic conflicts notably play out at the domestic and basin levels, they are also subject to the dynamics of global political economy and geopolitics. While I set greater store by the agency of the state in the global arena, given the incomplete globalization of the water sector, the present analysis has specifically taken on board transnational hegemonic processes. The layers in the cake are permeable: they interact with each other, as was visible during the 5th World Water Forum in Istanbul. A key talking point there was the privatization of water resources. The present contribution argued that the first round of privatization in Turkey’s water sector enabled an odd alliance of downstreamers, social and environmental NGOs and archaeologists to criticize the most recent dams. Turkey’s regionally unparalleled (relative) water wealth makes the country a key player outside the Euphrates and Tigris. While downstreamers accuse Turkey of aggression, and politicians have fuelled this fire by making outrageous claims, Turkey’s de facto international behaviour seems to be aimed at maintaining its role as a regional Middle Power, straddling Europe, the Middle East and, more recently, Turkic Central Asia. Rather than using an aggressive expansion strategy, Turkey seeks a sphere of influence (Realpolitik), in the strong belief that this will benefit all concerned—a public good. Alliances with Israel and the USA underpin its regional power position. Loosely, in Prys’ (2008) terms, while Turkey has the Perception of bringing good things to the Kurds, Syrians and Iraqis, and it certainly has the military, economic and hydraulic Preponderance, and, to a degree, the Provision of regulation, its leaders have not been very successful in Projecting its values and vision to its neighbours and prospective donors. In its classical Greek conception, hegemony is the leadership by a single stronger party over other weaker, but still autonomous, partners, undertaken for the mutual benefit of all parties. Over time the word ‘hegemony’ has taken on a negative connotation, and all the Turkish academics whom I have spoken to on the issue thoroughly disliked the word ‘hegemony’, preferring ‘leadership’ at best. ‘Leadership’ (for Destradi 2008) selflessly aligns the interests of up- and downstreamers. Kibarog˘ lu (1996, 31) for example sees a role for Turkey as a basin leader, marking out Turkish diplomacy as political entrepreneurship, and noting that a political entrepreneur serves both the social good and self-interest. While dismissing hegemony as applicable to regions, Kibarog˘ lu has pointed at the de facto hegemony of the USA in the 135

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basin. The overlay of the USA has indeed exerted considerable influence on the regional actors’ options. US dominance in the Middle East is expressed in extensive economic and military aid to Israel, Turkey and Egypt. As Cos¸kun (2005) notes, the USA’s enlisting of Syria and Turkey in the first war on Iraq quashed any hopes of a co-operative basin regime, while it is now establishing a de facto protectorate over Iraq, which considerably raised US interest in where Iraq’s water comes from, in what institutional context, after a long period of indifference (Zawahri 2006). Although it would be exaggerated to credit the USA with regime promotion in the basin (Cos¸kun, 2005), the Americans thus operated in the region as patron and/or policeman, providing carrot and stick and facilitating cooperation between the three basin riparians. As noted, hegemonic arrangements are never cast in stone, and their terms are hotly contested and changeable. In the basin hydropolitics case, the hegemonic layer cake is far from settled at all levels, the layers interacting with each other as well as being actively or structurally linked to non-water issues. While there are clear counter- and anti-hegemonic2 agendas for Turkey’s current water liberalization and political internationalization, no very coherent direction is in evidence. But, for Kemalists, ongoing privatization and Islamism, along with détente with Kurdish resistance, would mean a sell-out to external interests—another sign of the fragmentation of the unitary state on which the modern Turkish Republic was built. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This paper builds on presentations made during several Hydro-hegemony workshops organized by the London Water Research Group at King’s College, London and attendance at the Fifth World Water Forum, March 2009, during which events the author has benefited from multiple conversations. I am grateful to Mark Zeitoun, Tony Allan, Naho Mirumachi, Kai Wegerich and others for their comments on earlier drafts. NOTES 1 Syrian maps frequently show the entire region as part of Syria, and during Syrian talks with Turkey regarding the reduction of Euphrates flows, Syria used the Hatay card, insisting that France had no right to cede the territory to Turkey under its mandate (MacQuarrie 2003). 2 Several strands of critical and radical thought (from Habermasians to anarchists and anti-globalists) see all hegemony as negative, as a power structure that should be overcome by anti-hegemonic strategies, abolishing any hegemony (e.g. Day 2006).

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The politics of water and mining in South Africa ANTHONY TURTON INTRODUCTION

South Africa is a water-constrained country with an annual average precipitation of 497 mm p.a. (Ashton and Turton 2008). A staggering 98% of the total national water resource had been allocated at a high assurance of supply by 2004 (NWRS 2004), with a number of the major river basins being overallocated and thus closed out (Turton and Ashton 2008). The foundation of the economic development is based on the hydraulic mission that emerged from the Commission of Enquiry into Water Matters (RSA 1970), which elevated the management of the resource to the highest level of strategic priority. As a result of this hydraulic mission, South Africa is listed by the World Commission of Dams as being among the top twenty countries in the world by virtue of the number of dams that have been constructed (WCD 2000). This aggressive application of the hydraulic mission has meant that more than 60% of the mean annual runoff (MAR) has been captured by large dams, with the figure for some river basins being as high as 66% (O’Keeffe et al. 1992). The largest river basin in the country, both in terms of surface area covered and volume, is the Orange River, with the Vaal as a major sub-basin, which has a conversion of mean annual precipitation (MAP) to MAR of 5.1%, but with a total volume of dams being equal to 193.7% that of the average flow of the river if the basin is taken as a comprehensive whole (Ashton et al. 2008). In a highly comprehensive analysis of this data, Ashton and his team note that in the South African portion of the Orange River basin, the MAP:MAR conversion is a paltry 3.4%, but the dam storage to runoff ratio is an enormous 271.3% trapped behind 135 large dams (Ashton et al. 2008). The relevance of this to the case study presented later in this chapter is that the projected mine decant will contribute around 5% of the flow of the Vaal River in terms of volume, but that, given the poor water quality arising from mine effluent, this will contribute as much as 25% of the total salts load to that system (CEO Presentation 2009). SOME THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

This case study is about environmental conflict, so the key issue revolves around democracy and its ability to respond appropriately to an environmental crisis. In this regard a relationship has been suggested by Homer-Dixon 142

The politics of water and mining in South Africa (1994) between democracy and the environment in which it has been hypothesized, such that, if democracy responds adequately to the fouling of freshwater resources inter alia, then resource scarcity need not necessarily result in civil conflict (Midlarsky 2001). Central to this is the notion of inequality in terms of access to clean water, which could exacerbate conflict even if it did not become a direct cause of that conflict (Midlarsky 1988). South Africa provides an excellent setting for such an analysis, given that the country has recently transitioned from an oligarchy to a democracy, coupled with the fact that structural inequality was a characteristic of the apartheid phase (Turton 2000). In this regard Midlarsky (2001) asks what would happen if the democratic process does not operate in the best interests of the environment? The collapse of totalitarian states at the end of the Cold War has yielded a lot of evidence that such states were unresponsive to environmental needs, posing the question about the capacity of newly emerging democracies to deal with these complex issues. Midlarsky (2001) notes that there is a dearth of empirical evidence. In the absence of hard evidence, Midlarsky (2001) notes that the state of the art with respect to theory rotates around two possible positions. The first suggests that individual and free market behaviour normally associated with liberal democracies is contrary to environmental protection, with the most robust arguments being accredited to the Malthusian-type approach articulated by writers like Ehrlich (1968), Hardin (1969) and Heilbroner (1974) (see Turton 2000). In this regard corporations are extremely important units of analysis, given their capacity to mobilize sufficient financial resources to override the environmental interests of large swathes of the affected population. The second suggests a positive relationship between democracy and environmental protection; Payne (1995) argues that the relationship has five distinct components: 1. Democracies respect human rights and, as such, environmental specialists are able to peddle their ideas freely within a government setting that is responsive. 2. Democracies are more responsive to their citizens and, as such, they will articulate the aggregated interests of their constituency. 3. Political learning is made possible by the free flow of information, coming specifically from scientists and other technical specialists. 4. Democratic states tend to co-operate and thus achieve transnational approaches to common problems. 5. Corporations can be subjected to both incentives and sanctions because all democracies also have free market economies. Noting the above, Midlarsky (2001) suggests that these arguments present an idealization of democracy that ignores the fact that corporations and environmental activists can be fiercely opposed while still leaving a decision-making vacuum. In this regard there are three problems when it comes to the

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hypothesized positive relationship between democracy and the environment. First, the issue of potential inequality between actors is relevant. Lafferty and Meadowcroft (1996) show that environmental problems touch different groups in different ways. Stable democracies cannot exist for long under conditions of extreme inequality (Midlarsky 2001). Second, while the economy and environmental concerns are both global in scale, democracy exists and functions only at local and national levels of scale and then only within some states (Paehlke 1996). Third, the solution to persistent environmental problems might disrupt social relations and end up treating certain elements of the population in a way that is deemed to be inequitable, so a potential solution might result in unintended consequences and thus present a level of risk to which governments might be averse. To overcome this constraint a type of consociation has been proposed, with arguments on the pros and cons being made by O’Neill (1993), Achterberg (1996) and Cohen and Rogers (1992). Significantly, corporations can act in such a way that the outcome is not conducive to democracy at all (Lafferty and Meadowcroft 1996). The case for water and mining in South Africa is thus well suited to provide some answers to these theoretical dimensions. THE HYDROLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS TO ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

South Africa is approaching the very limit of its national water resource, with future economic growth and development being potentially constrained by decisions associated with mine closure that are about to be made in the political sphere. The national water situation is presented graphically in Figure 7.1.

Figure 7.1 The National Water Situation (Ashton, 2000).

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The politics of water and mining in South Africa This graph indicates that the total surface water resource of the country has been mobilized in terms of existing technology and that future economic growth needs to be based on technologies that do not yet exist. The importance of this graph cannot be under-emphasized, because it tells a powerful story about how a national economy will continue to grow, provided that water is managed as a flux rather than a stock (Turton 2008a). The National Water Resource Strategy (NWRS 2004) is the official government planning document that makes projections to the year 2025 using what is known as the Base Scenario (assuming limited economic growth) and the High Scenario (assuming higher economic growth). The NWRS data help the reader to contextualize the extent of the problem being presented in this chapter. The Base Scenario shows a national water deficit of 234m. cu m (234 x 106m3yr1), with three of the Water Management Areas (WMAs) that sustain the majority of the economic activity having deficits as follows: Berg WMA (sustaining Cape Town and environs) 67 x 106m3yr1; Mvoti to Umzimkulu WMA (coastal KwaZulu Natal from Richards Bay to Port Shepstone) 423 x 106m3yr1; and the Upper Vaal WMA 42 x 106m3yr1. Significantly, the only WMA supplying an industrialized area to have a surplus in this scenario will be the Crocodile West and Marico, which drains the Gauteng Province into the Limpopo River basin, and which is predicted to have a surplus flow of 125 x 106m3yr1, most of which will be sewage return flows draining the Witwatersrand and Pretoria industrial area. The High Scenario shows a national water deficit of 2,044 x 106m3yr1, with three of the WMAs that sustain the majority of the economic activity showing increased deficits as follows: Berg WMA 508 x 106m3yr1; Mvoti to Umzimkulu WMA 788 x 106m3yr1; and the Upper Vaal WMA 764 x 106m3yr1. Yet again, the only WMA supplying an industrialized area to have a surplus in this scenario will be the Crocodile West and Marico, which is predicted to have a surplus flow of 335 x 106m3yr1. This means that the management of return flows becomes a pivotal issue, because it is the reduced water quality that arises from this portion of the national hydrological cycle that is the focus for the rest of this chapter. A BRIEF HISTORY OF MINING IN SOUTH AFRICA

South Africa was forged as a sovereign state out of the misery of the Second Anglo-Boer War, which saw the first use of concentration camps for noncombatants (Fawcett 1901; Hasian 2003; Krebs 1992; Pakenham 1992; Raath 1999; Reitz 1929). Significantly, more people died in the concentration camps from malnourishment and disease than on the field of battle, which literally decimated the Boer population when they lost 10% of their people, mostly women and children who were rounded up in terms of what was known as the Scorched Earth Policy (de la Rey 1903; Evans 1999; Farwell 1999; Lee 2002; Parliamentary Debates 1901; Phillips 1901; van Reenen 2000; van Rensburg 1980). The objective of this war was for Britain to gain control over the mining wealth of the Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek (ZAR), also known as

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the Transvaal, which was one of two sovereign Westphalian states at that time, the other being the Orange Free State (Longford 1982; Meredith 2007; Welsh 2000). The significance is essentially two fold in the context of this chapter. First, mining formed the foundation of the economy and, as such, government was structured around the need to expedite the extraction of ore from the ground immediately after the cessation of hostilities in 1902. This means that any impediment to extraction has traditionally been sidelined as being irrelevant to the overall economic growth of the country. Second, enormous wealth has been created from the extraction of gold, so a culture of dependence has evolved, particularly between the mining industry and government. This means that rather than being a regulator of the mining industry, government has evolved over time into the role of collaborator, specifically during the years of apartheid, when South Africa faced comprehensive economic sanctions while simultaneously fighting a war in Angola and a massive insurgency inside the country (Adler et al. 2007a, 2007b; Turton 2009a, 2009b). One of the richest areas of gold-mining occurs in the far West Rand of South Africa. This area is characterized by three main features that are relevant to this chapter. First, the area is located on a watershed divide between the Orange and the Limpopo River basins, both of which are transboundary rivers, respectively being the largest and second largest river in the country. This means that all effluent return flows will enter the upstream portion of these two major river basins, and the pollution plume will move downstream over time. Second, the geology of the area consists of a massive dolomite aquifer that covers thousands of square kilometres. Third, the gold-bearing reef dips from the surface along the Witwatersrand down into deeper strata towards the Orange Free State. The implications of the latter two features are significant, because in order to mine safely, the dolomites had to be dewatered first. This was done in conjunction with the Jordaan Commission of Enquiry (Jordaan et al. 1960), which laid out a number of far-reaching implications for dewatering of the karst system. In essence, this document stipulated that the initial period of dewatering would mean that increased flows would be discharged into the receiving rivers, which would stabilize once the water table had been made safe for mining. However, it also stipulated that once mining was terminated, then the mine void would flood, eventually filling up through vertical shafts until a hydraulic connection would be re-established through the karst layer, at which time decant would occur as a natural factor. MINE CLOSURE

In South Africa most of the gold-mines have now reached the end of their productive lives. Many mines have closed already, or approach closure in the next decade. In the context of this chapter, the mines located along the Witwatersrand are being used as a case study. The Witwatersrand is a geological feature that coincides with the watershed divide between the Orange and the Limpopo River basins running east to west with Johannesburg located

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The politics of water and mining in South Africa roughly in the middle. The whole area is best understood in terms of a threelayered cake. The upper layer consists of sedimentary rock that has been subject to tectonic activities over time, which has resulted in some metamorphic patches. The middle layer consists of a significant dolomite aquifer that extends over the entire area, into which dolerite dykes have intruded as a result of past tectonic activities (McCarthy and Rubidge 2005). This has resulted in the compartmentation of the karst system into four distinct hydrological units known as the Eastern Basin, the Central Basin, the Western Basin and the Far Western Basin. The lower portion of the metaphorical cake consists of layers of rock, some of which are ore bearing, known as conglomerate, centred on the Carbon Leader, which is made up of the fossilized remnants of filamentous algae that grew in lagoons that trapped heavy metals, including gold and uranium, flowing from primordial rivers (Werdmüller 1986). This three-layered cake, which is a gross simplification of a highly complex reality, is presented schematically in Figure 7.2. Note that the different hydrogeological basins as depicted by the dolomite layer are separated by dolerite dykes caused by volcanic intrusion. The mine workings are depicted as horizontal tunnels criss-crossing the ore-bearing strata, all connected to the surface via a number of vertical shafts. Attention is drawn to the fact that the different mine workings are interconnected at various levels for

Figure 7.2 Horizontal cross section of the Witwatersrand showing the conceptual three-layered cake. Note that the hydrogeological compartments separated by dolerite dykes are linked in the ore-bearing strata via an underground safety drive. This potentially connects all of the hydrogeological compartments if the haulage through the dykes has not been sealed adequately after mining ceased.

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safety reasons. It is this interconnection that now causes a hydraulic linkage between the different basins, because it is unknown whether the different mining companies repaired the holes they made in the vertical dyke after mining ceased to be economic. This is the great unknown factor in the overall equation. The combined volume of the underground mine void is estimated to be around five times the volume of Lake Kariba, so it is massive. The dewatering of the dolomites has caused substantial land subsidence (Kleyweght and Pike 1982) and water pollution problems (Oelofse 2008a, 2008b). A distinct subset of these problems is related to the karst aquifer systems (Swart et al. 2003). When the mine void fills with water as a result of the cessation of all pumping activities, it eventually reaches the karst layer, where it then spreads rapidly in a horizontal fashion. The Witwatersrand is so called because it refers to a moment in historic time before mining started, when there were a myriad of springs arising along this geological feature. The word ‘Witwatersrand’ literally means ‘ridge of white waters’ (Turton et al. 2006). It was the existence of these dolomitic springs that sustained early hominid life in an area that is normally prone to drought, which accounts for the fact that a significant portion of the known hominid fossils in the entire world are located in a triangle closely associated with the Witwatersrand. This is acknowledged by the fact that a World Heritage Site known as the Cradle of Humankind exists on the edge of the Western Basin. As soon as mining started these springs dried up as predicted by the Jordaan Commission of Enquiry (Jordaan et al. 1960; van Eeden 1992, 2007, 2008). An early foretaste of things to come occurred in August 2002 when water started to decant from the karst system of the Western Basin (Hobbs and Cobbing 2007). This water was significant in volume, being in the order of 36 megalitres per day (ML/d), which started flowing from a large number of different springs that had been dry for almost a century. This water was of an abysmal quality, with a pH hovering around 3, an electrical conductivity of around 550 mS/m (milliSiemens per metre), and a sulphate load of around 2,000 mg/L (Hobbs and Cobbing 2007). The Western Basin decant peaked in 2008 with a flow of 50 ML/d (Schoeman and Zorab 2008), causing concern in the Cradle of Humankind downstream of the decant point. A schematic view of the hydrogeology associated with this event is presented in Figure 7.3. At roughly the same time, the first public domain research into radionuclide and heavy metal contamination of surface water was published. Prior to South Africa becoming a democracy in 1994, no public domain research to this effect was available, and, where it did exist, it was classified as secret (van Eeden et al. 2003) or commercially sensitive and thus removed from the public domain. These reports indicated that a pollution plume of radionuclides and heavy metals is moving downstream of all gold-mining activities, including 100,000 tonnes of uranium known to have been discharged into the tailings dams during the latter years of apartheid (Coetzee 1995; Coetzee et al. 2002a, 2002b, 2005, 2006; NNR 2007; Wade et al. 2002), with an unknown impact on human health (CSIR 2008).

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Figure 7.3 Hydrogeological cross section of the first decant from the Western Basin in 2002 showing the potentiometric surface as a dotted line (Oelofse et al. 2007).

This was greeted with a range of responses oscillating between denial and panic, with initial attempts by the mining industry to discredit what became known as Report 1214 (Coetzee et al. 2006), presumably in the hope of silencing voices being raised in concern (Weltz 2009). This became a futile exercise after the National Nuclear Regulator released what became known as the Brenk Report, which stated clearly that Report 1214 had probably underestimated the full impact of the radiological contamination (NNR 2007), causing the mining industry to be forced to formulate a plan. Central to this planning is the notion of a closure certificate, which is granted by government to the mining company at the cessation of mining activities. This closure certificate exonerates the mining company from future environmental liabilities and, without it, the mine owners cannot clear their books. Emerging from this process was the creation of a new company known as Western Utilities Corporation (Pty) Ltd, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Watermark Global PLC, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange Alternative Investment Market (Noseweek 2009). THE WESTERN UTILITIES CORPORATION PLAN

The Western Utilities Corporation (WUC) plan has been endorsed by the major players in the gold-mining industry (Naidoo 2009; Noseweek 2009). In a nutshell, this plan will take all of the decant from the four basins and centralize it at a treatment plant close to the current distribution hub of Rand Water, where it will be treated and then sold on for human consumption to the current 11m. consumers of Rand Water product (Naidoo 2009; Noseweek 2009). While numbers vary, given the general secrecy surrounding this issue (van Eeden et al. 2003), the author believes that the total decant potential of the Witwatersrand is around 300 ML/d, made up roughly as follows: Eastern Basin: 95 ML/d; Central Basin: 55 ML/d; Western Basin: 25 ML/d; and Far

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Western Basin: 125 ML/d. The current volume of potable water sold by Rand Water is 3,500 ML/d, which makes the volume of treated decant water approximately 12% of its daily throughput. The WUC plan is presented schematically in Figure 7.4. Stated simplistically, the WUC plan is to cascade the decant to the Central Basin, where it will be treated by means of a process known as the ABC method, which is an acronym for ‘Alkaline, Barium, Calcium’, being the three ingredients of the technology (Naidoo 2009; Noseweek 2009). This was developed by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and is essentially a precipitation process with a thermal stage. The process neutralizes the acidity by means of a base (alkaline), which causes the metals to precipitate out at different pH levels. Where possible, existing infrastructure will be used, the most notable being a basic treatment plant in the Eastern Basin, which neutralizes the existing acid mine drainage (AMD) into the Blesbok Spruit (a ‘spruit’ is the Afrikaans word for a stream), currently located at No. 3 Shaft at the Grootvlei Mine. The plan will take the neutralized AMD from the Eastern Basin by pipeline into the central treatment plant located at the East Rand Proprietary Mines (ERPM) South East Vertical Shaft and then on to the existing Rand Water facilities at the Klipriviersberg Reservoir by surface pipeline (Golder 2009). The AMD in the Western Basin will be abstracted from either No. 8 Shaft at Rand Uranium close to the

Figure 7.4 Schematic representation of the Western Utilities Corporation plan to centralize the mine decant and sell it on to Rand Water after neutralizing it.

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The politics of water and mining in South Africa current decant point, or West Wits East Chamdor Shaft, until environment critical level (ECL) has been reached, and then cascaded across the dolerite dyke into the closest vertical shaft in the Central Basin (Durban Roodepoort Deep No. 4 Shaft) where it will be allowed to discharge into that void. The ECL is the level just below the karst system, which will then be maintained by continuous pumping. The discharged AMD will fill up the void in the Central Basin, combining with natural ingress of water, which will then be pumped up the ERPM South East Vertical Shaft adjacent to the central treatment plant close to the Rand Water reticulation infrastructure (Golder 2009). In terms of the WUC plan, there are a number of critical facts that need to be understood by the reader. These relate to two variables, date and location of decant. The most critical of these is the ECL in the Central Basin, which will be reached by October 2011 (CEO Presentation 2009; Noseweek 2009). On this date the decant will enter the massive karst system along the East Rand and will rapidly flow laterally across a large geographic area that currently supports a range of agricultural activities including vegetable production for Johannesburg. Once in the karst system, this decant will contribute around 5% of the total volume of the Vaal River system, but also a massive 20% of the total salts load in a river that is already plagued by salinity problems (CEO Presentation 2009). If nothing is done to stop this, then the final decant will take place at a location known as South East Vertical Shaft in Boksburg, with the projected date of this event being January 2012 (Naidoo 2009; Noseweek 2009). This would be an environmental catastrophe and has to be avoided at all costs. In order to avoid this catastrophe, according to the plan, three things needed to occur:
First, an off-take agreement needed to be signed, which would guarantee WUC that Rand Water would buy all of the unused decant that would have been treated by means of the ABC process (CEO Presentation 2009; Naidoo 2009). This would lock 11m. users of Rand Water into an agreement over which they had had no say (Noseweek 2009) and would effectively mean that the excellent quality water currently coming from the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) would be diluted with very poor grade water that had been polluted with radionuclides and a cocktail of heavy metals.
Second, work needed to commence, as a matter of considerable urgency, on the construction of a plug and pump station in the South East Vertical Shaft of ERPM Gold Mine not far from the Germiston central business district (CEO Presentation 2009; Naidoo 2009). If this plug and pump station was not completed before the rising water level flooded the proposed location beneath the karst system, then there would be no alternative but to allow the flooding of the dolomites to occur (Naidoo 2009). This would in effect mean that all control would have been lost and an environmental catastrophe would no longer be avoidable.

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Third, in order to meet all these critical deadlines, engineering needed to commence by no later than December 2009 (Naidoo 2009). However, before this could happen, the off-take agreement had to be signed, because the capital that had been raised on the LSE was dependent on this legal fact (Naidoo 2009). (At the time of going to press, this off-take agreemernt has not been reached, and so the viability of the capital from the LSE is in jeopardy.) AN ASSESSMENT OF THE POLITICS OF MINE WATER

This case study provides an interesting window into the inner workings of the politics of water in a fledgling democracy that is both water constrained and mining dependent. The emergence of a democracy in South Africa has been a traumatic affair, closely associated with massive human rights violations, which has resulted in a sceptical public that is generally not trustful of political decision-making (Turton 2009a, 2009b). This sentiment has been reinforced by the relationship between the mining industry and government, which for historic reasons has not been one of regulator and regulatee, but rather of co-collaborators which both benefitted during the years of apartheid, when the revenue from gold sustained the embattled state, which was labouring under the burden of comprehensive economic sanctions while fighting a war in Angola and a major insurgency inside South Africa (Adler et al. 2007a, 2007b; Turton 2009a, 2009b). The existence of corruption at the very highest levels of government, the most notable having been the so-called ‘Arms Deal’, which has resisted every conceivable attempt to investigate it, has exacerbated this sentiment (Feinstein 2007). The simple fact that Rand Water was a creation of the mining industry and has been there to serve their interests for a century already (Tempelhoff 2003), will do little to convince the sceptical public that the decision reached was in their best interest (Noseweek 2009; Weltz 2008). Sceptical commentators suggest that the current plan merely allows the mining industry to avoid the polluter pays principle by getting the public to foot the bill instead (Noseweek 2009). If one extrapolates this into the WUC proposal for the treatment of AMD, then one finds a number of interesting and potentially contradictory elements. Probably the most significant of these is the matter of law that it conveniently side-steps (Noseweek 2009). The National Water Act (1998) makes it explicitly clear that the polluter pays principle applies to all water resource management. This means that it is the mining industry that is responsible for the full cost of remediation of the AMD resulting from over a century of mining and wealth extraction from the South African goldfields. However, as the current WUC proposal is framed, it will be the public who pays for the remediation costs, allowing WUC actually to make a 19% return on their investment in the process (Noseweek 2009). Once details of this are known by the sceptical public, a backlash can be anticipated; because in effect the mining industry will yet again be let off the hook, as has been the case over the past century (Adler et al. 2007a, 2007b; Noseweek 2009).

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The politics of water and mining in South Africa A more sensitive aspect is hidden in this plan. No toxicological testing has been done to determine if the water treated by the ABC Process removes all of the radionuclides and heavy metals from the water (Noseweek 2009). This means that a contractual arrangement is being negotiated behind closed doors, which will lock in 11m. consumers, who will have no say over the fact that they will be expected to drink water, albeit in diluted form, that has been treated by a process that has not yet been tested in terms of any rigorous toxicological parameters. In effect, the public will be told to simply trust the minister who will sign the agreement that locks Rand Water into this arrangement. A more prudent approach would be for the minister to engage in a process of public consultation before making her decision, but this is not possible by virtue of the close time frames being offered by WUC (Naidoo 2009). In effect, there is less than three months for public consultation, which is way too short to arrive at any robust outcome, simply because engineering has to commence by no later than December 2009 if the decant is to be avoided in January 2012 (Naidoo 2009). The author is of the opinion that the minister is damned if she does and damned if she does not, because if she does decide to consult with the public before signing the off-take agreement that will unlock the 1,000m. South African Rand from the LSE, then she will in all probability miss the deadline for the construction of the plug and pump station in the Central Basin, and she will be accused of dragging her heels and thus causing an environmental disaster of unparalleled proportions. Yet, if she does decide to act fast and sign the off-take agreement, then she runs the risk of being accused of doing a secret deal with the mining industry, running the risk of an arms deal-type scandal in the water sector. Then there is the small matter of seismicity that was raised by geologists during the Public Participation Meeting held at the Randfontein Country Club on 21 May 2009 under the leadership of the consultant (Golder 2009). These mine voids lie under the city of Johannesburg, which is a massive urban conurbation ranging across hundreds of kilometres. It is unknown what will happen to seismic activity as the voids fill with water once more. It is not improbable that fault lines will again become lubricated and slip, or that differential pressures building up behind the dykes could unleash a series of forces that are not yet understood. The dykes forming the compartment walls have been breached for safety reasons as drives have been interconnected underground, but the exact nature of these breeches is not known. It is also not known whether plugs that have been installed in these breaches are designed to the specification needed to withstand the pressures involved, so catastrophic failure is not an unlikely scenario. When this issue was raised during a meeting of interested and affected parties as part of the current environmental impact assessment process being conducted by Golder Associates on 21 May 2009, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of WUC merely answered by saying that there is insufficient time to do such studies (CEO Presentation 2009). The author is of the opinion that the mining sector is merely seeking to avoid additional engineering costs by using the mine void in

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the Central Basin as a conduit for water from the Western Basin to the central processing plant at the ERPM South East Vertical Shaft adjacent to the Rand Water reticulation hub. A more prudent approach would be to pipe this water over the surface, but that would incur massive costs because of the need to expropriate servitudes for the pipelines. It therefore becomes easier merely to discharge the water down an old mine shaft and allow it to find its own way to the final abstraction point. This begs the question—is it prudent from an engineering perspective to cut corners like this with such a significant unknown factor? CONCLUSION

The outcome of this case study is far from clear at the time of writing, but it does provide some data with which to evaluate the theoretical considerations presented at the beginning of this chapter. The fact that decant is approaching is unquestioned by the scientific community working on this issue. There is a high level of consensus that once it occurs it will be an environmental disaster the likes of which South Africa has never yet witnessed. The Vaal River system supplies water to the industrial heartland of the country, which employs 25% of the citizens and produces 10% of the economic output of the entire African continent. The estimated decant will contribute around 5% of the total flow of the Vaal River, but with it a staggering 25% of the total salts load (CEO Presentation 2009), in a system known to already be under stress in terms of water quality (DWAF 1998) and quantity (NWRS 2004). While these facts are all known, the exchange of information between the scientific community and government has not been successful. As a result, the government has dragged its heels on the mine closure issue for more than a decade, losing valuable time, and now a decision needs to be made in a hurry. Whatever the outcome, it is highly probable that there will be political fallout. If the minister acts boldly and signs the off-take agreement that unlocks the LSE money, then an environmental disaster can be avoided (Naidoo 2009), but a political crisis could arise from an angry public who will be forced to digest the reality that they are being asked to subsidize the cost of environmental remediation (Noseweek 2009) for a mining industry that has made massive profits by externalizing its costs of production onto an increasingly unwilling public (Adler et al. 2007b; Turton 2008b, 2009a). The author is of the opinion that the absence of toxicological data could also feed into anger known to exist already (Johnston and Bernstein 2007), potentially driving mass protest as every conceivable new malady is blamed on water that was radioactive and toxic yesterday, but is now being sold to the public for drinking purposes on the decision of a government that is generally lacking in technical expertise (Paton 2008; SAICE 2008; Walwyn and Scholes 2006) and increasingly distrusted by the public (Feinstein 2007). The really big issue is that the WUC proposal closes out future options by viewing this problem as a mine closure issue that needs to be put to bed with

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The politics of water and mining in South Africa the least fuss in the interests of the mining industry. No thought is being given to alternative uses for this water. If one views the mine decant, not as a symptom of mine closure, but rather as a manifestation of a threshold event between a historically extractive economy and a potential future value-added beneficiation economy, then different options become available (Naidoo 2009). For example, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost as the mines have closed, and these are not being replaced in the current WUC proposal. Why not treat the decant, not to potable standards to be foisted off onto an unwilling public for drinking purposes, but rather as bulk industrial water to be used to attract a future beneficiation-type of industrial complex centred on the West and East Rand? This industrial water can be made available at a cost lower than potable water, using the logic that underpinned the agreement between the paper and pulp and petrochemical industry located around Durban, when they negotiated with the Durban city council to purchase effluent from the sewage works for use as bulk process water (Naidoo 2009). This turns a problem into a solution and becomes a key element for a future economic vision that ensures economic prosperity in a post-mining economy. It also opens up the prospect of using the mine void as strategic storage, which is becoming relevant to a country where dams have been built on every conceivable site and where very few new dams can be built in future. If this is considered, then the mine voids offer a solution by reducing evaporative losses, which are considerable in South Africa given the climatic conditions that dictate that in excess of 95% of the MAP in the Orange and Limpopo River basins is immediately lost to evaporation before it can become MAR and thus economically useful (Ashton et al. 2008). The debate around these alternatives will not take place under the current conditions, and so we will never know what could have been. However, what is clear in all of this is the role of corporations, which have the capacity to dictate processes that generally suit their own interests and have a robust track record to this effect that has taken almost half a century to reach the level of sophistication that it currently displays (Adler et al. 2007a). BIBLIOGRAPHY Achterberg, W., ‘Sustainability and Associative Democracy’, in Lafferty, W.M. and Meadowcroft, J. (eds), Democracy and the Environment: Problems and Prospects, Cheltenham: Edgar Elgar, 1996. Adler, R., Funke, N., Findlater, K. and Turton, A.R., The Changing Relationship between the Government and the Mining Industry in South Africa: A Critical Assessment of the Far West Rand Dolomitic Water Association and the State Coordinating Technical Committee, Pretoria, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), 2007(a). Adler, R.A., Claassen, M., Godfrey, L. and Turton, A.R., ‘Water, Mining and Waste: An Historical and Economic Perspective on Conflict Management in South Africa’, The Economics of Peace and Security Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2: 32–41, 2007(b). Ashton, P.J., ‘Integrated Catchment Management: Balancing Resource Utilization and Conservation’, Occasional Paper No. 6, Pretoria, African Water Issues Research

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Unit (AWIRU), University of Pretoria, available online as www.anthonyturton.com/ admin/my_documents/my_files/65E_op6.pdf (accessed 21 June 2009), 2000. Ashton, P.J., Hardwick, D. and Breen, C.M., ‘Changes in Water Availability and demand within South Africa’s Shared River Basins as Determinants of Regional Social-ecological Resilience’, in Burns, M.J. and Weaver, A.v.B. (eds), Advancing Sustainability Science in South Africa, Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University Press, 2008. Ashton, P.J. and Turton, A.R., ‘Water and Security in Sub-Saharan Africa: Emerging Concepts and their Implications for Effective Water Resource Management in the Southern African Region’, in Brauch, H.G., Grin, J., Mesjasz, C., Behera, N.C., Chourou, B., Spring, U.O., Liotta, P.H. and Kameira-Mbote, P. (eds), Globalisation and Environmental Challenges: Reconceptualizing Security in the 21st Century, Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2008. CEO Presentation, ‘Environmental Impact Assessment of the Western Utilities Corporation Proposed Mine Water Reclamation Project for the Witwatersrand Basin’ held at the Randfontein Country Club on 21 May 2009. Coetzee, H., ‘Radioactivity and the Leakage of Radioactive Waste Associated with Witwatersrand Gold and Uranium Mining’, in Merkel, B.J., Hurst, S., Löhnert, E.P. and Struckmeier, W. (eds), Proceedings Uranium Mining and Hydrogeology, Freiberg, Germany: Köln, 1995. Coetzee, H., Wade, P., Ntsume, G. and Jordaan, W., Radioactivity Study on Sediments in a Dam in the Wonderfonteinspruit Catchment, DWAF Report, Pretoria: Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, 2002(a). Coetzee, H., Wade, P. and Winde, F., ‘Reliance on Existing Wetlands for Pollution Control Around the Witwatersrand Gold/Uranium Mines in South Africa – Are They Sufficient?’ In Merkel, B.J., Planer-Friederich, B. and Wolkersdorfer, C. (eds), Uranium in the Aquatic Environment, Berlin: Springer, 2002(b). Coetzee, H., Venter, J. and Ntsume, G., Contamination of Wetlands by Witwatersrand Gold Mines—Processes and the Economic Potential of Gold in Wetlands, Council for Geosciences Report No. 2005–0106, Pretoria: Council for Geosciences, 2005. Coetzee, H., Winde, F. and Wade, P.W., An Assessment of Sources, Pathways, Mechanisms and Risks of Current and Potential Future Pollution of Water and Sediments in Gold-Mining Areas of the Wonderfonteinspruit Catchment, WRC Report No. 1214/1/06, Pretoria: Water Research Commission, 2006. Cohen, J. and Rogers, J., ‘Secondary Associations and Democratic Governance’, in Politics and Society, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1992. CSIR, High Confidence Study of Children Potentially Affected by Radionuclide and Heavy Metal Contamination Arising from the Legacy of Mine Water Management Practices on the Far West Rand of South Africa, Project Concept Note, dated 26 February 2008, Pretoria: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. de la Rey, Jacoba E., A Woman’s Wanderings and Trials During the Anglo-Boer War (Translated by Lucy Hotz), London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903. DWAF, Orange River Replanning Study, Pretoria: Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, 1998. Ehrlich, P.R., The Population Bomb, New York: Ballantine, 1968. Evans, M.M., The Boer War: South Africa 1899–1902, Osprey Military, Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 1999. Farwell, Byron, The Great Boer War, London: Wordsworth Editions, 1999. Fawcett, M.H., The Concentration Camps in South Africa, London: Westminster Gazette, 1901.

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The politics of water and mining in South Africa Feinstein, A., After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey inside the ANC, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007. Golder., Environmental Impact Assessment: Western Utilities Corporation Mine Water Reclamation Project, Golder Report No. 12064-8755-1, Johannesburg: Golder Associates, 2009. Hardin, G., ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, in Science, No. 162, 1969. Hasian, Marouf., ‘The “Hysterical” Emily Hobhouse and Boer War Concentration Camp Controversy’, in Western Journal of Communication, March 2003. Heilbroner, R.L., An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, New York, Norton, 1974. Hobbs, P.J. and Cobbing, J.E., A Hydrogeological Assessment of Acid Mine Drainage Impacts in the West Rand Basin, Gauteng Province, Report No. CSIR/NRE/WR/ ER/2007/0097/C, Pretoria, CSIR/THRIP, Republic of South Africa, 2007. Homer-Dixon, T.F., ‘Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases’, in International Security, Vol. 19, No. 1, 1994. Johnston, S. and Bernstein, A., Voices of Anger: Protest and Conflict in Two Municipalities. Report to the Conflict and Governance Facility (CAGE), Johannesburg: The Centre for Development and Enterprise, 2007. Jordaan, J.M., Enslin, J.F., Kriel, J.P., Havemann, A.R., Kent, L.E. and Cable, W.H., Finale Verslag van die Tussendepartmentele Komitee insake Dolomitiese Mynwater: Verre Wes-Rand, Gerig aan sy Edele die Minister van Waterwese deur die Direkteur van Waterwese (In Afrikaans translated as, Final Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Dolomitic Mine-water: Far West-Rand, Directed at His Excellency the Minister of Water Affairs by the Director of Water Affairs), Pretoria: Department of Water Affairs, 1960. Kleyweght, R.J. and Pike, D.R., ‘Surface Subsidence and Sink-holes Caused by Lowering the Dolomitic Table on the Far West Rand Gold Field of South Africa’, in Annual Geological Survey of South Africa, Vol. 16, 1982. Krebs, P.M., ‘The Last of the Gentleman’s Wars: Women in the Boer War Concentration Camp Controversy’, in History Workshop Journal. No. 33, 1992. Lafferty, W.M. and Meadowcroft, J., ‘Democracy and the Environment: Congruence and Conflict-Preliminary Reflections’, in Lafferty, W.M. and Meadowcroft, J. (eds), Democracy and the Environment: Problems and Prospects, Cheltenham: Edgar Elgar, 1996. Lee, E., To the Bitter End: A Photographic History of the Boer War 1899–1902, Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2002. Longford, E., Jamieson’s Raid: The Prelude to the Boer War, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1982. McCarthy, T.S. and Rubidge, B., The Story of Earth and Life: A Southern African Perspective on a 4.6 Billion Year Journey, Cape Town: Struik, 2005. Meredith, Martin, Diamonds, Gold and War: The Making of South Africa, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007. Midlarsky, M.I., ‘Rulers and the Ruled: Patterned Inequality and the Onset of Mass Political Violence’, in American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, No. 2, 1988. ——‘Democracy and the Environment’, in Diehl, P.F. and Gleditsch, N.P. (eds), Environmental Conflict, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001. Naidoo, B., ‘Rising Tides: Massive Acid Mine Drainage Project Stimulus for Local Beneficiation’, in Creamers Mining Weekly, July 31–August 6, 2009. National Water Act, The National Water Act, Act 36 of 1998, Pretoria: Government Gazette, 1998.

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NNR, Radiological Impacts of the Mining Activities to the Public in the Wonderfonteinspruit Catchment Area, Report No. TR-RRD-07–0006 (also known as the Brenk Report), Pretoria: National Nuclear Regulator (NNR), 2007. Noseweek, ‘Joburg’s Poisoned Well’, in Noseweek Issue No. 118, August 2009. NWRS., National Water Resource Strategy, Pretoria, Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF), www.dwaf.gov.za/Documents/Policies/NWRS/Default.htm, 2004. Oelofse, S.H.H., ‘Mine Water Pollution—Acid Mine Decant, Effluent and Treatment: Consideration of Key Emerging Issues that may Impact the State of the Environment’, Pretoria, Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT), available online at http://soer.deat.gov.za/docport.aspx?m=97&d=28, 2008(a). ——‘Protecting a Vulnerable Groundwater Resource from the Impacts of Waste Disposal: A South African Waste Governance Perspective’, in Patrick, M.J., Rascher, J. and Turton, A.R. (eds), ‘Reflections on Water in South Africa, Special Edition’ of International Journal of Water Resource Development, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2008(b). Oelofse, S.H.H., Hobbs, P.J., Rascher, J. and Cobbing, J., ‘The Pollution and Destruction Threat of Gold Mining Waste on the Witwatersrand: A West Rand Case Study’, paper presented at the 10th International Symposium on Environmental Issues and Waste Management in Energy and Mineral Production (SWEMP, 2007), Bangkok, Thailand, 11–13 December 2007. O’Keeffe, J., Uys, M. and Bruton, M.N., ‘Freshwater Systems’, in Fuggle, R.F. and Rabie, M.A. (eds), Environmental Management in South Africa, Johannesburg: Juta and Co., 1992. O’Neill, J.O., Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Wellbeing and the Natural World, London: Routledge, 1993. Paehlke, R., ‘Environmental Challenges to Democratic Practice’, in Lafferty, W.M. and Meadowcroft, J. (eds), Democracy and the Environment: Problems and Prospects, Cheltenham: Edgar Elgar, 1996. Pakenham, T., The Boer War, London: Harper Perennial, 1992. Parliamentary Debates, South African War Mortality in the Camps of Detention. 1901, June 17, The Parliamentary Debates, Fourth Series, Second Session of the Twentyseventh Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume XCV, London: Wyman and Sons, 1901. Paton, Carol, ‘Dam Dirty’, in Financial Mail, November 2008. Payne, R.A., ‘Freedom and the Environment’, in Journal of Democracy, Vol. 6, No. 3, 1995. Phillips, Lisle March, With Rimington in the Boer War, London: Edward Arnold, 1901. Raath, A.W.G., The British Concentration Camps of the Anglo Boer War 1899–1902: Reports on the Camps, Bloemfontein: The War Museum, 1999. Reitz, D., Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer War, London, Faber & Faber, 1929. RSA, Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Water Matters, Document No. R.P. 34/1970, Pretoria: Government Printer, 1970. SAICE, ‘Presentation to Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Water Affairs and Forestry’, Cape Town, 4 June 2008, Cape Town: South African Institute of Civil Engineers (SAICE), 2008. Schoeman, J. and Zorab, R., ‘Slide presentation to the Western Basin Void Decant Technical Group Meeting No. 17’ held on 19 March 2008, Krugersdorp. Swart, C.J.U., Kleyweght, R.J. and Stoch, E.J., ‘The Future of Dolomitic Springs after Mine Closure on the Far West Rand, Gauteng, RSA’, in Environmental Geology, No. 44, 2003.

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The politics of water and mining in South Africa Tempelhoff, J.W.N., The Substance of Ubiquity: Rand Water 1903–2003, Vanderbijlpark: Kleio Publishers, 2003. Turton, A.R., ‘Precipitation, People, Pipelines and Power: Towards a Political Ecology Discourse of Water in Southern Africa’, in Stott, P. and Sullivan, S. (eds), Political Ecology: Science, Myth and Power, London: Edward Arnold, 2000. ——‘A South African Perspective on a Possible Benefit-Sharing Approach for Transboundary Waters in the SADC Region’, in Water Alternatives, Vol. 1, No. 2. 2008(a). ——‘Water and Mine Closure in South Africa: Development that is Sustainable?’, in online Development ‘Water and Development’, 2008(b). ——‘South African Water and Mining Policy: A Study of Strategies for Transition’, in Huitema, D. and Meijerink, S. (eds), Water Transitions, Netherlands: Edgar Elgar, 2009(a). ——Shaking Hands with Billy: The Private Memoirs of Anthony Richard Turton, Durban: Just Done Publications, 2009(b). Turton, A.R. and Ashton, P.J., ‘Basin Closure and Issues of Scale: The Southern African Hydropolitical Complex’, in International Journal of Water Resources Development, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2008. Turton, A.R., Schultz, C., Buckle, H, Kgomongoe, M., Malungani, T. and Drackner, M., ‘Gold, Scorched Earth and Water: The Hydropolitics of Johannesburg’, in Water Resources Development, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2006. van Eeden, E.S., Ekonomiese Ontwikkeling en die Invloed Daarvan op Carletonville, 1948–1988: ‘n Historiese Study (Afrikaans translated as ‘Economic Development and the Influence Thereof on Carletonville, 1948–1988: An Historic Study’), PhD thesis, Potchefstroom University for Higher Christian Education, 1992. ——‘An Historical Assessment of NGO Efficiency in Progressing Towards a Sustainable Environmental Heritage Focus, with as Case Study the Wonderfontein Spruit Catchment, Gauteng’, in New Contree, No. 53, 2007. ——‘Weaknesses in Environmental Action in South Africa: A Historical Glance on the West Rand (Gauteng Provence)’, in Patrick, M.J., Rascher, J. and Turton, A.R. (eds), ‘Reflections on Water in South Africa, Special Edition’ of International Journal of Water Resource Development, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2008. van Eeden, E.S., de Villiers, A.B., Strydom, H. and Stoch, E.J., ‘Mines, People and Sink-holes—An Analysis of the Carletonville Municipal Area in South Africa as a Case Study Regarding Policies of Secrecy’, in Historia, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2003. van Reenen, R., Emily Hobhouse: Boer War Letters, Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 2000. van Rensburg, T., Camp Diary of Henrietta E.C. Armstrong: Experiences of a Boer Nurse in the Irene Concentration Camp 6 April–11 October 1901, Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), 1980. van Rooyen, K., ‘Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?’, in Science Scope, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2008. Wade, P.W., Woodbourne, S., Morris, W.M., Vos, P. and Jarvis, N.W., Tier 1 Risk Assessment of Selected Radionuclides in Sediments of the Mooi River Catchment, WRC Project No. K5/1095, Pretoria: Water Research Commission, 2002. Walwyn, D. and Scholes, R.J., ‘The Impact of a Mixed Income Model on the South African CSIR: A Recipe for Success or Disaster?’ in South African Journal of Science, No. 102, 2006.

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WCD, Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision-Making, London: Earthscan, 2000. Welsh, Frank, A History of South Africa, London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2000. Weltz, Adam, ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Gold: Has a Leading Water Policy Expert Been Suspended for Being a Former Spook—or for Treading on the Mining Industry’s Toes?’, in Noseweek, No. 111, January 2009. Werdmüller, V.W., ‘The Central Rand’, in Antrobus, E.S.A. (ed.), Witwatersrand Gold—100 Years, Pretoria: The Geological Society of South Africa, 1986.

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Water rights politics RUTGERD BOELENS

INTRODUCTION

With growing needs and decreasing supply of timely available, good-quality freshwater resources, water rights and water access have become a source of increasing conflict in many places of the world. In these water rights disputes conflicting water interest groups often have objectives that extend far beyond getting access to liquid water and water-based economic goods and products. And state administrations, in the same way, have other concerns than just ‘equity, sustainability and efficiency’ when intervening and allocating water to local user collectives. For instance, besides economic interests in either gaining control over the surplus produced by local communities or reshuffling water allocation to third parties, a fundamental interest that state agencies and other powerful water agents may have is political control over, and obedience by, local water user collectives, peasant communities and indigenous territories. ‘Rationalization of water control’ by standardizing local water management rules, rights, and rituals often is a basic strategy to achieve this objective. It is common to find, across the globe, that local water control rules and management arrangements, as they exist in farmer-controlled irrigation systems, indigenous territories or local village drinking water supply systems, are ignored by international policy plans, national legislation, and locally intervening companies or development projects. Even though normative diversity sets the stage and cultural plurality is the background—particularly but not exclusively in developing, formerly colonized countries—the modernist legal and policy models that are applied usually fail to address particularity and diversity. These positivist water models also fail to conceptualize water as a politically contested resource, and water control as being constituted by water rights arenas in which diverse actors with unequal clout confront and negotiate. In their approaches to bring about ‘democracy’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘justice’ the emphasis tends to be on ‘water rationality’ and ‘efficiency’, but this neglects the profound consideration of issues of power, context, veritable grassroots representation, local fairness perceptions and how genuinely to accommodate plural rights repertoires. Despite the last decade’s shift toward (neoliberal) downsizing of state water bureaucracy, the formal governance institutes and policies—sustained by liberal discourses on user participation, management decentralization and the downscaling of water management to the lowest ‘appropriate level’—commonly 161

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aim to strengthen, not weaken, their control over local water management. As I have shown elsewhere, water users’ inclusion in new, ‘rational forms of water management’, guided by ‘expert knowledge’, ‘modern water control techniques’ and ‘demand-driven hydro-policy models’ is fundamental to this control project (Boelens 2008a; cf. Bakker 2010; Zwarteveen 2006). At the same time, we can witness many occasions in which water user collectives and federations, rather than relying on new participatory slogans and decentralization policies, feel that they need to mobilize and confront such dominant water discourses and power structures if they are to be taken seriously in co-designing and monitoring practices of water control and distributive justice. Water rights politics can be studied in many ways, at different hydro-social and political scales, considering different water use and management sectors, through diverse conceptual lenses and approaches, and with divergent standpoints and interests. In this chapter I will outline some key aspects of water rights politics and struggles, concentrating in particular on the divide and friction between modernist, official water law and policy regimes and contextbased, local water rights repertoires. Irrigation water rights and management will be the core focus. Though this particular water rights politics arena concentrates on the local–national scale interactions, the actual field of contention is much broader, involving multi-scalar interests and alliances. In the below section I detail the concepts of local water rights and legal complexity. The third section illustrates some fundamental frictions among local, community rights-based rationalities and official, water market-oriented rights policies as they have been applied in the Andean Region. The fourth section elaborates on a conceptual framework to study water rights conflicts, and presents cases from diverse countries to illustrate the concepts used. Water rights struggles involve disputes over access to water resources as much as over the definition of water rules, the legitimacy of rule-making authority, and the discourses to naturalize particular water political and socionatural orders. Section five examines the ambivalence of efforts to bridge the gap between official and local water rights repertoires through policies of recognition, and the problematic politics of identity and disciplinary normalization that these entail. Water distributive and recognition policies generate and naturalize new subjects, rights categories, distributive rules and forms of legitimacy to which many user collectives fiercely object. As section six elaborates, their multiscalar resistance includes opposing current distributive inequalities and undemocratic forms of representation, challenging the rules of play and the very politics of truth and identity themselves. In the final section I reflect on how water rights, in terms of claims and definitions, become arms in a struggle for both recognition of diversity and redistributive justice. OFFICIAL RIGHTS, LOCAL RIGHTS AND LEGAL COMPLEXITY

Burgeoning conflicts over ever scarcer water resources and the competition among multiple uses and users have made water property relations become

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Water rights politics central issues in current policy debates and rural development initiatives. Nevertheless, while universities and schools of water policy thought in both the North and the South focus almost exclusively on ‘modern’ water laws and their (theoretically optimal) relation to ‘advanced’ water technology and ‘should-be’ neo-institutional policy-models, there is an astonishing neglect of and lack of understanding about what water rights-in-practice are, how they function in local communities and how they are created, consolidated and transformed from abstract (socio)legal categories into local procedures and practices. This blind spot in conventional water science and policy-making, rather than being a consequence of misconception or error, results from the political practice and objectivist tradition of which they form a part. Water law and rights are seen as instrumental institutional arrangements ‘socially [to] engineer’ water society. In water governance reforms, water rights and the effective ‘rule of law’ are considered to be both the instruments for planned change and its final objectives, and it is according to these objectives that water reality is judged (Boelens 2008b; Roth 2003). But whenever just official regulations are seen as simultaneously the tools for designing progress, the ultimate goals, and the measuring stick to assess the ‘chaos of existing water reality’, then locally developed water laws, solutions, and rights are made irrelevant. Therefore, understanding not only ‘law-, project- or manual-driven’ rights concepts, but especially users’ reasoning and local expressions of water rights—and the ways in which local collectives use official law as a strategic resource—is of crucial importance if we want to comprehend users’ claim for ‘water rights’ and the ways in which local water control and defence of livelihoods interact with national and global water/power arenas. Though largely ‘invisible’ to outsiders, such local rights systems usually consist of clear, widely popularized patterns of norms that are part of the collective local memory and reference framework. They constitute the heart and fundamental pivot of the water management system. In general terms, a water right gives the right-holder authorization to subtract a flow of water from a particular source and to make use of legally or locally established privileges associated with the water right (among them, access and operational rights, such as use of infrastructure, and/or control rights, such as sharing in management decision-making), provided that the obligations associated with the water right are fulfilled (Beccar et al. 2002). But behind such overall notions, community water control contexts harbor a tremendous diversity of ‘living water rights’. Apart from the issue of who will have water rights and who will not, they respond in infinite ways to basic questions such as: What is the local definition and what are the precise facets of ‘water rights’? What mechanisms are jointly recognized as legitimate to obtain and maintain water rights? How will water benefits be divided? How will contributions and burdens be divided? Who will be entitled to participate in decisions about management, acceptance of new members and any changes in future system ownership? How, and with what results, can different users

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activate and materialize their water rights in practice? Which (human or even supernatural) authorities have legitimacy to enforce water rights? Answers to such questions, defining the locally prevailing water rights bundles and repertoires, differ per region, user group and water use system. This calls for, in each system and water territory, a thorough comprehension of the particular nature of water rights in action, taking into account the above multi-layered bundles: rights to use and withdraw, rights to operate, supervise and manage, and rights to control (i.e., to define, regulate and represent water uses and users). A water right does not refer only to the relationship between a user and a water source, but also to the relationship between people in their political, socio-technical network. Water rights are part of and simultaneously constitute social relations of production. A crucial element of water rights is the faculty to act in a certain way in relation to the rights of other persons or groups who claim to use or control the water source and its privileges. Water rights—both in conceptual terms and ‘in action’—express the workings and effects of power among humans, in alliance and alignment with non-human elements. Therefore it is crucial to consider the two-sided relationship between water rights and power: power relations determine key properties of the contents, distribution and legitimacy of water rights and, in turn, water rights in action reproduce or restructure power relations—they may both strengthen and challenge the status quo (Boelens and Doornbos 2001; cf. Gelles 1998; Mollinga 2008; Vos et al. 2006). Water rights are both strategically designed and planned as well as subject to dynamic, unforeseen changes and contingencies. Unlike game-theory notions that assume an almost spontaneous adaptation of law- and rule-making according to ‘rational choice’, ‘collective interest’ or even the summing-up of ‘individual interests’, and unlike monolegal state-biased theories, in real-life, interacting people make law, although they do not make it out of whole cloth. ‘They build it on existing ideologies, institutions, and structures. But these ideologies, institutions and structures do not have a mind of their own, they are interpreted, altered, and shaped by human agency’ (Chambliss 1993, 25). This also holds true for state law production. Like local water rights repertoires, state water laws are constituted and their implementation is mediated by a variety of interest groups—albeit with unequal clout and influence. The contents and manifestations of state water law are a reflection of the ongoing struggles and not simply ‘a mirror image of the short-run interests and ideologies of “the ruling class” or of “the people”’ (Chambliss 1993, 30). Consequently, the foundation, creation and re-creation of water rights both in states’ apparatuses and in local water user communities follow from ad-hoc, unintended or unforeseen patterns of change, and also from intentional design, as given shape within political struggles and strategies: strategies to control and discipline, and strategies to escape domestication (Boelens 2008a). As a result, the analysis of water rights necessarily implies the study of local water rights and water user systems embedding within the ‘outside’ forces and fields that influence the actual social relations in these user 164

Water rights politics communities. The saying ‘We will settle this among ourselves’ summarizes the fundamental principle of local law in most water user collectives; however, when conflicts overflow community boundaries, and third-party interests come into play, then tension emerges among local law, official law, and any other socio-legal repertoires. This tension has generated a complex interaction and hybridization among local and official norms and a series of norms originating neither in the community nor in official legislation. Therefore, by definition, water-using families and communities operate under conditions of legal pluralism (legal complexity) whereby, in the same hydro-ecological and socio-political space, different sociolegal sources and water rights orders exist, encounter and influence each other (cf. von Benda-Beckmann et al. 1998; Roth et al. 2005). As a consequence, local water laws and ideologies do not have just local roots but result from the way diverse actors select and draw elements from a variety of water rights regimes, with the aim of strengthening their water rights positions. The fact that many ‘local’ water rules and rights were actually official or colonial norms that have been locally appropriated, adapted and internalized (cf. von Benda-Beckmann 2007), means that local law (whether ‘indigenous’, ‘peasant’ or other) cannot be conceived of as pre-existing or being autonomous vis-à-vis the state. Local water rights nearly always assume the presence of state law, and define themselves in contrast and relation to it (Boelens and Doornbos 2001; Guevara-Gil 2006). Therefore also, contrary to popular belief, such rights systems are not just ‘traditional’ or ‘ancient’. They form a dynamic mixture, combining local, national and global rules and often mixing indigenous, colonial and contemporary norms and rights. Important sources of these complex systems tend to be state law, religious laws, ancestral laws, market laws, and the rights frameworks generated or imposed by multiple water project interventions, which often set their own regulations (see Figure 8.1). Thus, the concept of ‘local water rights’, rather than referring to strict timeand place-related origins, relates to the users’ perception that the definitions and enactment of water rights are ‘theirs’, that they ‘belong to them and the locality’, that they orient local users’ behaviour, and that the locally appointed authorities are the ones who have legitimate power to enforce these rights— rather than ‘outside’ rule-makers (Beccar et al. 2002; F. and K. von BendaBeckmann 2000). Therefore, an analysis of the construction and reproduction of local water rights systems, beyond focusing on the ‘truthful representation’ of their sources of origin, or the ‘academic accuracy’ of local uses and customs constructs, needs to consider their constitution as local-national-global hybrids and focus on the question of their political use and convenience—for either intervening agents and supralocal rulers or for user groups which struggle for livelihood defence and rule-making autonomy. CONFLICTING WATER RIGHTS RATIONALITIES

Over the past decades, in most regions of the world, international water policy models have been introduced—whether through top-down state-biased

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Figure 8.1 Local water law as a hybrid construct, embedded in multidimensional domains. Source: own elaboration

regimes, private property and market-driven models, or multiple public-private constructs—that share a neglect for local agro-ecological and politicalorganizational contexts, existing water rights rationalities and the embeddedness of rights in local cultures and histories. Mostly, community water rights systems have suffered greatly from these universalistic policies, since the fundamental rights rationalities are in conflict. Community irrigation rights in the Andean Region countries constitute a typical example. In all their complexity and diversity, local water rights often share some common features (norms that, in a diversity of colours, can also be found in many other farmer-controlled systems around the world). Rights with such common features typically: are collective property; are individually derived from and embedded within the community’s collective water rights; are territory-bound; have their authority vested in rotating community leadership posts; can hardly ever be transferred to users outside the system (which guarantees long-term social security and the collective’s continuity); express diverse usage values (including non-economic values); in times of scarcity, are allocated in accordance with prioritization reflecting social needs (to enable livelihood reproduction); are acquired and consolidated, significantly, based on system construction and consolidation; have their consolidation (upkeep) also ‘community-embedded’, which thus may relate to responsibilities

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Water rights politics entirely outside water control instrumentality; subject to decision-making procedures based on one vote per right-holder, etc. Each community collective provides its context- and history-particular version of such a rights repertoire, as systems of organized complexity that order the highly conflictive field of water control. In each water user community, despite tremendous variety and internal struggles, there is a forceful quest to seek community control (which is not necessarily more ‘equitable’ than supralocal rights systems). Collaboration, instead of competition, is the only way to survive. This simply cannot be supplanted purely by individual, state, or market solutions. Reviewing the above properties (among many other notions), it is immediately clear that the diversity of Andean rights acts against outside bureaucratic or market players’ control; moreover, their very contents and acquisition mechanisms also make control by state and free market agents very difficult (cf. Boelens and Zwarteveen 2005). Neoliberal water policies in the region, as violently implemented in Chile (e.g., Budds 2010; Hendriks 1998), strongly promoted in pre-Morales Bolivia (e.g., Bustamante 2006; Perreault 2008) and pre-Correa Ecuador (e.g., Cremers et al. 2005), and now forcefully installed by the García Government in Peru (e.g., Boelens 2008a), have typically advocated rights with features that are contrary to the above Andean concepts, i.e. water rights: that are private property; that are separated from the land, community and territory; the dominion of which is vested in the state, to protect private interests and the functioning of the ‘free market’; the transfer of which to ‘higher values’ is promoted (i.e., most often outside the community and outside local subsistence systems); that allow new rights to be awarded to the economically most powerful bidder; that fundamentally express market exchange value; that do not obey legally protected social prioritization; the acquisition and consolidation of which is cut loose from system sustainability and reproduction; and, among various other individualizing aspects, for which the individuals’ voting weight is made proportional to their water shares (and buying power), thereby suffocating democratic decision-making. Therefore, as Gelles (1998) argues, attempts to privatize or wrest control over water from indigenous communities affects their cultural identity and their local management systems. This troubled relationship between the state and market forces, on the one hand, and local communities who strive for collective control, on the other, is not typical for the Andes. For instance, Hicks (2010) explains the complex relationship between state-centred water governance in Colorado and New Mexico and the ancient Hispanic acequia irrigation institutions, highlighting the same normative tension and rationality conflict. While these acequias are based on collective rights concepts and complex, organizational forms rooted in community-based obligations and rights, the state administrative system promotes individual rights concepts and allocates water based on its ‘optimal use’. Hicks shows the dangers of weakening experience- and history-based social and natural resource management in which people, place and identity closely interact (for similar cases,

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see, e.g., Ingram and Brown 1998; Gelles 2000, Urteaga and Boelens 2006; for land rights, see also Mayer 2002; Zoomers and van der Haar 2000). ERA—THE ECHELONS OF RIGHTS ANALYSIS

Given that water rights definitions and enforcements are surrounded by contradictions, that they embody social and power relations (e.g., they organize inclusion and exclusion) and that they are shaped by the way power is socially and culturally organized in water governance practice, it is not surprising that water rights are subject to permanent conflicts and struggles. From everyday encounters to high-level global water politics, different water interest groups as well as divergent water rules and rights frameworks interact and confront. To analyze water rights politics and struggles according to the issues at stake at different levels of abstraction, we have suggested four interlinked conceptual ‘rights echelons’ that can be examined through the Echelons of Rights Analysis (see also Boelens 2008a; Zwarteveen et al. 2005): disputes over the resources, the rules, the legitimate authorities, and the discourses. A first basic field of contention is the struggle over resources: access to and withdrawal of water, and the fundamental material means to concretize water rights—such as technological artifacts and infrastructure, land, labour, financial resources, and other means of water-related production. In water conflicts cases and studies this ‘base structure’ echelon tends to get most attention. Examples abound. For instance, in their study on groundwater extraction for irrigation in Gujarat, India, Prakash and Ballabh (2005) conclude that the struggle over water rights and access is largely determined by the unequal distribution of economic buying power to access high-technology water infrastructure. Groundwater tables are rapidly declining on account of increasing use and water scarcity, which has put many at a disadvantage, while giving rich farmers an opportunity. They have invested in deep tube wells. Mediated by access to increasingly expensive pumping devices, access to groundwater is ultimately determined by the hierarchic social and economic relationships associated with caste rather than by legal regulation of the resource. In a similar way, in her study on urban groundwater use in Kathmandu, Nepal, Regmi (2005) analyzes how the unequal distribution of modern extraction technology directly generates huge access inequalities, affects the existing rules and rights regimes to water, and shapes peoples’ perceptions of rights. Since groundwater is primarily seen as private property, the right to use it is increasingly individualized, quite beyond any official or customary legislation. Even when clear laws and policies are in place to protect the rights of disadvantaged or minority groups, the ‘base structure’ struggle over resources often determines the outcome. For example, Getches (2005) examines various cases of the defence of indigenous water rights in the USA. The lack of access to financial means and to technological facilities to materialize their water entitlements implies that recognized indigenous rights largely lead a ‘paper’ 168

Water rights politics life, with uncertain opportunities for use, since economically more powerful settlers have those technological means effectively to access the waters. Wilkinson (2010), for instance, examines the effective loss of access to water by an indigenous territorial group in Pyramid Lake, Nevada, USA. Irrigation systems drained away their rivers, eliminating a historic fishery in the tribe’s lake and reallocating water to communities of settlers. The well-intended legal doctrine claiming reserved water rights for indigenous people was subdued by powerful economic interests. The second echelon for analyzing disputes over water claims involves the substance and meaning of the rules: the contents of water rights, operational and management rules, and mechanisms to acquire rights. Divergent interest and power groups historically and strategically use (and manipulate) different rules to claim and secure water. In many cases these divergent claimants may share the same or a similar legal-normative background and, to enhance their interest, seek to apply opposing rules or ‘shop’ strategically in ‘convenient outside legal frameworks’ (see, e.g., Boelens and Doornbos 2001 for Ecuador; Yoder and Martin 1998 for Nepal; Gerbrandy and Hoogendam 2002 for Bolivia). In other cases, the members of largely divergent legal frameworks confront and impose or defend their rights and rules vis-à-vis the others (see, e.g., Gelles 1998 for conflicting cultural logics and rights rationalities in Peru; Bustamante 2006 for Bolivia; Meinzen-Dick and Pradhan 2005 for various Asian countries; Van Koppen et al. 2007 for diverse African countries). Often, conflicts develop along class, gender, cast or ethnic lines. They occur both in countries with a historically constituted mixture of diverse rights systems (e.g., former colonies) as well as in countries (e.g., in the West) that on the surface seem to obey just one positivist, monolegal system (e.g., Roth and Warner 2007). Key elements of this field of analysis are the bundles of rights and obligations; categories, roles and responsibilities of users; criteria for allocation based on the heterogeneous values and meanings assigned to water; diverse ideas and constructs of fairness, etc. Guevara (2008), for instance, shows how formal rules and rights of Peruvian state water law fail to grasp the way in which peasants and local bureaucracies reinterpret and make sense of these official regulations. Studying the social effects of official water law in the Achamayo River Basin, he illustrates how local water organizations confront, resist and reshape the meaning and enforceability of state law’s contents. In Achamayo, the reconfiguration of official commands proves to be a powerful force in strengthening peasant water organizations, though quite different from official legal structures and policy objectives. Similar cases of water norms confrontation and ‘legal distortion’ are analyzed by von Benda-Beckmann (2007) and Roth (2003) in Indonesia. The latter analyzes irrigation management among migrant Balinese farmers in a state-built irrigation system. Their practices have developed in the field of tension between state-defined norms, organizational and technical engineers’ blueprints, and Balinese conceptions of irrigation management. Within the

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void created by a highly abstract and generalized legal definition of rights and responsibilities, specifically Balinese perceptions and practices continue to play a crucial role, contesting and shaping this ‘modern’ system. A third echelon, or analytical and political level, of water conflict relates to regulatory control: the authority to formulate and enforce water rights, to command water management through binding prescriptions, to make decisions and sanction the implementation of user categories and their norms of conduct. Just as official water authorities tend to deny, neglect or dispute nonformal local water authority, in the eyes of water users in many places in the world, legitimate water authority and rights are not restricted to those emanating from official law. Water user collectives, therefore, also clearly distinguish ‘customary water rights as defined by the lawyers’ (officially codified or recognized by state authorities) from their own, living rights systems (von Benda-Beckmann et al. 1998). Since user groups, to regulate day-to-day water practices, reinvent and experiment with rights definitions and normative codes that originate from local, national, regional and international sources, the authorities that they call in to enhance their interests and confirm ‘their rights’ may also operate at different scales. For example, as I have shown in the Peruvian case of the San Mateo de Huanchor community confronting the powerful mining companies, water user groups often aim for horizontal and vertical linkages, so creating strategic alliances that include or are able to appeal to national and also supranational authorities to claim their rights (Boelens 2008a). Local community foundations, through open and subsurface linkages and fluxes, provide the groundwork for up-scaling their water rights defence networks to national and transnational arenas. In cases such as Peru, where their collective rights are increasingly violated by national authorities, local community authorities tend to put growing emphasis on defending their own control over resources regulation and seeking support from international human rights and UN authorities (cf. Getches 2010). Increasingly also, water user federations, as in Ecuador (Boelens 2008a, Palacios 2006) or Bolivia (Bustamante 2006; Perreault 2006, 2008), have contested the authority of the state to govern ‘their water affairs’, particularly when the state is seen to establish universalist policies and laws that neglect local contexts and needs. However, possessing ‘legitimate authority’ to decide and establish water rights and their contents goes beyond mere questions of regulatory hierarchies, to also involve the effective forces of epistemic communities in the water world. Zwarteveen (2006), for instance, shows how the values and discourses of prevailing modernist water development schools legitimate the masculinization of decision-making power and water authorities, while reinforcing the process of gender-based economic and political subjugation. In water agencies, ‘normal knowing’ is typically associated with masculine identities and authority (cf. Bennet et al. 2005; Vera 2006). For this, the echelons of resources, rules and regulatory control are directly linked to the fourth echelon, of discourses.

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Water rights politics The most abstract level of the water rights battle relates to the regimes of representation: the discourses that establish, impose or defend particular water rights policies and regimes. Regimes of representation define, colour, align and legitimize the contents of the foregoing echelons. As powerful discursive practices, they make the moral, institutional and political linkages among the social and technical, human and natural, theoretical and practical water worlds, as if these bonds were entirely natural. Such discursive presentations and their counter-discourses are multi-scalar and clash at all scale levels. To generate space for defending their water resources, rules and authorities, local water user groups often try to network in order to become an actor at broader arenas of political and discursive power. For example, Vicky Tauli-Corpuz, activist, researcher and indigenous grassroots leader, observes: ‘For us, the Igorot peoples of the Cordillera Region in Northern Philippines, the damming of our rivers was the key issue that pushed us to fight against the Marcos dictatorship and the World Bank, and finally to go to the UN. In the mid-1970s, the World Bank gave loans to the Marcos Government for the Chico River Hydroelectric Dam Project. The whole country was under martial rule, at the time, and the Government thought they could decide how our lands and waters were to be used, without our consent. Gross violations of our civil and political rights as well as economic, cultural and social rights became daily occurrences and a resistance movement was launched to stop the project’ (Tauli-Corpuz 2006, 29). Clearly, all rights echelons linked together in this water struggle, which finally reached momentum at international water decision-making levels, and not least influencing international discourses. ‘It won international support and, by the mid-80s the World Bank decided to cancel the project. This battle was won but not without heavy sacrifices, displaced communities, and divisions between families, clans and tribes’ (Tauli-Corpuz 2006, 29). Since then, increasingly, the grassroots institution (Entebba) managed to get access to UN and other global institutions to try to challenge the dominant water policy and rights views, such as those expressed at the World Water Forums. ‘The lead actors were global water corporations, the World Bank, donor agencies, professional associations dealing with water and sanitation, academia, research institutions and think-tanks. Neither indigenous peoples, nor those who are suffering most from the water crisis, are represented in the World Water Council or the Global Water Partnership, the two organizations responsible for the Word Water Forums’ (Tauli-Corpuz 2006, 27). Claiming water rights, changing policies, and breaking open discursive space to frame alternative water ontologies, meanings, values and identities go hand in hand, from the local to the global: ‘Defending one’s ancestral lands and waters demands heavy sacrifices on the part of indigenous peoples. This is especially so in situations where spaces for serious dialogues are virtually absent, and where force and deception are used by those in power to quell any resistance to their projects. We are constantly seeking ways to enable the modern world to accept and understand our world views, cultures and lifestyles. … During 171

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the two last World Water Forums, even if they were heavily dominated by the water industry, the donor community and water specialists, we managed to carve out a few spaces where we could discuss and present our own concerns’ (Tauli-Corpuz 2006, 31). From the other side of the world, at the same Forum, indigenous leader and current Bolivian president, Evo Morales, aligned with the indigenous discourse—one of the many regimes of counter-representations that aimed to challenge the dominant World Vision on Water: he argued that, rather than persuading indigenous and small farmers to participate in policy-makers’ and development institutes’ projects, for the latter it is time to understand that they need to participate in the projects and strategies of marginalized water user groups. ‘We indigenous peoples do not want to be research objects, but fellow combatants in the struggle’ (Morales 2006, 22). In order to bring the indigenous movement to power and, as one of its key objectives, change neoliberal water policies, the Bolivian irrigator movement that constituted an important back-bone of Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) Government engaged in water rights politics that dynamically interlocked all four levels of abstraction (cf. Perreault 2006, 2008). Clearly, for example, the Bolivian ‘water wars’ and successive water disputes, more than conflicts ‘internal to any echelon’, conformed to the multi-layered, complex water rights battlefields in which all echelons interact. SUBTLE POLICIES AND EQUALIZING DISCOURSES TO ‘RECOGNIZE’ AND DISCIPLINE LOCAL RIGHTS

At the level of discourses and ideologies the aim is to create forms of consciousness that can and will be called upon (presumably in a self-evident manner) in order to defend particular water policies, legitimize water authority hierarchies, and affirm particular water control institutions and distribution practices. So, as I have argued, the struggle over water rights is simultaneously a battle over resources and legitimacy; the legitimacy to formulate and enforce water rights combines the four levels, shaping socio-technical discourses that blend discursive and material (‘physical-technical’) elements together with water truth and knowledge claims, in specific ways. This gives rise to ever more subtle power plays to ‘gain legitimacy’ and establish ‘water truth’ and ‘rightful authority’ (Boelens 2009). Water legislation, among others, is both tool and product of such discourse. For example, a fundamental principle of most water laws is blanket enforcement throughout national territories, based on the proclaimed liberal equality of all citizens before the law. One ideological function of such an equalizing law is to create national identity within an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983), a uniform nation in which water users share the same ‘natural’ objectives. Despite the fact that the reference model of equality, in practice, is often based on the class, gender and cultural standards and interests of a small but powerful water interest minority, the political-discursive effort is to maintain

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Water rights politics the image of an objective and neutral normative framework that would be equally valid for all. How far does legal equality discourse, rather than facilitating water property redistribution, fulfill an important role in denying rights to diversity of water norms and cultures? As I have stated, local water control autonomy and water rights diversity and dynamics make up an elementary obstacle for national and international rule-makers and planners. In general terms, state agencies and market actors require a predictable, uniform playing field to materialize their interests in water control and intervention. Context-particular rights orders tend to be seen as systems of irrational disorder that escape justice and are intangible and unruly. Most liberal and socialist-inspired regimes around the world share the above ideological basis that official law must be omnipresent, uniform and equal for all, and cannot take particular features of existing norms into account. Nevertheless, history has proven that the official legal order cannot afford entirely to neglect local rights systems. Given the fact that local law is context-based, while state law is formulated to regulate water control throughout the country, in most (heterogeneous) cases official justice is seen as inadequate: it faces the problem of losing legitimacy by not ‘doing social justice’ because its general arrangements are seen as unfair when trying to solve context-particular rights conflicts. Totally ignoring these local rights conflicts endangers the state’s authority as problem-solver and may also overflow into challenging the broader political economic structure. This situation often leads to solutions of ‘forced engagement’ among local and positive law. In a sense, just as local laws presuppose interaction with national legislation, paradoxically, state law fundamentally bases its continuity on the capacity of local rights systems to respond to local contexts and claims. Therefore, the state legal system (threatened with losing its legitimacy), in juxtaposition with a national élite (fearing to lose control over society’s water destiny), have increasingly recognized local normative frameworks in a juridical-political sense, albeit in manners that have not challenged society’s fundamental contradictions. In many instances, customary law has been used, institutionalized and codified, not to substitute positive law, but to supplement and adapt it. In fact, it is ironic that official Justice has often been able to survive thanks to the ‘local equity’ and ‘acceptability’ of customary laws that were incorporated (Schaffer and Lamb 1981). Hence both orders base their existence on mutual interaction and strategic ‘recognition’, and are partners to a ‘shotgun marriage’ (Boelens 2009). However, this ‘state-institutionalized local equity’ is a contradictio in terminis. It commonly leads to the de-contextualization and de-politicization of local rules and rights, the latter becoming part of a general formalized system, which takes away their nature of suitability, acceptability, relevance and being ‘fair’ in particular cases (cf. Schaffer and Lamb 1981). Local socio-legal repertoires make sense only in their dynamic context, whereas national law demands ‘order and stability’. Indeed, there is a danger of freezing or even fossilizing customary rights systems by incorporating them into relatively

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static, universalistic state law, in which local principles lose their identity, functionality and capacity for renewal (von Benda-Beckmann et al. 1998; Roth et al. 2005). Not surprisingly, such ‘recognition’, based on de facto hierarchical structures and stereotyped and naturalized concepts regarding water-distributive equity, democracy, community and identity, has not resolved the tensions between official law and local rights systems. In fact, recognition policies are not simply responses to demands by subjugated groups for greater authority and autonomy (cf. Fraser 2000). The current balance in many cases shows a power game of (intermittent) politics of outright exclusion of local water rights and user collectives (by force) and subtle inclusion by ‘participatory’ policies of legal recognition, codification, transformation and confinement. Moreover, recognition of some local rights, under an equalizing regime, also illegalizes those local normative systems that do not fit uniformity-based control efforts. It facilitates political control by the water bureaucracy, and helps neo-liberal sectors incorporate local water users’ rights into the market system. In fact, these subtle politics of water rights inclusion, recognition and equalization invade and may expropriate local collectives’ agency, annihilating local norms. The new norms (of so-called modern, all-inclusive water control) that are imposed organize subjects (water users and their collectives) in hierarchies, and make subjects self-organize in and conform to these lines of command. In a Foucauldian way, normalizing, disciplinary power imposes homogeneity and at the same time individualizes: it compares, categorizes, hierarchizes and corrects people according to the gaps that they show when measured against the norms of modernist water governance. Therefore, as a tool of disciplinary control, ‘inclusive, participatory power’ not only equalizes, but also tends to prosper well in modern societies with systems of formal equality, since ‘within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces, as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of individual differences’ (Foucault 1995, 184). These differences, categorized by a satisfactory–unsatisfactory dichotomy, are the material for self-correction, not just to diminish the aberrant behaviour, but also to produce the very subject. Subtly, the standards for ‘equality’ (a referential concept that requires responding to fundamental questions as: ‘equal to what, to whom; to which norms and models?’) are taken away from the diverse local water user communities. Not meeting these moral, ‘self-evident’ principles of ‘water reason and rationality’ goes far beyond violating the law or the ‘water rules of the rulers’: it means violating one’s own capacity for reason, violating one’s own possibilities to progress and join modern water management. Fundamentally, it entails not just being irresponsible and offending those things that rational water society holds sacred, but most of all, not bearing responsibility for one’s own irrigation practice, household, user organization and community. Therefore, essentialization and objectification of local rights and identities (to ‘include’ them in modern water law and governance) are not just errors of misunderstanding, but take place when ambiguous categories need to be

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Water rights politics re-cognized (reinterpreted) and reclassified to discipline them. Dominant cultural politics thus tend to define water cultures and rights as fixed and aligned to prevailing institutional and power relations: they crystallize presumed physical, political-economic and psychological boundaries and repertoires of a group, aiming to make their water management behavior ‘tangible’ (Boelens 2009). Decentralization and rule-making autonomy come with clearly articulated limits, differentiating those water rules and rights that are ‘good’ and ‘rational’ from those that are ‘inefficient’ and ‘not acceptable’. Modern water policies aim at self-reproduction in water use communities and create a water world after their own image (cf. Assies et al. 1998; Boelens and Gelles 2005; Hale 2002). Besides liberal justice’s recognition of individuals as primary right-holders, in this same vein of modernist equalization, global neoliberal policy actors now open up space for ‘multi-culturalism’, in which collectives are also increasingly endowed with private rights. Assies (2010) illustrates the working of these ‘identity policies’ in Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico, showing how the combination of the neoliberal model with ‘recognition politics’ can give rise to new official strategies of ‘managed multi-culturalism’ that celebrate cultural pluralism but fail to materialize it in lasting redistributive effects for oppressed ethnic groups. By contrast with transformative multi-culturalism—which aims to redistribute power and resources—this ‘top-down’ multi-culturalism reinforces essentialist concepts of group identities that implicitly ignore dynamic, locally generated cultural norms, self-management strategies and forms of political representation. In short, to avoid challenging the (positivist) state’s legitimacy for not being able to respond to local water rights conflicts, to silence protests against the unequal water distributive relationships, or to reshape local institutions into those that fit in with state administrative structures and/or market rules, cooption of water user communities is crucial. Therefore, modern recognition policies seem to acknowledge local rights and rules but actually re-create them by reifying presumed essences, naturalizing the re-arranged normative framework, and reinforcing lines of political control. Local rights systems are invaded from below, absorbed and codified in an all-embracing formal framework in which local water user communities are supposed to participate and compete ‘as equals’ with national and transnational water interest groups in a ‘win-win exercise’. But: many of them refuse to accept these policies of recognition and politics of containment. RESISTANCE

In contrast to those political and development projects that seek to define and inscribe local water rights in the hierarchical structure and legal ontology of power, sustained by ‘water expert networks’ and disciplinary hydropolicy models, it is crucial to understand local water rights creation and re-creation simultaneously as a struggle precisely against this imposition of formalized rights and universalistic regimes of thought. Local water user collectives, in

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many places, consciously and unconsciously, develop their forms of critique which, as Foucault argued, fundamentally entails ‘the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth: critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability’ (2002, 194). Many user collectives around the world engage in multiple forms of resistance to defend their resources, rights, organizational forms and decision-making faculties. Their resistance ranges from opposing current distributive inequalities and undemocratic forms of representation to challenging the very politics of official water truth themselves. In fact, the ongoing creation and re-creation of water rights in local contexts, profoundly intertwined with processes of local identity formation, harbours a world of difference below the outer appearances of uniformity and formality. Multi-layered collective water rights systems proliferate legal pluralism, necessarily questioning the exclusiveness and self-evidence of formal state- and market-based water rules. Local user collectives construct new, diverse water rules and rights, both to adapt to changes and fulfill the everyday needs of their own water control systems, and to strategically represent their members in the struggles against control-externalization. Thus, the expansion and deepening of water rights plurality and water identity-based distinctiveness is a means of resisting commensuration and control by the ruling economic-political and symbolic order. Often, they are expressions of resistance to official laws and to the imposition of outside technological, political and cultural models. But dichotomous representations of normalization vis-à-vis resistance, or formality versus informality, obscure the workings of the politics of water rights rather than clarifying them. When analyzing water material and symbolic resistance it is essential to understand how user collectives reject the categories in which the dominating groups want to enclose them but, at the same time, to see how they use formal rights and official normative categories for their own purposes. Often they try to ‘localize’ water control by deepening their own water rights repertoires and simultaneously shopping around in the power factory of the rulers. Therefore, for instance, local user organizations who try to defend their autonomy do not avoid interaction with the state or development institutions. Many of them request collaboration. Through such interaction, the state, the users and third parties all try to achieve their own, often contradictory, purposes. Here, commonly, local user groups pursue state resources and international funding without handing over local normative power. Each side tries to conscript the other in the action programme that they desire. This interaction is between entities with unequal power, but a mutual need for each other’s resources, where each makes strategic use of some of the other’s techniques, norms and rules. Fundamental questions, thus, relate to the issue of who, and to what extent, controls ‘the process of using (and imitating) the other’. Do water users internalize the formal truths and structures, and assimilate to powerful agents’ norms and rights—i.e., are they ‘subjectified to normalizing 176

Water rights politics power’—or do they rather use imitation as a subtle, subversive strategy to shield below and take over the sources of power of dominant groups? (i.e., ‘mimicry’: Boelens 2008a). Do they incorporate these elements into their own water control practices, but assign a different strategic significance to them? Such questions can only be answered empirically. Water rights embody the innately political nature of water as much as they represent cultural meanings and identities of user collectives. Commonly, as I have argued, water is deeply attached to ‘community’ and has a fundamental role in the constitution of ‘territory’, i.e., the generation of a cultural-political and socio-productive home place. Water control space is actively created by local water cultures and is rooted in history, in community identities, property relations and livelihoods. But although users strategize to ‘localize’ water development and ‘bring home’ decision-making power vis-à-vis control-externalizing policy models, commonly, water user organizations and peasant and indigenous communities strive for broad, supralocal networks. Since local rights arenas are increasingly challenged by (inter)national forces, and transnational arenas also provide new strategic opportunities and allies, they often aim to capture external and even ‘global’ opportunities and adapt them to the local conditions, under local autonomy. Here, the water rights ‘undertows’ (Boelens 2008a) constitute home-bases to enable action on broader political scales, building flexible trans-local networks. ‘Water community’, far from being an egalitarian micro-society (cf. Laurie et al. 2002; Vera 2006; Verzijl 2007), is not a fixed state but a process and a capacity. It is the effort to link diverse and mutually dependent people, and recognize and accommodate their internal differences. For their operation and defence, scalar strategies that link the local, national and global worlds are indispensable. For example, for the case of rural water control in the Andean countries, Bebbington et al. (2010) explore the grassroots responses to the contradictions of bureaucratic governance and neo-liberal reforms. Indigenous and rural movements have forced changes in state public policies and laws throughout the Andean region to counteract undemocratic reforms and extractive industries in order to regain control over natural resources. Multi-scalar networking, mobilizations, multi-actor platforms and continuous bottom-up pressure have been critical in materializing their objectives. As similar evidence shows in other cases (e.g., Gelles 2000; Perrreault 2008; van der Ploeg 2006; Swyngedouw 2004; Warner and Moreyra 2004; Zimmerer 2000), control-localizing strategies implicate wider political objectives and alliances in order to transform water governance frameworks, discourses, and class, gender and ethnic structures. Objectives often involve the contestation of processes that deterritorialize water rights and policy actions that attack the integrity of their territories in general. Thereby they transcend boundaries, challenging ‘manageable units’, ‘assigned identities’, and continuously produce new webs and alliances for political, normative and scalar articulation (Boelens and Gelles 2005). Such domination and resistance struggles do not have final outcomes and rather reflect the contemporary balances of continual confrontations among

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opposing forces. The water rights politics that they entail (including the politics of identity) are inherent both to dominant, control-externalizing strategies and to the power tactics of control-localizing water user collectives. Each tries to shape identity and forms of subjectivity in divergent ways. Each seeks power over the formulation and implementation of rules and rights and over the discursive meanings and interpretation of social practices, of the past, present and the future. REFLECTIONS

In this chapter I have examined particular aspects of water rights politics, concentrating on the ways in which ruling groups have aimed to supplant the diversity of water cultures and rights to make everyday water management and social relations graspable and controlable, by installing the categories and frames of rights and reference of the dominant water players. This is done, often, by presenting the latter as objective, universal schemes of rational water culture, identity and belonging. In this respect, in diverse ways, distributive water rights politics often combine with policies and politics of cultural recognition, many of which aim for the normalization of deviant groups, rights and behaviour, to keep them from ‘wrong-doing’ and align them to official water administrative standards and structures. Here, water rights battles simultaneously involve struggles over resources, rules, authority and discourses. Struggles over this last echelon are to bring the four together in a convenient regime of representation. Water discourses glue together the social and the technical, the human and the non-human, the physical and the meta-physical, in the particular field of water control; they give these network components a specific meaning so as to secure a particular political order, as if it were a naturalized system. Therefore they aim for presenting ‘fixed linkages’ and ‘standard logical relations’ among water actors, objects, categories, concepts, by defining their identity, status and hierarchies, and by forcefully prescribing the nature of problems as well as the solutions to overcome them. Thus, discourses (and counter-discourses or alternative regimes of representation), as Foucauldian power-knowledge-truth triangles, are at once vehicle, tools and product. Though they aim at consolidating particular orders of things, they are not hermetically sealed systems, their strategic nature makes them dynamic, constantly adapting to contexts, opportunities and counter-forces. This same strategic nature in a fierce struggle over water rights determines their great importance as both instruments of domination and arms of resistance. It is common in policy circles that the question of local rights (and identity) recognition is placed as a false dilemma, ‘incorporation versus autonomy’: either accepting the universalized, liberal standards of rationality, efficiency, human rights, justice, and order, or recognizing and celebrating local diversity and rule-making whatever the outcome may be. However, the issue is not so much a matter of respecting ‘otherness,’ if this is presented as ‘isolated and 178

Water rights politics radically different normative systems’ and ‘pre-constituted, static identities.’ Rightful critique to ethnocentric, universalistic or rigid positivist approaches should not mislead us into reifying local rules and rights autonomy, and giving freeway to a cultural relativist approach, or worse, a revival of the theories that essentialize the ‘noble savage,’ assuming that ‘indigenous’ is equal to ‘good’ and ‘local’ is presented as necessarily ‘better’ and ‘more just’. This positioning not only risks legitimizing local class, ethnic and gender injustices, but also misrepresents the dynamic nature of water culture, water rights, and the hybrid forms that water control and organization take in practice. Stereotyping and naturalizing of local water norms, rights and cultures, be it in law, policies, intervention strategies or theoretical reflection, denies the very existence of interaction among socio-legal systems and thereby equally denies the right to self-re-creation (and improvement) of diverse normative systems, always and necessarily in contact with ‘otherness.’ Opportunities for and openness to mutual critique and self-critique are essential for living law systems and their re-creation—an equally important message for formal, national law-making. Critical analysis of the power relations that underpin these systems, thus, is crucial in order to improve both local, national and international water laws and rights. Local water rights and identities are given shape, not by reification, isolation or folkloric policies, but by confrontation and communication in an inter-legality approach. This calls for proactive, contextualized and power-critical strategies that enhance inter-disciplinarity rather than multi-disciplinarity, inter-culturality rather than multiculturalism, and inter-legality rather than multi-legalism. This is not a plea for believing in harmonious interaction among divergent parties. To the contrary, it asks for critically recognizing existing historical, geographical, cultural and normative differences, and at the same time questioning the distributive injustices that underlie water distribution and governance structures. Conflicts, such as the water rights battles at four conceptual levels, are unavoidable and necessarily question water cultural discrimination, lack of water political democracy and representation, and socio-economic water injustice. But, contrary to common policy discourse, the aim of water and territorial disputes and the claims for rule-making autonomy and respect for distinctiveness are almost never the results of a tendency to separatism, independence or cultural conservatism. Far from efforts to ‘Balkanize’, they result from the intensive struggle between the actors over water access and control rights, over the privileges to norm and regulate, and over the strategic positions of legitimate authority within the structures of state and non-state water orders. As was argued in this chapter, in the struggle over water rights, in many places around the world, user collectives, grassroots organizations, and rural and indigenous federations resist externally-imposed ‘formalization and normalization’ policies that attempt to take control of their water rights and management systems. Such water struggles are clearly also struggles for the right to self-define the nature of water problems and the direction for

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solutions. Therefore, they also criticize the very rationality of reforms and aim to show that policy choices that are justified on the basis of neutrality, efficiency and naturalized laws, work in actual practice to promote the interests of a select water society group. They seek to bring the hidden political contents to the surface. Consequently, these struggles, beyond demanding counteraction to flagrant injustice and social differentiation, also demand the development of new concepts, visions and ways to define and discuss ‘water’ and ‘water rights’. However, since modernization projects directly label the critical questioning of imperative forms of water rationality as ‘acts of irrationality’, as ‘revolt against reason’, or ‘obstruction of public morals’, water user networks require and struggle for the space and freedom to deviate and elaborate on non-centralized ways of water truth production. They engage in the never-ending struggle against the very politics of truth, to claim and defend the right to construct their own local water rights models and cultures, to create their own water world. BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Assies, W. (2010) ‘The Limits of State Reform and Multiculturalism in Latin America’, in Out of the Mainstream: Water Rights, Politics and Identity, Boelens, Getches and Guevara (eds), London: Earthscan. Assies, W., G. van der Haar and A. Hoekema (eds) (1998) The Challenge of Diversity: Indigenous Peoples and Reform of the State in Latin America, Amsterdam: Thela Thesis Publishers. Bakker, K. (2010) Beyond Privatization: Water, Governance, Citizenship, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bebbington, A., D. Humphreys Bebbington and J. Bury (2010) ‘Federating and Defending: Water, Territory and Extraction in the Andes’, in Out of the Mainstream: Water Rights, Politics and Identity, Boelens, Getches and Guevara (eds), London: Earthscan. Beccar, L., R. Boelens and P. Hoogendam (2002) ‘Water Rights and Collective Action in Community Irrigation’, in Water Rights and Empowerment, R. Boelens and P. Hoogendam (eds), 1–21, Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum. Benda-Beckmann, Franz von (2007) ‘Contestations over a Life-giving Force: Water Rights and Conflicts, with Special Reference to Indonesia’, in A World of Water, P. Boomgaard (ed.), 259–277, Leiden: KITLV Press. Benda-Beckmann, F. von, K. von Benda-Beckmann and J. Spiertz (1998) ‘Equity and Legal Pluralism: Taking Customary Law into Account in Natural Resource Policies’, in Searching for equity: Conceptions of Justice and Equity in Peasant Irrigation, R. Boelens and G. Dávila (eds), 57–69, Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum. ——(2000) ‘Gender and the Multiple Contingencies of Water Rights in Nepal’, in Water, Land and Law, R. Pradhan, F. von Benda-Beckmann and K. von BendaBeckmann (eds), Kathmandu, Nepal, Freedeal and Wageningen, Netherlands, Wageningen University.

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Water rights politics Bennett, V., S. Dávila-Poblete and M.N. Rico (eds), (2005) Opposing Currents: The Politics of Water and Gender in Latin America, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Boelens, R. (2008a) The Rules of the Game and the Game of the Rules: Normalization and Resistance in Andean Water Control, Wageningen, Netherlands: Wageningen University. ——(2008b) ‘From Universal Recipes To Living Rights: Local and Indigenous Water Rights Confront Public-Private Partnerships in the Andes’, Journal of International Affairs, 61 (2), 127–144. ——(2009) ‘The Politics of Disciplining Water Rights’, Development and Change 40 (2), 307–331. Boelens, R. and B. Doornbos (2001) ‘The Battlefield of Water Rights: Rule Making Amidst Conflicting Normative Frameworks in the Ecuadorian Highlands’, Human Organization 60 (4), 343–355. Boelens, R. and P. Gelles (2005) ‘Cultural Politics, Communal Resistance and Identity in Andean Irrigation Development’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 24 (3), 311–327. Boelens, R. and M. Zwarteveen (2005) ‘Prices and Politics in Andean Water Reforms’, Development and Change, 36 (4), 735–758. Budds, J. (2010) ‘Water Rights, Mining and Indigenous Groups in Chile’s Atacama’, in Out of the Mainstream: Water Rights, Politics and Identity, Boelens, Getches and Guevara (eds), London: Earthscan. Bustamante, R. (2006) ‘Pluri-, multi-issues in the Reform Process: Towards New Water Legislation in Bolivia’ in Water and Indigenous Peoples, R. Boelens, M. Chiba and D. Nakashima (eds), 126–143, Paris: WALIR, UNESCO. Chambliss, William J. (1993) ‘On Lawmaking’, in Making Law: The State, the Law and Structural Contradictions, W.J. Chambliss and M.S. Zatz (eds), 3–35, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Cremers, L., M. Ooijevaar and R. Boelens (2005) ‘Institutional Reform in the Andean Irrigation Sector: Enabling Public Water Agencies for Strengthening Local Rights and Water Management’, Natural Resource Forum, 29, 37–50. Foucault, M. (1995 (1975)) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage. ——(2002 (1978)) ‘What is critique?’ in The Political, David Ingram (ed.), 191–211, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Fraser, N. (2000) ‘Rethinking recognition’, New Left Review, 3, 107–120. Gelles, P.H. (1998) ‘Competing Cultural Logics: State and “Indigenous” Models in Conflict’, in Searching for Equity, Boelens and Dávila (eds), 256–267, Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum. ——(2000) Water and Power in Highland Peru: The Cultural Politics of Irrigation and Development, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Gerbrandy, G. and P. Hoogendam (2002) ‘Materialising Rights: Hydraulic Property in the Extension and Rehabilitation of Two Irrigation Systems in Bolivia’, in Water Rights and Empowerment, R. Boelens and P. Hoogendam (eds), 36–51, Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum. Getches, D.H. (2005) ‘Defending Indigenous Water Rights with the Laws of a Dominant Culture: The Case of the United States’ in Liquid Relations, D. Roth, R. Boelens and M. Zwarteveen (eds), 44–65, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.

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Getches, D. (2010) ‘Using International Norms in Indigenous Water Rights Struggles’, in Out of the Mainstream: Water Rights, Politics and Identity, Boelens, Getches and Guevara (eds), London: Earthscan. Guevara-Gil, A. (2006) ‘Official Water Law Versus Indigenous and Peasant Rights in Peru’, in Water and Indigenous Peoples, R. Boelens, M. Chiba and D. Nakashima (eds), 126–143, Paris: WALIR, UNESCO. Guevara-Gil, A. (ed.), (2008) Derechos y Conflictos de Agua en el Perú, Lima, Peru: WALIR, Concertación, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Hale, C. (2002) ‘Does Multiculturalism Menace? Governance, Cultural Rights and the Politics of Identity in Guatemala’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 34 (3), 485–524. Hendriks, J. (1998) ‘Water as Private Property. Notes on the Case of Chile’, in Searching for Equity, R. Boelens and G. Dávila (eds), 297–310, Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum. Hicks, G. (2010) ‘Acequias of the Southwestern United States in Tension with State Water Laws’, in Out of the Mainstream: Water Rights, Politics and Identity, Boelens, Getches and Guevara (eds), London: Earthscan. Ingram, H. and F.L. Brown (1998) ‘Commodity and Community Water Values. Experiences from the U.S. Southwest’, in Searching for Equity, R. Boelens and G. Dávila (eds), 114–120, Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum. Laurie, N., R. Andolina and S. Radcliffe (2002) ‘New Exclusions: The Consequences of Multicultural Legislation for Water Policies in Bolivia’, in Multiculturalism in Latin America: indigenous rights, diversity and democracy, R. Sieder (ed.), London Palgrave. Mayer, E. (2002) The Articulated Peasant, Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview Press. Meinzen-Dick, R. and R. Pradhan (2005) ‘Analyzing Water Rights, Multiple Uses, and Intersectoral Water Transfers’, in Liquid Relations, D. Roth, R. Boelens and M. Zwarteveen (eds), 237–253, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Mollinga, P. (2008) ‘Water, Politics and Development: Framing a Political Sociology of Water Resources Management’, Water Alternatives, 1 (1), 24–47. Morales, E. (2006) ‘Message on Behalf of the Indigenous Peoples at the Third World Water Forum.’ in Water and Indigenous Peoples, Boelens, Chiba and Nakashima (eds), 20–24, Paris: UNESCO. Palacios, P. (2006) ‘Between Customs and the Establishment of Juridical Pluralism’, in Water and Indigenous Peoples, R. Boelens, M. Chiba and D. Nakashima (eds), 160– 173, Paris: UNESCO. Perreault, T. (2006) ‘Escalas socioespaciales, reestructuración del Estado y la gobernanza neoliberal del agua en Bolivia’, in Agua y Derecho: Políticas hídricas, derechos consuetudinarios e identidades locales, Boelens, Getches and Guevara (eds), 285–320, Lima: IEP. ——(2008) ‘Custom and Contradiction: Rural Water Governance and the Politics of Usos y Costumbres in Bolivia’s Irrigator Movement’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 98 (4), 834–854. Ploeg, J.D. van der (2006) El Futuro Robado: Tierra, Agua y Lucha Campesina, Lima: WALIR, IEP. Prakash, A. and V. Ballabh (2005) ‘A Win-Some Lose-All Game: Social Differentiation and Politics of Groundwater Markets in North Gujarat’, in Liquid Relations, Roth, Boelens and Zwarteveen (eds), 172–194, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.

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Water rights politics Regmi, A. (2005) ‘Complexities of Water Governance: Rise and Fall of Groundwater for Urban Use’, in Liquid Relations, D. Roth, R. Boelens and M. Zwarteveen (eds), 124–143, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Roth, D. (2003) Ambition, Regulation and Reality: Complex Use of Land and Water Resources in Luwu, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. PhD dissertation, Wageningen University. Roth, D. and J. Warner (2007) ‘Flood Risk, Uncertainty and Changing River Protection Policy in the Netherlands: The Case of Calamity Polders’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 98 (4), 519–525. Roth, D., R. Boelens and M. Zwarteveen (eds), (2005) Liquid Relations: Contested Water Rights and Legal Complexity, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Schaffer, B. and G. Lamb (1981) Can Equity Be Organized? Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Swyngedouw, E. (2004) ‘Globalisation or “Glocalisation”? Networks, Territories and Rescaling’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 17(1), 25–48. Tauli-Corpuz, V. (2006) ‘Indigenous Peoples and International Debates on Water’, in Water and Indigenous Peoples, R. Boelens, M. Chiba and D. Nakashima (eds), 20–24, Paris: UNESCO. Urteaga, P. and R. Boelens (eds), (2006) Derechos Colectivos y Políticas Hídricas en la Región Andina, Lima: IEP. Van Koppen, B., Giordano, M., and Butterworth J. (eds), (2007) Community-based Water Law and Water Resource Management Reform in Developing Countries, Wallingford and Cambridge, MA: CABI Publishers. Vera, Juana (2006) ‘Derechos de agua, etnicidad y sesgos de género’, in Agua y Derecho, Boelens, Getches and Guevara (eds), 389–410, Lima, IEP. Verzijl, A. (2007) Derechos de agua y autonomía local: Análisis comparativo de los Andes peruanos y los Alpes suizos, Lima: WALIR-IEP. Vos, H. de, R. Boelens and R. Bustamante (2006) ‘Formal Law and Local Water Control in the Andean Region: A Fiercely Contested Field’, International Journal of Water Resources Development, 22 (1), 37–48. Warner, J. and A. Moreyra (2004) Conflictos y Participación: Uso multiple del agua, Montevideo: Nordan Comunidad. Wilkinson, C. (2010) ‘Indian Water Rights in Conflict with State Water Rights: The Case of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe in Nevada, USA’, in Out of the Mainstream: Water Rights, Politics and Identity, Boelens, Getches and Guevara (eds), London: Earthscan. Yoder, R. and E. Martin (1998) ‘Water rights and equity issues: A case from Nepal’, in Searching for Equity, Boelens and Dávila (eds), 133–142, Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum. Zimmerer, K.S. (2000) ‘Rescaling Irrigation in Latin America: The Cultural Images and Political Ecology of Water Resources’, Ecumene, 7 (2), 150–175. Zoomers, A. and G. van der Haar (eds), (2000) Current Land Policy in Latin America: Regulating Land Tenure under Neo-liberalism, Amsterdam: KIT. Zwarteveen, M. (2006) Wedlock or Deadlock? Feminists’ Attempts to Engage Irrigation Engineers. PhD thesis, Wageningen University. Zwarteveen, M., D. Roth and R. Boelens (2005) ‘Water Rights and Legal Pluralism: Beyond Analysis and Recognition’, in Liquid Relations, D. Roth, R. Boelens and M. Zwarteveen (eds), 254–268, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.

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The politics of gender in water and the gender of water politics MARGREET Z. ZWARTEVEEN INTRODUCTION

Mentioning the words ‘politics’ and ‘gender’ in one phrase is a bit like calling water wet. After all, gender itself is already a deeply political term, embedded in and raising fundamental questions of diversity and sameness, and of equity and justice. Gender is political because it is about difference; and difference lies at the heart of politics. Gender difference is a major structuring factor of social life, for instance providing the basis for the fundamental division between paid ‘productive’ labour and unpaid ‘reproductive’ and domestic labour, assigning women primary responsibility for the latter. Gender also is an important principle of cultural-valuational differentiation, with the authoritative construction of norms that privilege traits associated with masculinity, and the simultaneous pervasive devaluation and disparagement of things coded as ‘feminine’ (Fraser 1997, 20). In this chapter, I elaborate and discuss how gender ‘works’ to mediate and modify water politics. I hope to show that gender is not only a major although often implicit criterion for allocating rights and powers in water (the politics of gender in water), but also shapes and is used to either legitimize or de-legitimize water knowledge and authority by associating those with masculinity or femininity, respectively (the gender of water politics). My main aim with the chapter is to demonstrate that much in water politics is indeed about, or mediated through, gender. This is important, because gender seldom explicitly figures in water policy documents other than in a separate chapter or section that remains thematically separate from the main text. Nor is gender normally invoked in analyses of water management and distribution. Indeed, gender tends to disappear in policies and analyses through intertwined mechanisms of normalization, naturalization and neglect and through the ways in which water problems and solutions tend to be conceptually and discursively framed (see Zwarteveen 2010). Water cultures, professional identities, discourses and knowledge all work together to either marginalize or depoliticize the inherently political questions of distribution and recognition that gender entails. Identifying, uncovering and challenging the mechanisms and processes through which this occurs forms an important part of feminist gender politics in water. It involves both a rethinking of what is normal and just, as well as a reframing of what water politics is about (see Zwarteveen 2010). 184

The politics of gender in water and the gender of water politics I have divided the rest of this chapter into three main sections. The first is about gender, politics and water, in which I present some important definitions and concepts that help in understanding and unravelling the linkages between gender and water politics. In the second section, I discuss and give examples of how gender shapes important questions of distribution and representation in water in ‘modern’ irrigation systems and in traditional irrigation systems, respectively. Although I draw my examples from water used for irrigation, a similar argument could be made for water used for drinking and sanitation. While these examples illustrate how gender shapes and structures water politics, the next and third section is about the gender of water politics. It shows how water politics are partly played out, resolved and contested around and through gender. In the last and concluding section, I discuss the implications of the realization that water politics and gender mutually constitute each other. GENDER, POLITICS AND WATER

Gender is the social usage of and social meaning attributed to biological sex differences. Rather than simply elaborating or expressing ‘natural’ differences, social processes—through a range of institutions, codes and taboos—mediate and modify biological differences and inscribe them in masculine and feminine gender identities (Rubin 1975; Connell 1987). This inscription, and the resulting creation and ordering of relations between people, happens in a hierarchical manner, with men and all that is associated with masculinity usually being valued higher (and granted more powers and authority) than women and all that is associated with femininity. In other words, gender is also a way through which and in which power obtains meaning (Scott 1986). According to Harding (1986), this happens through three distinct processes that are interrelated in practice: symbolism, structure and identities. First, gendered social life is the result of assigning dualistic gender metaphors to various perceived dichotomies that rarely have anything to do with sex differences (symbolism). Second, it is the consequence of appealing to these gender dualisms to organize social activity, of dividing necessary social activities between different groups of humans (structure). And third, it is a form of socially constructed, individual identity that is only imperfectly correlated with either the ‘reality’ or the perceptions of sex differences (individual gender or gender identities). The referents for all three meanings of masculinity and femininity differ from culture to culture, though within any culture the three forms of gender are related to each other. Together, they can be seen to constitute what Connell (1987) calls ‘hegemonic forms’ of masculinity and femininity, which constrain and influence the actual behavioural practices of men and women, but do not determine them. Instead, there are a range of possibilities between the acceptance of normative sanctions as the legitimate rules of behaviour, and conforming to them (Giddens 1979). In some societies, the rules and practices that shape gender relations are relatively flexible, 185

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leaving room for multiple interpretations; in others, they are severely and punitively enforced. Nevertheless, most societies display a proliferation of gender identities along with normative standards that exercise greater or lesser pressures for conformity. The meaning of gender is always contextual—and constructed and contested. Women—or men, for that matter—cannot be identified as a pre-existing group or category before (or outside) history or analysis, along with, for instance, other categories of disempowered people, such as ethnic minorities or socially excluded immigrants. Gender cuts across, or intersects with, all other social categories, producing differences of interests between women. Gender politics often ‘happen’ in social spaces and domains that tend to be defined as pre-political or as outside (water) politics. More or less intimate relationships between men and women—that tend to be seen as ‘private’ and therefore by definition not public and political—in families and communities are key sites of gender-specific struggles. Any strategy to advance gender justice must therefore also focus on power relations in this domestic context. Yet, the patriarchal mindsets and identities that are produced in this sphere are not contained there, but infuse most economic, social and political institutions. Indeed, combining the words gender and politics serves as a direct reminder that the normal conception of politics itself is very often gender-biased in just associating it with what goes on in the ‘public’ sphere and in failing to acknowledge that ‘private’ and ‘public’ are linked in complex and multiple ways. The terms themselves often serve to delimit and reproduce gendered boundaries, associating the former with women and femininity and the latter with men and masculinity. Attention to gender in water politics therefore carries with it a questioning of the very definition of the political, based on the view brought forward by, for instance, Hannah Arendt that drawing the borders of the political is, in many respects, itself a fundamental political activity. It requires a willingness to perceive politics in a different way: as a human activity that is not necessarily or historically reducible to representative forms of government or ‘the arrogant, male, public realm’ (cf. Dietz 1992, 75). Although more or less explicit mention of gender in water policies and analyses seems recent, gendered ideas and ideals—such as about appropriate behaviour and tasks or roles for men and women, or about the organization of care and labour—have always played, and continue to play, an important role (though not the only, nor necessarily the most important) in decisions about how benefits and burdens, rewards and punishments, status and voice are divided. Water is an important political resource, and control over water—and over water-related investments and water knowledge—is an important source of political power. In water contexts, power and politics have a strongly gendered character, with authority and expertise being associated with masculinity and maleness. Water, therefore, is also an important site for the construction of gendered power and hegemonic masculinities. It is a professional domain dominated by men, playing an important role in shaping images of masculinity and masculine heroism in wider society (Zwarteveen 2008).

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The politics of gender in water and the gender of water politics THE POLITICS OF GENDER IN WATER

‘Modern’ irrigation systems The first gender and development scholars—in the 1970s and 1980s—often referred to ‘modern’ irrigation projects as negative examples of gender-biased planning. Their studies provided a grim picture of negative changes in gender relations caused by such projects. They showed how planners’ and engineers’ strongly normative, but often implicit, ideas about the prevailing (or ideal) gender division of labour and about the intra-household organization of farming served to justify a redistribution of land and water resources in favour of men. Farming and irrigation itself was, in the eyes of the irrigation planners and engineers of that time, clearly a masculine activity. A feasibility study drafted in the 1970s by a French firm on the settlement policy of the Mahaweli H irrigation project in Sri Lanka for instance described the ideal pioneer (called the ‘paradigmatic settler’) as ‘a young man gifted with entrepreneurial qualities’ (Schrijvers 1988, 44). He had to be someone ‘who is not inhibited by a long practice of submissive behaviour towards individuals and who is capable of dealing with them on equal terms … one with initiative, enthusiasm and a pioneer spirit … one who is an experienced farmer … able to participate in the management of his community … . He should live in the area with his family’ (Schrijvers 1988, 44). Irrigated farmers were supposed to be men, whereas women were supposed to assume the role of housewives and mothers. Within such a modern nuclear family, this division of labour between men and women would reflect the principle of comparative advantage (Becker 1981). Given women’s central role in procreation, it would be rational for them to specialize in domestic labour, while men specialized in full-time production for the market. Sociologists characterized this division of labour as functional role-differentiation, based on the socialization of men and women into different personality types fitting for their respective roles. Men would thus acquire characteristics that went with their specialization in instrumental roles: rationality, objectivity, competitiveness, etc. Women would instead become the affectionate, caring characters that their roles in the home demanded. Many water projects engaged in active efforts to help both genders assume their ‘ideal’ or most appropriate role and function in the new modern scheme of things. Men were assisted through agricultural training and the provision of inputs and credits, support that was aimed at turning them into productive and modern farmers. Women were likewise assisted in becoming modern housewives and mothers. In the Sri Lankan Mahaweli example, ‘Home Development Centres’ were established where women settlers were supposed to learn ‘in short courses’ how to become better housewives. The training program contained ‘health, nutrition, sanitation, poultry, home-gardening and needle-work (with special emphasis on macramé)’ (Schrijvers 1988, 47). In drinking water projects as well, modernity was often associated with a

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specific gender division of labour, with for instance hygiene and health designated as the female domain, and the operation and maintenance of pumps as the male domain. These normative ideas about the most appropriate and suitable roles for men and women, and about the organization of farming, also provided the basis for allocating water-related rights and responsibilities. In irrigation projects, and because men were designated as the farmers, all rights were normally vested in them. Women were thus systematically denied rights to own land and water, resulting in their loss of control over resources and over the products of their own labour. Studies showed how this negatively affected gender equity. An early evaluation of the Mwea scheme in Kenya, for instance, concluded: ‘it is our contention that the unsatisfactory recognition of women’s rights and needs within the Scheme remains one of the great weaknesses of the “Mwea system”. It is our doubt about this central aspect, so important for the long term welfare of Mwea families, that had led us to question … whether the Mwea pattern ought to be replicated elsewhere’ (Hanger and Moris 1973, 244). Another study, done in the already referred to Mahaweli irrigation system in Sri Lanka, linked the serious decline in household food security within the scheme to the fact that women no longer had their own land and incomes: ‘the chronic under nutrition in the Mahaweli H area is a direct result of planning that cuts women off from their productive resources. It is of primary importance that women, who have to provide the daily food for their children and other members of the family, have the means to obtain sufficient food. … Research showed that only 35% of the net income of the male farmer (after debts were paid off) benefitted the rest of the household’ (Schrijvers 1984, 270). These and many other studies helped in creating awareness that gender relations, divisions of labour and identities are not a given, or a function of a particular society’s place on the evolutionary ladder. The realization that gender relations vary deeply depending on location and history raised critical doubts about the desirability of replicating the Western middle-class family ideal that had inspired water planning in the 1970s and 1980s, and fuelled the wider debate about the nature and direction of development. These studies also contributed to the realization that the household is an important domain of water politics, an arena in which the division of benefits and burdens of using water are co-determined. This challenged the hitherto designation in much water planning of the household as ‘private’, placing it outside the domain of planning influence and thus of formal water politics. Opening up this domain for explicit scrutiny and intervention to water analysts and planners, and recognizing how it is intricately and interactively linked to all that happens outside it, was and is an important task of feminist scholars and practitioners. It brings to mind the famous slogan ‘the personal is political’, and is a recognition of the fact that the boundaries between private and public, or between work and home, are themselves social and political constructions that serve to maintain or challenge gendered social orders and

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The politics of gender in water and the gender of water politics hierarchies. This recognition also implies the need to thoroughly rethink what a household is, and debate about what is ‘just’ or ‘fair’ in terms of intrahousehold divisions of burdens and benefits, and of incomes and responsibilities. The two are in fact intertwined; as Agarwal rightly notes: ‘How we characterize the household … can impinge critically on policy decisions regarding whom resources and programmes get directed towards’ (Agarwal 1994, 55). ‘Traditional’ irrigation systems The results of studies about changing gender relations in ‘modern’ irrigation systems were often used to point an accusing finger at (male) water planners and engineers, blaming them of gender biases and patriarchal attitudes. One favoured line of feminist argumentation of the time (1980s and 1990s) was that water development, rather than liberating women from exploitative traditions and family relations, made them subject to even harsher exploitation by men as well as by the global system of capitalist labour relations (see Zwarteveen 2006). Some scholars even posited that modern control of water went hand in hand with, and indeed was an intrinsic part of, the modern control of women, arguing that the origins of male control over water could be found in Western systems of Cartesian thought and Western systems of patriarchy and capitalism (Shiva 1989; Strang 2005). In this reasoning, (Western, white) men’s ‘mastery of nature’ is a powerful emblematic icon of Western progress and civilization, associated with capitalism, enlightenment and positivism. Some real or metaphorical beliefs that women in traditional cultures were closer to nature and had more control over water are the Corollaries to such lines of thinking. Indeed, in some of the analyses, male water engineers (and their knowledge and technology) were implicitly pictured as evil demolishers of a pristine and heavenly paradise in which men and women lived in egalitarian harmony and water was abundantly available. Yet, examples of ‘traditional’ or farmer-managed irrigation systems that have remained in relative isolation from globalized irrigation engineering traditions and market systems do not support such a belief in more gender equal societies in a not-yet spoilt past. Also in these ‘traditional’ systems, gender is often a clear axis around which water rights and responsibilities, status and authority are divided, with men most often belonging to the privileged group. Adams et al. in their analysis of an indigenous irrigation system in Marakwet in Kenya, for instance, observe that women lack primary water rights in this system: ‘Women obtain usufructuary rights to land under various circumstances … , but the organization and regulation of water use is sanctioned by cultural taboos which mean that women live under a very different regime of access to water than men’ (Adams et al. 1997, 720). Primary rights to irrigation water are allocated through participation in communal maintenance work. Because a woman is forbidden to take part in maintenance activities, she can only obtain water through her husband, other male

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family members (e.g. a grown-up son), or another man willing to work on the furrow on her behalf. For some, especially for those without access to male labour or cash, this makes access to water so difficult that they give up irrigated farming altogether (Adams et al. 1997). Studies of traditional community-managed irrigation systems in Nepal (Bajracharya 2000; Bruins and Heijmans 1993; Poudel 2000; Pradhan 1989; Pun 2000; Schaaf, van der 2000; Zwarteveen and Neupane 1996) paint a rather similar picture: women often do use and have access to water and are actively involved in irrigated agriculture, but few women are involved in its management. Formal ‘ownership’ (i.e. alienation and management) rights to water are predominantly vested in men. In many of these systems there is a clear gender division of labour, with men being primarily responsible for the provision of water (organizing water allocation and mobilizing and providing labour for irrigation scheme maintenance) and women, in their capacity as farmers, being primary responsible for the actual field-tasks of irrigating, applying water to crops. Studies of indigenous irrigation systems in the Andes (Bourque and Warren 1981; Lynch 1991; Radcliffe 1986; Tuijtelaar de Quitón et al. 1994) likewise document how the tasks of canal maintenance and water distribution tend to be labelled as strictly masculine, a labelling that also supports the vesting of rights to access water in men. Just as in ‘modern’ projects the attribution of water rights only to men was justified on the basis of normative ideas about the proper functioning of households, in many of these traditional or indigenous systems it was based on equally normative ideas about appropriate behaviour for men and women, or on supposed gender differences in terms of physical abilities and strength. Male farmers in the Chhattis Mauja irrigation system in Nepal, for instance, explained that maintenance work on the head works could not be done by women because this would expose them to embarrassing jokes and behaviour of men, while women (especially those who lived further away from the main intake) explained that it would be difficult for them to participate in maintenance of the head works because it would require travelling and working in places far away from their homes (Zwarteveen and Neupane 1996). That women would not be able to do the same amount and types of work as men, and that allowing them to take part would therefore result in unfairness (with less work, they would still be entitled to access water) is also often mentioned as a reason for not allowing them to take part in construction or maintenance works. Hence, social norms (partly justified by fears of adultery and sexual violence) and work divisions based on supposedly natural differences between women and men (the assignment of women to domestic and caring duties, and women’s lesser physical strength) that restrict women’s mobility legitimize the construction of irrigation as something that belongs to men and the attribution of rights to men only. Such constructions maybe further justified by and couched in gendered symbolisms and languages that are linked to taboos, norms and myths. Interestingly, similar traditional rules exist in countries as diverse as Sri Lanka (Athukorala 1995, pers. com.), Tanzania

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The politics of gender in water and the gender of water politics (Sheridan 2002), Kenya (Adams et al. 1997 and Dubel and de Kwaasteniet 1983), Indonesia (Jha 2004) and the Andes (Radcliffe 1986) that stipulate that women (any woman, or sometimes just menstruating women) are not to come close to irrigation intakes, or to walk on canal bunds. If they do, disasters in the form of collapsing intakes and reduced fertilities of soils and humans will be the result. In northern Kenya, ‘women are not allowed to take part in any work connected with the irrigation furrows, the general maintenance, the control of the water level at the intake, or the diverting of water onto the crops from the furrow’ (Adams et al. 1997, 720). Among the neighbouring Pokot, women are forbidden to bathe in the furrows, and a woman who has given birth to twins, or had a breach birth, is not even allowed to touch the water in a furrow. Problems with the furrows, such as leakage or bank breakage, were blamed on women breaking the taboo (Dubel and de Kwaasteniet, 1983). These studies illustrate the existence of symbolic and semantic parallels between human sexuality and soil productivity, with irrigation water for instance likened to men’s semen and the earth or soil to a womb. Some scholars interpret such parallels as proof that control over irrigation, and by extension over the fertility of soils and over agricultural productivity, are symbolically and semantically linked to the control of men over women, and by extension over their fertility and productivity (Sheridan 2002). Irrespective of whether one agrees with this suggestion, what is clear is that the use and management of water often is a site of rather strong gender segregations, which are rooted in larger systems of gendered metaphors, symbolisms and norms that serve to justify and naturalize them. THE GENDER OF WATER POLITICS

The system level The above cited studies already suggested that water is also deeply gendered in yet another way: power, expertise and status in water tend to have a strong masculine connotation (Zwarteveen 2008). Those water tasks that are seen as most important, difficult or valuable generally are designated as ‘masculine’, and water expertise and authority likewise carry a clear masculine label. Attributes deemed necessary to carry out water management tasks—physical force, determination, technical competence, self-confidence, being in command—are associated with manly behaviour. Hence, markers of gender delineate and define gender politics, in such a way that either women and all that is associated with femininity are seen as not belonging to the political domain of water, or their political skills and virtues are disqualified. At the level of users, the delegation of water management authority and expertise to men is often linked to male landownership. Yet, water management was also a male-only affair in those South-East Asian societies in which women could own and inherit land, such as in the famous Ifugao terraces in the North of

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the Philippines (Barton 1922), in the zanjera in Luzon (Lewis 1991), or in the Balinese subak systems (Jha 2004). The ideological, spatial and symbolic demarcation of the tasks of irrigation management as a masculine domain has been observed in many other irrigation systems throughout the world (Lynch 1991; Zwarteveen 1997; Zwarteveen and Neupane 1996). Even though women are active as farmers in irrigated fields, their responsibilities and visibility in the formal and public parts of irrigation management, or indeed in what could be referred to as formal water politics, are often restricted. Operational tasks in water management in large irrigation systems, such as distributing water and operating sluices and inlets, are likewise often considered to require skills and abilities that are associated more with men than with women. These tasks involve the everyday politics of water (Mollinga 2001), and often directly relate to struggles over who gets how much water and when. As many scholars have observed, such struggles and the actual water distribution that happens as a result of them rarely take place following bureaucratic technical-administrative recipes and rules but, especially when water is scarce, happen through competition and conflict between local influentials and power-holders using some combination of influence, alliances, use and threat of force, and bribery. Even though few authors deem it necessary to explicitly mention it, the overall impression one gets from studies of water management at this level is that it is an all-male domain. Ditch tenders, gatekeepers, and canal operators tend to be men, and when female exceptions are mentioned, it is precisely because they are exceptions. Because this masculinity of the everyday politics of water management is taken for granted, or treated as the norm, few have attempted to explain it. Yet, two detailed ethnographic studies about the everyday politics of water management in the Philippines (Oorthuizen 2003) and Mexico (Rap 2004) allow a more explicit questioning of why water operation and distribution is such a masculine affair. These analyses more or less explicitly show how the professional identity and performance of operators are coloured by and tied up with notions of masculinity. In the Philippines’ system that Oorthuizen studied (Oorthuizen 2003), as well as in the Mexican system that was the research home of Rap (Rap 2004), professional performance as a canal operator appeared to be closely and positively linked to ‘being (or performing as) a real man’. Hence, not only were the operational and managerial water management tasks—which in real life involved a lot of politics—mainly or only done by men, but these tasks were also seen and defined as truly masculine in that performing them simultaneously entailed performing masculinity. It is striking in this respect that Oorthuizen (in a footnote) makes mention of one female water master, who was (considered a) macha or a manly woman: also when a woman does the job, it is a performance of masculinity (Oorthuizen 2003, 201). Oorthuizen analyzes how the control and management of water is an intrinsic part of local and regional politics, and closely linked to other struggles such as those over political votes, and markets. Struggles to control water,

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The politics of gender in water and the gender of water politics and struggles for the authority to decide on water distribution, are part and parcel of wider struggles of power and authority. Oorthuizen describes such struggles, and the networks and alliances that are formed around the control of water. These alliances and networks invariably appear as consisting of men only, and a strong impression is created that water politics and masculinity intrinsically belong to each other and reinforce each other: the manliness of canal operators rubs off on the job they do, and water jobs in turn have a masculine character that rubs off on the people that do them (cf. Cockburn 1988 cited in Britton 2000, 419). Rap’s study is an ethnographic account of a water user association after Irrigation Management Transfer. The aim of his analysis is to bring out and show the cultural and performative dimensions of water control. Towards this aim, Rap presents the analysis of canaleros (canal operators) and other actors at the operational level as a theatre play, and starts with presenting the main characters of the play. Significantly, all actors on stage are men. Rap’s analysis suggests that the people who play important roles in water management at the operational level are all men, and that masculinity is a crucial ingredient of their professional behaviour. The description in chapter five of the doings and wanderings of one particular canalero (Diego) is replete with references to networks of male friends, symbolic and real brotherhood (compadrazgo), godfathers, patronage, male political groups, clientelism and cuatismo, a Mexican form of male comradeship in which alcohol is important. An atmosphere of male conviviality is painted, in which complicity and trust affirm relations of social and political commitment (Rap 2004, 164). The linkages between the canaleros and the larger-scale, more influential, farmers are also typified in terms of a ‘sphere of male complicity and friendship’ (Rap 2004, 170). In Rap’s account, water politics appears as an exclusively male affair, the dynamics of which are linked to sympathies and antipathies between men. Informal interactions among the male members of the political water networks invariably involved jokes and humorous discussions, and manhood was a revolving subject as part of continuous plays of words and images in which masculinity was re-affirmed and contested. The canalero Diego for instance phrased his criticisms of his engineer-colleagues in terms of their lack of masculinity, and he accused them of homosexuality (Rap 2004, 163). Rap also shows how the domain of water politics is spatially a male domain in that it is set, ‘played out’, in spaces that are not open to women, at least if they want to maintain an image of respectability. Cantinas and restaurants are of particular importance, and male bonding typically occurs when eating and drinking together: ‘these apparently marginal recreational spaces such as cantinas and restaurants are central to forging social and political bonds in this rural sphere. They are convenient places for the organization of festive encounters in which collective drinking and eating and popular music take on political importance’ (Rap 2004, 220). Interestingly, the only women that are allowed in these domains are transvestites: men dressed and performing as women.

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Both the accounts of Oorthuizen and Rap draw attention to how attitudes and behaviours of segregation are constructed and consolidated through various symbolic and performative means. Both cases suggest a strong association between ‘being seen and honoured as a man’ and authority and power: the more you are (seen as) a man, the more powerful you are. Yet, it is possible that the analyses leave the potential parallel existence of more ‘feminine’ types of water powers relatively unexposed, for instance because the initial definition of water politics only recognizes the more ‘masculine’ political domains and identities. For the Philippines case, more ‘feminine’ powers may reside in women’s control over finances (see Illo 1985). Likewise, in the River Santiago Water User Association in Mexico there may be forms and mechanisms of water control that are more associated with or open to women. Gendered analyses of water management in other regions of Mexico in fact suggest this, while simultaneously reconfirming the extreme masculinity of the more visible and public forms of water management (Brunt 1992; Monsalvo-Velázquez and Wester 2002; Vera 1999). Science, engineering and hydrocracy Also at other levels, water knowledge and decision-making tend to be dominated by men, and are associated with masculinity. Indeed, the professional involvement with water, be it as an engineer, manager, planner or researcher, is (or at least used to be) very much identified and perceived as a male activity, as an activity belonging to and associated with men. Yet, the conditions, processes and consequences of men’s historical and contemporary domination of the water profession have received little scrutiny. There has been a strange silence, which may reflect an embedded and taken-for-granted association, even conflation, of men with organizational power, authority, expertise and prestige (cf. Collinson and Hearn 1996). This silence, and the concomitant invisibility of men and masculinity in water has important political dimensions in that it can be interpreted as one of the ways in which power presents itself as self-evident and ‘natural’, or as one of many strategies ideologically and discursively to mask, normalize or legitimize the workings and strategies of power. One way to start making sense of the strong equation between masculinity and water professionalism lies in unravelling the connection between modern technology and hegemonic masculinity through links of control and domination. This connection has been a recurring topic in feminist technology studies (Faulkner 2000; Cockburn 1988; Oldenziel 1999) and, at least in most Western societies, ‘technical competence is central to the dominant cultural ideal of masculinity and its absence a key feature of stereotyped femininity’ (Wacjman 1991, 159). The bureaucratic organization of many so-called modern water systems provides another possible link between water and masculinity (without providing an explanation). Bureaucracy has long been identified by feminists as gendered, and as masculine (Acker 1990; Collinson

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The politics of gender in water and the gender of water politics and Hearn 1996; Ferguson 1984), meaning that ‘advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine’ (Acker 1990, 146). Researchers of gender and management have also drawn attention to the recurrent associations between gender, hierarchy and organization on the one hand, and militarism and warfare on the other (see Collinson and Hearn 1996, 2–3). The relevance of these associations for water is clear, given that many early water engineers used to be army men. Through the ‘bureaucratic tradition’ (Lynch 1993), masculinity and the professional water identity have come to belong to each other; they mutually constitute and define each other at symbolic and metaphorical levels. This means that the water profession and the professional status of those working in the field of water are partly delineated through a gender demarcation. Yet ideas about how a true and real water professional should behave, what he should know and how he could distinguish himself have always been subject to discussion and change. Debates for instance between those engineers favouring ‘total control’ and those preaching flexibility to leave room for users’ decisions can be seen not just to be associated with different ideas about development and modernity, but also with different versions of masculinity. In the Netherlands, the first group used to be trained at the Delft University of Technology and were seen as (and saw themselves) as the ‘true’ engineers, embodying some tough scientific and rational version of masculinity, whereas the second group—trained at the Wageningen University—were the ‘softies’ who, alongside their promotion of different engineering ideas, also promoted a different, more ‘emotional’ or ‘feminine’ version of masculinity. Laurie’s analysis of Bolivia’s water wars provides additional examples of competing water masculinities. She identifies three versions of ‘the modern’ (‘technocratic neo-liberalism’, social development and ‘techno-fix development’) that have become associated with water since privatization first came on the agenda in the early 1990s, and shows how all three are gendered in specific ways. The institutional strengthening plans that preceded the first round of water privatization, for instance, implied a questioning of the ‘old’ mestizo public sector class of technocrats. Foreign consultants (usually white, Northern men) questioned their management skills and integrity, with an implied accusation of corruption. The public sector paradigm they represented lost status and became outdated, and with it their version of professional manhood (Laurie 2005, 538–40). The extreme ‘maleness’ of the water profession does and did not mean that water professionals denied the existence of women. On the contrary, women, or the symbolically feminine, provide the necessary other part of a dichotomous gender order where maleness and femaleness are perceived as opposites and attributed different forms of behaviour (Gherardi and Poggio 2001, 246). Women and the feminine play a crucial role as the referent against which the virility of male water professionals can stand out, and against

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which they can define their power, identity and projects. Women exist as lovers, mothers and daughters, roles that throw them into sharp relief with male water engineers. Indeed, their very absence and invisibility in the professional water domain can be seen as contributing to the status of the water profession by underscoring its ‘manliness’. The historical predominance of men in the water engineering profession, and the constitution of professional identities and cultures by a strong gendered dichotomy, have coalesced into a set of firmly established notions and practices which confirm that water work is part of a public domain in which men and particular forms of masculinity associated with them ‘naturally’ reign. Workplace social practices thus tend to favour such men without question and often in subtle and insidious ways. They preserve male dominance by coding activity and assigning meaning as either superior (male, masculine) or inferior (female, feminine), while at the same time maintaining the plausibility of gender neutrality. Identifying these social practices and documenting their effects on women’s and men’s experiences is the starting point for questioning gendered power in the water (cf. Ely and Meyerson 2000, 115–17). CONCLUSION

Gender politics in water has to do with how benefits and burdens of accessing and using water are (to be) divided between men and women, about how authority and expertise are defined and recognized and about the discourses and knowledge used to articulate water realities. Gender therefore deeply penetrates and colours water politics, and much politics in water is (also) about gender. Yet, gender relations and identities mostly do not belong to what is considered to require explanation and discussion in water, while women are notoriously underrepresented in formal domains of water deliberation. Mutually reinforcing processes of normalization, naturalization and neglect work to delegate gender to the domain of the undisputed, to perceive it as something that is far from the realm of influence of water professionals and that, therefore, does not belong to the domain of water politics. This partly happens because the traditional subject matter of much water knowledge and planning is non-social. Water knowledge is, or used to be, primarily concerned with ‘the resource’, water. The physical, biological and chemical characteristics of water, together with the engineering knowledge needed to convey water, constitute(d) the heart of much water knowledge. Although efforts are increasingly made to include social questions in the analysis of water problems, preferred scientific languages and methods continue to be derived from the natural and engineering sciences. These are not always best suited for understanding the behaviour of human beings and their interactions. In addition, the positivist epistemological tradition in water is difficult to combine with the more constructivist ways of knowing of gender analysts and feminist scholars. Much water knowledge is visibly rooted in a modernization

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The politics of gender in water and the gender of water politics project, a project that associates positivist science (and mathematics in particular) and modern technology with progress and civilization. Although most contemporary irrigation and water professionals no longer share the strong faith in technology as a motor of progress with their (colonial) ancestors, many continue to believe in the superiority—and universal applicability—of scientifically developed irrigation technologies or institutional and economic models (also see Boelens 2008). In such a positivist epistemology the ‘godtrick’ is pervasive: the assumption that one can see everything from nowhere and that disembodied reason can produce accurate and ‘objective’ accounts of the world (Haraway 1991). Normal water knowledge is marked by a faith in the neutrality of reasoned judgment, in scientific objectivity, in the progressive logic of reason in general and science in particular. Through the omnipotence of reason, transcendence is possible, allowing the knower to escape the limits of body, time and space (Hartsock 1998, 206). Normal knowing in water is an explicit and important part of a larger range of cultural resources through which water experts represent and identify themselves, and that contributes to legitimizing professional activities and choices. In water, these identifications are undeniably associated with masculinities and masculine identities. Challenging mainstream water science, therefore, also means challenging much-cherished masculine expert identities and cultures. This realization in itself is an important criticism to claims of objectivity and neutrality of water knowledge, but also opens the door to reflecting critically on how knowledge was constructed and by whom, and how the identity and social situation of knowledge producers affect the type of truth claims they make. The reverse is equally true: the recognition that water expertise and authority have an identity—a colour, gender, ethnicity— opens the door to questioning critically the taken-for-granted symbolic markers of distinction in water, and to welcoming other voices and sources of knowledge. BIBLIOGRAPHY Acker, J. 1990, ‘Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations’, Gender and Society, 4, 139–158. Adams, W.M., E.E. Watson and S.K. Mutiso, 1997, ‘Water, Rules and Gender: Water Rights in an Indigenous Irrigation System, Marakwet, Kenya’, Development and Change 28, 707–730. Agarwal, B., 1994, A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Athukorala, K., 1995, ‘personal communication’. Bajracharya, P., 2000, ‘Gendered Water Rights in the Hile Khola Kulo Irrigation System, Shakhejung VDC, Ilam’ in R. Pradhan, F. von Benda-Beckmann and K. von Benda-Beckmann (eds), Water, Land and Law: Changing Rights to Land and Water in Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal, Wageningen/Rotterdam, Netherlands: FREEDEAL/WAU/EUR, 129–146. Barton, R.F., 1922, Ifugao Economics, University of California Press.

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Becker, G.S., 1981, Treatise on the Family, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boelens, R., 2008, The Rules of the Game and the Game of the Rules: Normalization and Resistance in Andean Water Control, PhD thesis, Wageningen, Wageningen University. Bourque, S.C. and K.B. Warren, 1981, Women of the Andes: Patriarchy and Social Change in Two Peruvian Towns, Michigan, MI: University of Michigan Press. Britton, D.M., 2000, ‘The Epistemology of the Gendered Organization’, Gender and Society, 14 (3), 418–434. Bruins, B. and A. Heijmans, 1993, ‘Gender Biases in Irrigation Projects: Gender Considerations in the Rehabilitation of Bauraha Irrigation System in the District of Dang, Nepal’, unpublished report, Kathmandu, Nepal, SNV. Brunt, D., 1992, ‘Mastering the Struggle: Gender Actors and Agrarian Change in a Mexican Ejido’, Latin America Studies 64, Amsterdam, Netherlands: CEDLA. Cockburn, C., 1988, Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men and Technical Know-how, London: Pluto. Collinson, D.L. and J. Hearn, 1996, ‘Breaking the Silence: On Men, Masculinities and Managements’, in Men as Managers, Managers as Men: Critical Perspectives on Men, Masculinities and Managements, David L. Collinson and Jeff Hearn (eds), London, California, and New Delhi, India: SAGE Publications Ltd., 1–24. Connell, R.W., 1987, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press. ——1995, Masculinities, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Dietz, M., 1992, ‘Context is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship’, in Dimensions of Radical Democrac:. Pluralism, Citizenship and Community, Chantal Mouffe (ed.), London and New York: Verso, 63–85. Dubel, I. and M. de Kwaasteniet, 1983, Irrigated Agriculture as a Basis for Subsistence, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam and Nakuru, Provincial Irrigation Unit. Ely, R.J. and D.E. Meyerson, 2000, ‘Theories of Gender in Organizations: A New Approach to Organizational Analysis and Change’, Research in Organizational Behaviour 22, 103–151. Faulkner, W., 2000, ‘The Power and the Pleasure: A Research Agenda for “Making Gender Stick” to Engineers’, Science, Technology and Human Values 25 (2000) 1, 88–120. Ferguson, K.E., 1984, The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Fraser, Nancy, 1997, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition, New York and London: Routledge. Gherardi, S. and B. Poggio, 2001, ‘Creating and Recreating Gender Order in Organizations’, Journal of World Business, 36 (3), 245–259. Giddens, A., 1979, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goetz, A.M., 2007, ‘Gender Justice, Citizenship and Entitlements: Core Concepts, Central Debates and New Directions for Research’, in Gender, Justice, Citizenship and Development, M. Mukhopadhyay and N. Singh (eds), New Delhi: Kali for Women, 15–57. Hanger, J. and J. Moris, 1973, ‘Women and the Household Economy’, in Mwea, An Irrigated Rice Settlement in Kenya, Chambers, Robert and Jon Moris (eds), Munich, Germany: Weltforum Verlag, 209–237. Haraway, D.J., 1991, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books.

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The politics of gender in water and the gender of water politics Harding, Sandra, 1986, The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Hartsock, N.C.M., 1998, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited & Other Essays, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Illo, J.F.I., 1985, ‘Women’s Participation in Two Philippine Irrigation Projects’, Philippine Sociological Review, 33 (3–4), 5–45. Jha, N., 2004, ‘Gender and Decision-making in Balinese Agriculture’, American Ethnologist, 31 (4), 51–75. Laurie, N., 2005, ‘Developing Development Orthodoxy: Negotiating Masculinities in the Water Sector’, Development and Change, 36 (3), 527–549. Lewis, H.T., 1991, Ilocano Irrigation: The Corporate Resolution, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Lynch, B.D., 1991, ‘Women and Irrigation in Highland Peru’, Society and Natural Resources, (4), 37–52. ——1993, ‘The Bureaucratic Tradition and Women’s Invisibility in Irrigation’, Proceedings of the 24th Chacmool Conference, Alberta, University of Calgary, Archeological Association, 333–342. Mollinga, P.P., 2001, ‘Water and Politics: Levels, Rational Choice and South Indian Canal Irrigation’, Futures, 33, 733–752. Monsalvo-Velázquez, G. and P. Wester, 2002, ‘Equidad de género e intragénero en el manejo del agua de riego? Cargos de autoridad en tres niveles de representación en la cuenca Lerma-Chapala, México’, in Los estudios del Agua en la cuence LermaChapala-Santiago, B. Boehm Schoendube, J.M. Durán Juárez, M. Sánchez Rodríguez and A. Torres Rodríguez (eds), Zamora, Michoacán, México, El Colegio de Michoacán, Universidad de Guadalajara. Oldenziel, R., 1999, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America 1870–1945, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Oorthuizen, J., 2003, Water, Works and Wages: The Everyday Politics of Irrigation Management Reform in the Philippines, Wageningen University Water Resources Series, New Delhi, India: Orient Longman. Poudel, R., 2000, Farmers’ Laws and Irrigation: Water Rights and Dispute Management in the Hills of Nepal, PhD thesis, Wageningen, Netherlands, Wageningen University. Pradhan, N.C., 1989, ‘Gender Participation in irrigation system activities in the hills of Nepal’, Proceedings of the Second Annual Workshop on Women in Farming Systems, September 1989, Rampur and Kathmandu, Nepal, Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science and USAID. Pun, S., 2000, ‘Gender, Land and Irrigation Management in Rajapur,’ in R. Pradhan, F. von Benda-Beckmann and K. von Benda-Beckmann (eds), Water, Land and Law: Changing Rights to Land and Water in Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal, Wageningen/ Rotterdam, Netherlands: FREEDEAL/WAU/EUR, 195–216. Radcliffe, S., 1986, ‘Gender Relations, Peasant Livelihood Strategies and Migration: A Case Study from Cuzco’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 5, 29–47. Rap, E., 2004, The Success of a Policy Model: Irrigation Management Transfer in Mexico, PhD dissertation, Wageningen, Netherlands: Wageningen University. Rubin, G., 1975, ‘The Traffic in Women’, in Toward an Anthropology of Women, R. Reiter, New York: Monthly Review Press. Schaaf, C. van der, 2000, ‘Land, Water and Gender in Rupakot Village, Nepal’ in R. Pradhan, F. von Benda-Beckmann and K. von Benda-Beckmann (eds), Water, Land

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and Law: Changing Rights to Land and Water in Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal, Wageningen /Rotterdam, Netherlands: FREEDEAL/WAU/EUR, 169–194 Schrijvers, J., 1988, ‘Blueprint for undernutrition. An example from Sri Lanka’, in Structures of Patriarchy: The State, the Community and the Household, Agarwal, B. (ed.), London and New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd., 29–51. ——1984, ‘Blueprint for Undernutrition: An Example from Sri Lanka’, Sociologia Ruralis, Vol. XXIV, 3–4, 256–273 (reprinted in Schrijvers, J., 1986, ‘Blueprint for undernutrition’, in Mothers for Life: Motherhood and Marginalization in the North Central Province in Sri Lanka, Schrijvers, J., Delft, Netherlands: Eburon, 57–78). Scott, J., 1986, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review, 91 (5), 1053–1075. Sheridan, M.J., 2002, ‘An Irrigation Intake Is Like a Uterus: Culture and Agriculture in Precolonial North Pare, Tanzania’, American Anthropologist, 104 (1), 79–92. Shiva, V., 1989, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, London: New Left Books. Strang, V., 2005, ‘Taking the Waters’, in Gender, Water and Development, Anne Coles and Tina Wallace (eds), Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 21–38. Tuitelaar de Quitón, C., M.E. Pozo, R.M. Antezana Iriarte and R. Saavedra Crespo, 1994, Mujer y riego en Punata, aspectos de género: Situación de uso, accesso y control sobre el agua para riego en Punata, Cochabamba, Bolivia: PEIRAV. Vera Delgado, J., 1999, Engendering the Debate of Irrigation Development: Gender Interface and Irrigation System Concepts as Starting Points. A Mexican case from Quiringuicharo en Michoacán, MSc thesis, Wageningen, Netherlands, Wageningen University. Wajcman, J., 1991, Feminism Confronts Technology, Pennsylviania, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Zwarteveen, M. and N. Neupane, 1996, ‘Free-riders or Victims: Women’s Nonparticipation in Irrigation Management in Nepal’s Chhattis Mauja Irrigation Scheme’, Research Report No. 7, Colombo, Sri Lanka, IIMI. Zwarteveen, M., 1997, ‘Water: From Basic Need to Commodity: A Discussion on Gender and Water Rights in the Context of Irrigation’, World Development, 25 (8), 1335–1349. ——2006, Wedlock or Deadlock. Feminists’ Attempts to Engage Irrigation Engineers. PhD Thesis, Wageningen University. ——2008, ‘Men, Masculinities and Water Powers in Irrigation’, Water Alternatives, 1 (1), 111–130 ——2010, ‘A Masculine Water World: The Politics of Gender and Identity in Irrigation Expert Thinking’, in Out of the Mainstream: Water Rights, Politics and Identity, R. Boelens, D. Getches and A. Guevara (eds), London: Earthscan.

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Rural poverty reduction: What’s irrigation got to do with it? KAI WEGERICH

INTRODUCTION

One of the current assumptions in development thinking is that irrigation reduces poverty (Lipton et al. 2003; Smith 2004). It is even considered to have multiple functions in solving several problems at the same time: water shortages, poverty and food production (Hall 1999). According to this thinking it is only a matter of correct application and targeted assistance that becomes the issue. It is further argued that irrigation not only benefits land holders but also the landless (Lipton et al. 2003; Saleth et al. 2003). Hence, irrigation is viewed as a key problem solver for rural poverty. More recently the multiple uses of water in irrigation systems are identified and highlighted as indirect benefits of irrigation. Hussain (2007a) mentions irrigation water being used for domestic supply, fish farming, rural enterprises and industries as well as transportation. Recently, Bhattarai et al. (2007, 211) went even a step further. They reasoned that irrigation is a semi-public good and even compared the benefits of irrigation to ‘education and road infrastructure’. Usually, to highlight the benefits of irrigated agriculture it is compared to rain-fed agriculture (Hussain 2007a); however, Chambers (1988) pointed out that there is direct competition between irrigated and rain-fed agriculture and that marginal rain-fed agriculture is losing in the competition. Even though irrigation has this ‘positive’ image, the development funding for agriculture has been decreasing substantially since the 1970s, for example, World Bank lending fell from US $2,200m. in 1978 to $750m. in 1993. One of the explanations given is that the expectations of financial return are unjustifiably high (Hall 1999). In addition, international experience has led to criticism of large-scale irrigation systems and the implications of resettlement schemes connected with large reservoirs and dams (Geary 2000). Hussain (2007a) mentions other negative effects such as health risk and land and water degradation. However, the recent trend of declining budgets for water projects seems to have reversed. For example, the World Bank increased its spending on water projects. While in 2002 the expenditure was $1,200m., in 2004 it increased to $3,200m. Even though the larger increase was for drinking water supply and sewage, the amount spent on irrigation projects in 2004 rose to 201

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$800m. and in 2005 to $1,000m. The rising trend in spending suggests that ‘water is back on the agenda’ (Welschof 2005). On the other hand, Rijsberman (2003) calls large-scale irrigation systems ‘the sunset’ irrigation and focuses on new approaches that are ‘alive’. Hussain et al. (2001) highlight that the benefits of irrigation are not always equitable. This already suggests that the impact on poverty reduction of large-scale systems is questionable, or in other words not guaranteed. This would have further implications on the policies of Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) and the creation of Water User Associations (WUAs). Chambers (1988) argued that, while there are benefits, there are also disadvantages for the landless. Is the assumption that irrigation reduces poverty justified? Could irrigation even create vulnerability? Is there an impact on vulnerability when the ‘sunset’ irrigation is transferred to the users? This paper utilizes a Sustainable Livelihood approach (DFID 1999; Carney 1999), with its six ‘capitals’, to analyze different irrigation technologies, their impact on local communities, and the influence of the current policy of IMT on the rural poor. POVERTY AND LIVELIHOOD APPROACHES

Poverty is largely a rural phenomenon. It is estimated that the proportion of the world’s poor who live in rural areas ranges from 62% to 75% (Dorward et al. 2004, 74). A poor person is characterized as one whose standard of living falls below the minimum acceptable level that is the ‘poverty line’. In economic terms, the ‘poverty line’ is broadly accepted as a level of earnings of less than US $1 per day. Although income or consumption provides a good indicator of the standard of living, ‘it does not adequately capture other important dimensions of welfare such as health, education, access to clean water, access to public goods or common property resources’ (Mabulu 2003, 912). These other factors are important, because the lack of those assets increases vulnerability and therefore can trigger the decline of so called non-poor households into poverty (Krishna 2004). The realization that the economic concept of poverty, with a determined poverty line, as well as the focus on food self-sufficiency of the household are either not specific enough in terms of policies or are just outdated, is reflected in the rise of the livelihood of households approach in the mid-1980s. In this respect Chambers (1988) argued for a shift away from production thinking to livelihood thinking and looking at entitlements and the amount and stability of working days. Sen (1981) originally put an entitlement approach forward as an alternate explanation to famine. Sen related poverty and entitlement by categorizing entitlement relations into trade-based entitlements, productionbased entitlements, own labour entitlements and inheritance and transfer entitlements. The approach has been criticized for being too restrictive by focusing only on legal rights. Then Leach et al. (1997, 23) developed the

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Rural poverty reduction concept of ‘environmental entitlements’, which ‘sees entitlements as the outcome of negotiations among social actors, involving power relationships and debates over meaning, rather than as simply the result of fixed, moral rules encoded in law’. More explicit in its differentiation is the livelihoods approach, with its different capitals. Even though the sustainable livelihood approach uses the term ‘capital’, the distinction between different capitals is better understood as livelihood building blocks. Carney defines a livelihood as comprising ‘the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living’ (Carney 1998, 4). The most well known Sustainable Livelihood framework has been documented by the UK government Department for International Development (DFID). The approach originally considered five assets of the household: financial, human, natural, physical and social capital (DFID 1999). Later, a sixth capital was added: political capital (Baumann and Sinha 2001). The introduction of political capital as an analytical category is helpful to the presented argument in that it is utilized by more powerful actors in addition to financial and social capital. A fundamental criticism of the use of the term ‘capitals’ is that it reduces the complex reality of the actor. ‘In societies where livelihoods are organized around complex mixtures of collective and private property ownership, the form of individual capital assets may not be that significant in judging people’s vulnerability’ (Arce 2003, 204). Similarly, Ratna Reddy et al. (2004) point out that it is difficult to measure results, because of the different effects at the level of the individual and of the community. The same reasoning would apply to the household level and the relations between the different members of the household. Nevertheless, utilizing the livelihood approach has various advantages. Not only does it become possible to differentiate the group classified as being poor, but it also enables the distinction between different vulnerabilities and, third, it would be possible to look at the different positive or negative implications of changes of one capital to the other capitals and therefore to evaluate the complexities of policies. The different capitals cannot stand by themselves, and each capital has to be interpreted in the context of the other capitals. This would also imply that a development policy has to be evaluated in terms of its overall impact on all the capitals. Ratna Reddy et al. (2004, 300) distinguish between strong and weak Sustainable Rural Livelihoods (SRLs). ‘Improvement in all the capitals, and less dependence on vulnerable activities or strategies, could be termed “strong SRL”, while improvement in some of the capitals should at least compensate for any decline in other capitals and high dependency on vulnerable strategies, which could be termed “weak SRL”’. In this respect, DFID (1999) argues that ‘use of the [sustainable livelihood] framework is intended to make a distinct contribution to improving DFID’s ability to eliminate poverty’.

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ESSAYS

DO LARGE-SCALE SURFACE WATER OR CANAL IRRIGATION SYSTEMS MATTER? AND TO WHOM?

Lipton et al. (2003) argue that irrigation has a major impact on poverty reduction. They contend that, for small and large farmers, irrigation has three main benefits. Firstly, irrigation improves yields through reduced crop loss due to erratic, unreliable or insufficient rainwater supply. Secondly, irrigation allows for the possibility of multiple cropping and so an increase in annual output. Thirdly, irrigation allows a greater area of land to be used for crops in areas where rain-fed production is impossible or marginal. (Lipton et al. 2003, 418) However, what is questionable is whether these are really arguments to support the claim that irrigation is poverty reducing, or whether this only confirms that it increases agricultural production. In addition, a recent study argued that ‘irrigation may not be an effective way to reduce poverty: subsidized irrigation undermines the returns to already poor and marginal rainfed farmers, and diverts scarce investment resources from where it may do the most good in terms of poverty reduction—i.e., improving rainfed agriculture’ (Merry et al. 2006, 15). It should be noted that ‘past investments in irrigation were not targeted specifically to the poor people. Also women’s needs and environmental concerns were rarely assessed in most of the earlier projects’ (Hussein et al. 2001, xiv). For example, it is evident that the benefits of irrigation are not evenly spread. Hussain and Hanjra (2003, 431) argue that, ‘given that irrigation water entitlements are generally linked to land, the direct benefits of irrigation in terms of increased farm output will tend to accrue in proportion to the size of landholdings, with large holders benefiting more than smallholders and the latter benefiting more than the landless’. This would imply that irrigation reinforces social power relations within the rural setting. Analyzing large-scale irrigation systems from a rural livelihood perspective, one could argue that the productivity of the land (natural capital) is dependent on labour of the household (human capital), the labour of social networks (social capital) (Hentschel and Waters, 2002), or labour through hired workers (financial capital). Considering that water delivery in large-scale irrigation systems can be unreliable (too much, too little, or not the right timing), farmers at the tail-end could be classified as vulnerable (Moore 1989; Brugere and Lingard 2003; Hussain 2007b). Hence, the productivity of the land (natural capital) within large-scale irrigation depends on the location within the irrigation system (physical capital). In addition, water delivery within the system does not only depend on the physical infrastructure and technical control, but also on the human dimension (management), and is therefore influenced by the social networks (social capital) (Wegerich 2004), bargaining

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Rural poverty reduction power (financial capital) (Robbins 2000; Wegerich 2006), and rights and power relationships (political capital) (Wegerich 2008; Thomas and Ahmad 2009; or, for studies showing the combination of the three capitals, see Mollinga 2003; Oorthuizen 2003; Veldwisch 2007). Utilizing the framework of the different capitals within the livelihood approach, one could argue that largescale irrigation increased the physical capital of the individual farmer, but created dependencies on other capitals as well. Hence, there was a shift and maybe a spread of vulnerability; arguably it might even have increased the vulnerability of smallholders, because it increased their dependence. In terms of already powerful individuals, it increased their physical capital, and it might have manifested or even increased their other capitals. Even though the development of irrigation does not affect the landless directly, Chambers et al. (1989) argued that irrigation has positive effects on the landless. Irrigation requires labour for construction and ongoing maintenance (Lipton et al. 2003; Saleth et al. 2003). However, Ratna Reddy et al. (2004, 315) point out for their case study that the construction work is mainly short-term, and that ‘once the implementation of the water shed is completed there are no alternative avenues to sustain employment created’. It is argued that, through irrigation, increase in output might stimulate demand for farm labour both within the season and across new cropping seasons (Chambers et al. 1989; Lipton et al. 2003; Rijsberman 2003). Obviously, the advantages would increase with the number of cropping seasons. Whether or not the landless have direct benefits depends on the size of the land of the household, whether the farm utilizes labour from within the household, or whether it has to employ outside labour, from within the social networks or hired labour (Ghose 1979). Similar is the reasoning of Ratna Reddy et al. (2004, 321), who show for their case study that the employment benefits ‘seemed to be relatively greater in the case of medium and rich households, as they have more cultivable area’. Chambers (1988, 12) points out, that ‘with irrigation in two or more seasons daily wages do rise’ [However], ‘wage levels are subject to many forces, subtle and not subtle, and may not always rise with irrigation’. For example, immigration could increase competition and therefore keep wages low. Arguably, depending on the level of the wages, medium and rich households might decide to increase mechanization (Chambers 1988). Finally, Chambers (1988, 24) added a geographical dimension to the benefits to the landless. He states: ‘for landless labourers, tailends provide less work and less assured work. The deprivations of tailends are multiple, affect all of the poor, and keep people poor’. Overall, Chambers (1988, 16) highlights for the landless and land-poor ‘the greatest potential for creating livelihoods from canal irrigation is … the redistribution of the irrigated land’. In applying the livelihood approach to the landless, it appears that only financial benefits through manual labour occur for the landless. Applying the reasoning of Ratna Reddy et al. (2004), the construction of irrigation systems seems to be a weak policy to address benefits for the landless. Furthermore, the group of landless is not homogeneous: do women, old or ill people benefit

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in the same way from the created jobs? Is there security if workers become unable to work? Are there additional rents for the landless? The simple answer would be no; in this case, they are still dependent on their social network, assuming that the state does not provide this kind of security (Thompson 1999; Gidwani 2002). In addition, looking beyond statistical and economic evidence, Beck (1995, 178) asks the question, ‘How do the people perceive the changes [introduction of irrigation]?’ He states that poor villagers ‘looked at the improvement in the standard of living of the richer villagers, and compared it with their own. This comparison was central to their experience of poverty’. Beck’s observation reveals a shortcoming of the livelihood approach with the six capitals, because this approach tries to measure the development policy/project and its affects, but it does not take into consideration the perception of people and their relative gains compared to other groups that benefit from the same policy/project. OLD SYSTEMS, NEW MANAGEMENT, BUT THE SAME OLD DANGERS FOR THE POOR

Even though there is currently not much funding of new large-scale irrigation projects, it is questionable what the consequences are of the current trend of restructuring the irrigation sector and of the reduction in funds for the irrigation management infrastructure. Based on a literature review Ostrom (1990) analyzes communal natural resource management arrangements in six case studies. These arrangements have survived for long periods of time. Ostrom comes up with eight institutional design principles for ‘robust’ management arrangements. However, not all of her design principles seem to be present within her six case studies, whereas she shows more conclusive evidence for two other design principles: one of these being to protect the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. She promotes her own design principles despite the inconclusive evidence for them and the more conclusive evidence in favour of greater protection for those who ‘have’. Overall, rather than focusing on the community, Ostrom’s focus is on the arrangements regarding water management: the institutional rules. Rijsberman (2003, 406) argues that the policy of IMT and the creation of WUAs increase the benefits to poor farmers. He states that ‘there are indications that transferring irrigation management responsibilities to farmers has led to a reduction in agricultural water-related corruption, disputes and water theft and consequent empowerment of communities’. However, an earlier study by Vermillion (1997, 31), from the same research institute, concludes the opposite: ‘Accountability between farmers and leaders, especially in finance is often weak, and water users’ associations generally do not have professional staff’. Vermillion (1997, 29) argues that ‘the policy of IMT mainly has the advantage of decreasing the financial burden of the government, but increases the costs to the farmers’. In addition, even though Rijsberman argued that IMT empowers the community, this does not necessarily

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YES

NO

?

Minimal recognition Evidence for other design principles

‘Haves’ versus ‘have-nots’

?

?

Conflict resolution

YES

Detectives From low to extremely high ?

Paid herder Substantial fines

Monitoring Graduated sanctions

Controlling officer has YES incentive (gets part of fine / has tail-end land)

Some households

YES

Congruence YES appropriation / provision

Cattle owners

YES

YES

Clearly defined boundaries

Collective choice

Japan

Switzerland

Case studies / design principles

Marcia/Orihuela

Alicante

YES

YES

Courts every second week ?

Syndic Fines are very low

YES

YES

?

?

Water courts

Syndic ?

YES–old versus new

?

?

?

Ditch rider ?

? Official irrigation ? Old and new community and city rights, state-dam officials ? Maintenance ? Price for water, decided by and fees for committee organization Farmers elect ? Huerta Not really–voting syndic (chief organisation according to land exec.) size, but most are excluded

Valencia

Table 10.1 Ostrom’s (1990) supporting evidence for design principles

YES–within canals, between canals

YES

Federation–inequity of shares

?

YES and NO; members elect maestro. Rules that zanjera have constructed for themselves–but also constructed by landowner for tenants Not clear Not clear–but violators can lose land

YES–but not really clear

YES–but farmer may own land in more than one system

Philippines

ESSAYS

imply that the poor within the community are empowered. For example, the landless often have no voting rights within the WUAs. Furthermore, one has to distinguish between small and large farmers. The research by Van Koppen et al. (2002, 22) in India shows that ‘in all WUAs small farmers participate considerably less in meetings than large farmers, while they rarely become committee members’. The decision-making power therefore lies with the more powerful stakeholders. Hence, ‘what is called a “WUA” in reality is first and foremost a handful of local elite’ (Van Koppen et al. 2002, 21). Hussain and Hanjra (2003, 439) go even further, arguing that the implementation of IMT could actually lead to adverse effects on the poor if the land distribution is highly inequitable. Meinzen-Dick and Zwarteveen (1998) show that irrigation management transfer could also be gender biased and have unintended negative consequences for women. While it appears that, in the case studies of Van Koppen, and Meinzen-Dick and Zwarteveen, these are unplanned developments, it seems that WUAs can institutionalize the powerful from the beginning. An IWMI/SIC (International Water Management Institute/Scientific Information Centre) (2003, 22) handbook for establishing WUAs recommends a mixture of proportionality and egalitarianism for the voting rights of WUA members: ‘Each WUA member has one vote regardless of the size of their land plot. Each WUA member has a proportionate number of votes based on their land plot size. Each member is entitled to not more than of the total number of votes’. This would imply that the process of IMT mainly stabilizes the existing social and economic setting, and does not benefit the poor in particular. Furthermore, because each farming household has only one vote, this system could institutionalize a gender bias. GROUNDWATER IRRIGATION

Shah et al. argue that groundwater development is perceived in Asia and Africa as more amenable to poverty targeting than surface irrigation, and therefore it has become the central element of livelihood creation programmes for the poor. They state that ‘groundwater irrigation likely creates more wealth per cu m, alleviates more poverty per cu m targeted to the poor and spreads benefits more widely than surface irrigation generally does’ (Shah et al. 2001: 11). Even though the statement suggests that groundwater is in general more amenable for poverty reduction, it is important to differentiate the technology in use, the level of groundwater and its recharge. COST-INTENSIVE TECHNOLOGY AND LOW RECHARGE RATE OF GROUNDWATER

To encourage groundwater usage, support policies have been implemented in the agricultural sector in India and Pakistan. These policies included subsidies for the costs of pumps and wells, credit support and subsidies on power supply to agriculture (Narain 1998; Shah et al. 2001; van Steenbergen and

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Rural poverty reduction Oliemans 2002; Prakash and Ballabh 2004). As a consequence, the utilization of groundwater has increased rapidly over the last 50 years; however, it is questionable whether it secured the livelihoods of the poor. While Rijsberman (2003) argues that groundwater exploitation was scale-biased during the Green Revolution, the new technology benefited the well-endowed. Moench (2002) reasons that the social implications for groundwater pumping have to be placed in a dynamic perspective. In the beginning the distribution of groundwater was determined by a few ‘water lords’, who could afford pumps, and therefore established a ‘seller’s market’. In the beginning landowners (natural capital) who did not have the financial means (financial capital) were not able to afford pumps and therefore depended on the infrastructure (physical capital) of richer neighbours. Hence, they had to utilize financial capital and social capital to access groundwater (natural capital). With the increase of low-cost pumps and the pooling (social capital) of small farmers, the amount of pumps per hectare increased and therefore changed the market to a ‘buyer’s market’. Van Steenbergen and Oliemans (2002, 331) argue in respect of Pakistan that ‘the fast development of tubewells was a democratization of groundwater access’. The ‘democratization’ (strong social and political capital) led to a decline of the groundwater tables (natural capital) to unsustainable levels (Narain 1998). For example, Prakash and Ballabh (2004) observed that in Northern Gujarat the water table had declined from a depth of approximately 3–5 m in the 1960s to 150 m by the year 2003, and, with the rapid decline of the groundwater table, the situation changed again. Today, resource-poor farmers do not have the ability (financial capital) to chase the water table. Prakash and Ballabh (2004, 33) argue that ‘again new “water lords” emerge and that water buyers have been almost totally dependent on the sellers’. Thus, groundwater depletion has serious equity implications. In addition, deep tube well owners have primary rights, they are the first to irrigate, while water buyers have subordinate rights (weak social and political capital), they get served when the water need of the owner is satisfied. Hence, ‘during the time of scarcity, the water buyers are hardest hit as their right to buy water is the first to be curtailed, followed by the owners of the well’ (Prakash and Ballabh 2004: 16; see also for Pakistan van Steenbergen and Oliemans 2002). CONCLUSION

The utilization of the livelihood framework, with its six capitals, for analyzing the impact of irrigation on the poor has highlighted that the link between irrigation and poverty reduction is not as straightforward as is claimed. First and foremost, irrigation benefits the land owners, and not directly the landless. The review has shown that canal irrigation (physical capital) can reduce the vulnerability of the natural capital, but can increase dependence on the social, political and financial capitals, and therefore the vulnerability of the small farmers and tail-enders. The presented cases of IMT show that promoting the

209

ESSAYS

current practice of IMT as pro-poor cannot be substantiated. Instead, WUAs are not only new management with old dangers, but they also even institutionalize these dangers, and therefore manifest inequity and gender bias. Even the promotion of groundwater irrigation technologies might not come without dangers. This is, first of all, because groundwater can be a limited resource, and the institutions needed to govern groundwater irrigation in a sustainable manner are not in place. Groundwater irrigation has the benefit that smallholders can be directly targeted through support policies and therefore has an advantage compared with large-scale irrigation systems. However, as argued above, falling groundwater tables render smallholders dependent on farmers who can afford expensive deep tube wells. Hence, compared to largescale irrigation systems in which small farmers could at least claim their official water right, with groundwater this is not the case. Therefore it leaves smallholders in the long term even more unprotected and vulnerable. The impact of irrigation systems on the rural landless seems to strengthen only their financial capital, leaving the other capitals untouched. Hence, it is questionable whether the generated income is sufficient to strengthen the other capitals as well, and to create long-term and sustainable benefits. Not without reason, a draft version of the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture (co-ordinated by IWMI) argued that, ‘rural poverty alleviation may be more successfully achieved by urbanization and employment creation processes than by targeting water development to the rural poor, depending on the time frame considered’ (Merry et al. 2006, 21). Unfortunately, this statement was removed from the final version of the Comprehensive Assessment. BIBLIOGRAPHY Arce, A. (2003) ‘Value contestations in development interventions: Community development and sustainable livelihoods approaches’, Community Development Journal, 38 (3), 199–212. Baumann, P. and Sinha, S. (2001) ‘Linking development with democratic processes in India: political capital and sustainable livelihoods analysis’, ODI Natural Resource Perspective No. 68. London: Overseas Development Institute. Beck, T. (1995) ‘The green revolution and poverty in India’, Applied Geography, 15 (2), 161–181. Bhattarai M., Barker, R. and Narayanamoorthy, A. (2007) ‘Who benefits from irrigation development in india? Implication of irrigation multipliers for irrigation financing’, Irrigation and Drainage, 56, 207–255. Brugere, C. and Lingard, J. (2003) ‘Irrigation deficits and farmers’ vulnerability in Southern India’, Agricultural Systems, 77, 65–88. Carney, D. (1999) ‘Approaches to Sustainable Livelihoods for the Rural Poor’. London: ODI Poverty Briefing. ——(1998) (ed.) ‘Sustainable rural livelihoods: What contribution can we make?’ Papers presented at the DFID Natural Resources Advisers’ Conference, July. London: DFID.

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Rural poverty reduction Chambers, R., (1988) Managing canal irrigation: Practical analysis from South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chambers, R., Saxena, N.C. and Shah, T. (1989) To the hands of the poor: Water and trees, New Delhi, Oxford & IBH. DFID (1999) ‘Sustainable livelihood guidance sheets’. www.nssd.net/pdf/sectiont.pdf. Dorward, A., Kydd, J., Morrison, J. and Urey, I., (2004) ‘A policy agenda for pro-poor agricultural growth’, World Development, Vol. 32, No. 1, 73–89. Geary, K. (2000) ‘Engineering the ebb and flow’, Corporate Watch (12).http://archive. corporatewatch.org/magazine/issue12/cw12w3.html. Ghose, A.K. (1979) ‘Institutional structure, technological change and growth in poor agrarian economies: An analysis with reference to Bengal and Punjab’, World Development, 7, 385–396. Gidwani, V. (2002) ‘The unbearable modernity of development? Canal irrigation and development planning in Western India’, Progress in Planning, 58, 1–80. Hall, A.W. (1999) ‘Priorities for irrigated agriculture’, Agricultural Water Management, 40, 25–29. Hentschel, J. and Waters, W.F. (2002) ‘Rural poverty in Ecuador: Assessing local realities for the development of anti-poverty programs’, World Development, 30 (1), 33–47. Hussain, I. (2007a) ‘Direct and indirect benefits and potential disbenefits of irrigation: Evidence and lessons’, Irrigation and Drainage, 56, 179–194. ——(2007b) ‘Poverty-reducing impacts of irrigation: Evidence and lessons’, Irrigation and Drainage, 56, 147–164. Hussain, I. and Hanjra, M.A. (2003) ‘Does irrigation water matter for rural poverty alleviation? Evidence from South and South-East Asia’, Water Policy, 5, 429–442. Hussain, I., Yokoyama, K. and Hunzai, I. (2001) ‘Irrigation against rural poverty: An overview of issues and pro-poor intervention strategies in irrigated agriculture in Asia’, in Hussain, I. and Biltonen E. (eds), Irrigation against rural poverty: An overview of issues and pro-poor intervention strategies in irrigated agriculture in Asia, Colombo: IWMI, x–xix. IWMI/SIC (2003), ‘How to establish a Water User Association: Practical steps for social mobilizers’, www.iwmi.cgiar.org/centralasia/html/files/WUA_eng.pdf. Krishna, A. (2004) ‘Escaping poverty and becoming poor: Who gains, who loses and why?’ World Development, 32 (1), 121–136. Leach, M., Mearns, R. and Scoones, I. (1997) ‘Environmental entitlements: A framework for understanding the institutional dynamics of environmental change’, Discussion Paper 359, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Lipton, M., Litchfield J. and Faures, J.-M. (2003) ‘The effects of irrigation on poverty: A framework for analysis’, Water Policy, 5, 413–427. Madulu, N.F. (2003) ‘Linking poverty levels to water resource use and conflicts in rural Tanzania’, Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, 28, 911–917. Meinzen-Dick, R. and Zwarteveen, M. (1998) ‘Gendered participation in water management: Issues and illustrations from water users’ associations in South Asia’. In: D. Merrey and Baviskar, S. (eds), ‘Gender analysis and reform of irrigation management: Concepts, cases and gaps in knowledge’. Proceedings of the Workshop on Gender and Water, September 1997. Colombo: IWMI. Merry, D., Meinzen-Dick, R., Mollinga, P.P. and Karar, E. (2006) ‘Policy and institutional reform processes for sustainable agricultural water management to reduce poverty: The art of the possible’, Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture, Chapter 14.

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Moench, M. (2002) ‘Water and the potential for social instability: Livelihoods, migration and the building of society’, Natural Resource Forum, 26, 195–204. Mollinga (2003), On the water front: Water distribution, technology and agrarian change in a South Indian canal Irrigation system, New Delhi: Orient Longman. Moore, M. (1989) ‘The fruits and fallacies of neo liberalism: The case of irrigation policy’, World Development, 17 (11), 1733–1750. Narain, V. (1998) ‘Towards a new groundwater institution for India’, Water Policy, 1, 357–365. Oorthuizen, J. (2003) Water, works and wages: The everyday politics of irrigation management reform in the Philippines, New Delhi: Orient Longman. Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prakash, A. and Ballabh, V. (2004) ‘A win-some lose-all game! Social differentiation and politics of groundwater markets in North Gujarat’, Institute of Rural Management Working Paper No. 183. Anand: Institute of Rural Management. Ratna Reddy, V., Gopinath Reddy, M., Galab, S., Soussan, J. and Springate-Baginski, O. (2004) ‘Participatory Watershed Development in India: Can it Sustain Rural Livelihoods?’ Development and Change, 35 (2), 297–326. Rijsberman, F. (2003) ‘Can development of water resources reduce poverty?’ Water Policy, 5, 399–412. Robbins, P. (2000) ‘The rotten institution: Corruption in natural resource management’, Political Geography, 19, 423–443. Saleth, R.M., Namara, R.E. and Samad, M. (2003) ‘Dynamics of irrigation-poverty linkages in rural India: Analytical framework and empirical analysis’, Water Policy, 5, 459–473. Sen, A., (1981) Poverty and Famines: An essay on entitlement and deprivation, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Shah, T., Deb Roy, A., Qureshi, A.S. and Wang, J. (2001) Sustaining Asia’s groundwater boom: An overview of issues and evidence, GDI and IWMI, Bonn: German Development Institute and International Water Management Institute. Smith, L.E.D., (2004) ‘Assessment of the contribution of irrigation to poverty reduction and sustainable livelihoods’, Water Resource Development, 20 (2), 243–57 www. iwmi.cgiar.org/centralasiawaterusers/files/pdf/SMID_StrategyEng.pdf. Thomas, V. and Ahmad, M. (2009) A Historical Perspective on the Mirab System: A Case Study of the Jangharoq Canal, Baghlan, Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, Case Study Series. www.areu.org.af/index2.php?option=com_docman&task= doc_view& gid=655&Itemid=26). Thompson, M., (1999) ‘Security and solidarity: An anti-reductionist analysis of environmental policy’, in Fischer, F. and Hajer, M.A. (eds) Living with nature: Environmental politics as cultural discourse, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 135–150 Van Koppen, B., Parthasarathy, R. and Safiliou, C. (2002) ‘Poverty dimensions of Irrigation Management transfer in large-scale canal irrigation in Andra Pradesh and Gujarat, India’, IWMI Research Report No. 61. Colombo: International Water Management Institute. Van Steenbergen, F. and Oliemans, W. (2002) ‘A review of policies in groundwater management in Pakistan 1950–2000’, Water Policy, 4, 323–444. Veldwisch, G.J.A. (2007) Cotton, Rice and Water: The Transformation of Agrarian Relations, Irrigation Technology and Water Distribution in Khorezm, Uzbekistan. PhD thesis, Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn.

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Rural poverty reduction Vermillion, D.L. (1997) ‘Impacts of irrigation management transfer: A review of the evidence’, IWMI Research Report No. 11. Colombo, International Water Management Institute. Wegerich, K. (2008) ‘Blueprints for water user associations’ accountability versus local reality: Evidence from South Kazakhstan’, Water International, 33 (1), 43–54. ——(2006) ‘“Illicit” water: Un-accounted, but paid for. Observations on rent-seeking as causes of drainage floods in the lower Amu Darya’, http://www.ceres.wur.nl/ Activities/2006_Wegerich_illicit_water.pdf. ——(2004) ‘Informal network utilization and water distribution in two districts in the Khorezm Province, Uzbekistan’, Local Environment, 9 (4) 337–352. Welschof, J, (2005) Vermerk, Water Week 2005 der Weltbank, ‘Water security: Policies and investment’, KfW Entwicklungsbank.

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A–Z Glossary Jens Treffner, Vincent Mioc and Kai Wegerich

A Adaptive capacity (also referred to as ingenuity) The ability of individuals, an organization or a society to cope with constraints in their livelihood resources and the challenges posed by ever-changing prioritization of demands is known as adaptive capacity. In the context of water scarcity, the capacity of a society to tackle the threat of a further aggravation of the situation with appropriate measures both on the supply and on the demand side of the management of water resources will determine its prospects for future development. Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) Chaired by former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, the AGRA aims at boosting agricultural productivity and development on the African continent by co-ordinating funding from, e.g., the Rockefeller Foundation or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Besides initiatives to provide agricultural inputs that permit higher yields and thus promise increased food security, in the water domain the alliance promotes the widespread utilization of treadle pumps and small-scale drip irrigation kits. Allocation In its original use the concept of allocation is an economic concept. The act of assigning or granting the use of a scarce resource to a certain sector or type of utilization is known as the concept of resource allocation. The underlying rationale of considering allocation (or reallocation) is the increase in economic efficiency (defined as the most favourable ratio between cost of production and price per unit of output) and the resulting overall economic welfare. Nevertheless, allocation is not only an act of ascribing a right to use a defined part of a scarce resource to a certain productive activity. It also has physical dimensions, e.g. where canal designs allow the flow of a certain defined flow per unit of time and where outlet structures allocate a certain discharge to one specific area. Given the scarcity of a good used for productive purposes, such as water, the monetary return on one unit of water provided per production unit of an economic activity will differ as a function of a) the resource efficiency of the productive process and b) the type of good produced.

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For the water domain, it has been widely agreed upon that the value added to a good through the productive utilization of water is by far inferior for agricultural products (where, e.g. irrigation water is largely ‘lost’ to evapotranspiration), compared to its utilization in other sectors, such as industrial production or for recreational uses. In contexts of severe water scarcity, economic thinking highlights the necessity of re-allocation of the precious resource to its most favorable use, creating welfare and strengthening economic development. Problematic for the successful transfer of water amongst users in one sector (to improve efficient use) and between sectors is the question of the right mix of mechanisms to address the process: market mechanisms need an existing legal framework for the sale and clear characteristics of water rights; political measures to put allocation mechanisms into practice are influenced by a diverse set of objectives and the administrative means to manage allocation range from issuing permits over conflict resolution to the technical conveyance of water in time and space according to the allocative procedures. A concern raised in the context of irrigation and the fight against rural poverty is the fact that, from a pure economic perspective domestic uses in urban zones or for industrial purposes largely outcompetes agriculture due to the high input demand for the latter and the more competitive ways of acquisition by the former (through lobbying, economic power, etc.). Another critical point raised is the question about the technical feasibility of reallocation. Whereas, on paper and in theory, water deals can be achieved as long as the legal and administrative institutions are appropriate, the hydraulic realities present in most countries do not allow a reliable, timely and controllable conveyance from one use or user to another. The main reason is the absence or deteriorated state of infrastructure and the often path-dependent design of water systems. Aquifer Groundwater bodies carrying water in the pores between the sediments are known as aquifers. They are delimited by an underlying aquitard, an impermeable layer of rock or clay that hinders the water from percolating deeper. There are different types of aquifers; they are characterized according to their recharge characteristics and their accessibility for human uses. Two main characteristics of all aquifers are the capacity to store water and the capacity to permit water flow. Aquifers retard and store water in the sediment layers, acting like a buffer that regulates and levels peak flows against minimum flows, and sometimes as a filter that influences the water quality in a positive way. However, the buffering capacity is limited; groundwater overexploitation (as a result of agricultural practices, the recharge of natural water bodies is diminished), or mining (withdrawal constantly exceeds the recharge over a multi-year period) are phenomena that occur once the withdrawal of water exceeds a safe or sustainable yield. Surface water flows usually have a higher annual fluctuation, depending on climatic variations in precipitation and the topographic situation, than

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Average annual recharge groundwater. In sloped areas and on soils with a low infiltration capacity (because of compaction, sealing or deforestation), most of the water usually runs off superficially, accumulates in perennial, seasonal or periodic streams and leads to peak flows and floods. The uncertainties concerning the physical properties of aquifers make it often difficult to delineate an underground water body precisely. Also, the complex relationship between groundwater and surface water generates debate in international water law. These are major problems encountered in the management and use of transboundary aquifers. Aquifers often recharge at a very slow flow rate and are generally more affected by the long-term effects of pollution than is surface water, the ecological integrity of which can usually be restored in shorter time scales. However, the depletion of aquifers in many regions of the world is the main concern, as overexploitation (groundwater mining) leads to lower water tables, and subsequent drilling costs to access the water, and finally may cause intrusion of salt water if aquifers are linked to coastal waters. Appropriate attention must therefore be given to the use, management, share between users, and protection of aquifers, that is, through the establishment of a dedicated set of rules. Artesian well A deep drilled well tapping an artesian aquifer (also confined aquifer), where water is confined under pressure. Once tapped, due to the pressure water will rise without pumping above the top of the aquifer or even to the surface. Artificial recharge of groundwater An artificial process by which water is led into the ground in order to replenish an aquifer. Different methods exist, among others, spreading surface water within the recharge area, modifying storage devices such as tanks, using recharge wells or the modification of natural conditions to increase infiltration of water into the soil. Artificial recharge may be used for different purposes: a) to recover a depleted aquifer or to raise the quality of the water of an aquifer; b) to increase groundwater supplies and thus to increase the sustainable yield of aquifers; and c) to store water in periods of water surplus. Nevertheless, artificial recharge may present disadvantages, especially from the environmental point of view. The injected water may be of a lower quality than that in the aquifer itself as it may carry pollutants and contaminants. Average annual recharge A hydrological measure expressing the volume of water draining into an aquifer on an annual basis. The volume is generally expressed in cm p.a. or

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cu km p.a. and, on account of the often complex characteristics of aquifers and changes in land use (and hence differing infiltration), two methods exist to approximate the recharge. One is to compute precipitation and surface runoff data using empirical infiltration coefficients; the other is the direct monitoring of groundwater levels. The latter provides more precise, real-time information about recharge rates and levels. The average annual recharge can be used as an indicator for various purposes. It gives an idea of the importance and the size of the underground body of water, and an indication on the availability of water. First and foremost, it helps in the management of the resources of an aquifer as it indicates the amount of water that can be withdrawn in order to respect the aquifer’s sustainable yield and thus not negatively affect the resource (and potentially other users). From a hydropolitics perspective, data such as the average annual recharge of an aquifer are very important as they are generally used by parties involved in conflict or in negotiations about sharing transboundary water resources. Usually, the parties will try to influence or manipulate the data in order to sustain their interests and contest other parties’ points of view. Water-related data can therefore be highly politicized and should be seen as potentially biased.

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B Basin: see River basin Basin closure A phenomenon occurring world-wide. Closure describes the trajectory of river basins where all, or almost all, water resources are allocated to certain uses. This means that water is physically scarce, even if this is sometimes not evident from surface water bodies. Although basin closure generally results in the drying up of a river, the water flowing in its bed can also be drainage effluent from different uses and of degraded quality. To speak of closure, a minimum level of freshwater draining to the terminus needs to be defined as a reference. This is vital for aquatic ecosystems or wetlands in coastal zones. For a considerable part of the year, basins on the closure trajectory do not meet the necessary outflow of freshwater (see environmental flow). Bellagio Draft Treaty This model agreement concerning the uses of transboundary groundwaters was provided by Professors Robert Hayton and Albert Utton in 1989. This legally adequate set of provisions supported by comments can be used by diplomats as a basis on which to negotiate specific agreements related to water resources. The Bellagio Draft Treaty emphasizes the need to consider the whole hydrologic cycle and the complex interdependent relationship between surface water and groundwater. The authors of the draft aim to achieve optimum utilization and conservation of transboundary groundwaters and to protect the underground environment (Art. 2). The Bellagio Draft Treaty provides a detailed, comprehensive set of rules or provisions concerning transboundary groundwater management, and promotes co-operation among states by advocating the creation of a commission ‘designated as the parties’ agency to carry out the functions and responsibilities provided for by this agreement’ (Art. 3). Benefit-sharing An economic approach to co-operation on water issues between two parties stresses the recognition of the different benefits that are generated through the utilization of water, rather than focusing on water volumes. The concept of a

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basket of benefits is receiving increased attention in hydropolitics as it does not have a water-centric view (like water governance), but rather takes the larger problemshed into consideration, crossing disciplinary boundaries and conceptual boundaries of IWRM and opening up potentially beneficial issue-linkages that facilitate co-operation. The basket’s content is strongly scale-dependent and can reach up to the level of international politics, thus the benefits should be perceived not only as narrow, economically measurable goods, but also as a valuable and advantageous array of wider, economic and political improvements in whatever context. Although in many river basin initiatives benefit-sharing is on the rise in discourses and negotiations about possible trade-offs and mutual solutions, it is also being criticized for its depoliticizing implications, focusing on the macroeconomics of the river basin. An example of sharing benefits by transboundary co-operation is the construction of a dam in an upstream riparian state with the help of a downstream riparian. In this case, benefits can be envisaged for both, through the prevention of floods, the controlled release of water for irrigation and the generation of hydropower; this is a case of mutual co-operation. Berlin Rules Adopted by the International Law Association at its conference in Berlin, Germany in 2004, this set of non-legally binding rules applies to all types of waters, transboundary as well as waters within states (Art.1, 1); this means that these rules’ scope is broader than the equivalent provisions of the Helsinki Rules and of the UN Convention on International Watercourses. The Berlin Rules subordinate the principle of ‘equitable utilization’ to the principle of do ‘no harm’. In this respect there is a clear shift from the early emphasis on equitable utilization (Helsinki rules) to equal emphasis (United Nations Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses) to the Berlin rules emphasis on ‘no harm’. The Berlin Rules emphasize, within Articles 5 and 6, the notions of conjunctive management and integrated water resource management. Those terms were already used in the International Law Associations’ Seoul Rules of 1986. The Berlin Rules express many obligations: sustainable water management, equity and reasonable use of water, the obligation not to cause harm to other basin states, co-operation among states, right of persons to access to water and protection of minorities, pollution control, protection of water and water installations during war or armed conflict, dispute settlement and navigation rules. Chapter eight deals with groundwater resources. The rules expressed in the document apply to all aquifers, including aquifers that do not contribute water to, or receive water from, surface waters, or receive no significant contemporary recharge from any source (Art. 36). Article 37 states the necessity of conjunctive management and thus reaffirms the necessity to take into account the relationship between surface water and groundwater in the management of water resources.

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Brundtland Report Black water Black water is wastewater that has been contaminated with sewage, in contrast to grey water. It needs treatment to be reused as it contains potential health hazards, and has a high biochemical oxygen demand, indicating its low quality. Blue water Blue water is the share (about 40%) of water in the terrestrial part of the global hydrologic cycle that is stored as groundwater, in wetlands, lakes and streams. It does not comprise the saltwater stored in the oceans, which constitutes the lion’s share of the earth’s water (see also Green Water). The term blue water is used to characterize so-called non-consumptive use and water flows through the hydrologic cycle, where evapotranspiration plays only a minor role, and where the return-flows—water that re-enters the nearby water system—are of almost the same quantity. Brisbane Declaration The declaration was made during a conference in Brisbane, Australia, in 2007 by policymakers, scientists and professionals dealing with the conservation and protection of river systems. Besides advocacy for the acknowledgement that water unutilized by man is still beneficial, the concrete mission is to establish the concept of environmental flow within water management practices for river basins throughout the world. Brundtland Report The World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1987 published a report entitled Our Common Future, also known as The Brundtland Report after the WCED chairman, Gro Harlem Brundtland. The report is a milestone in international environmental politics and its relations with human development; it is of primary importance because it helped to popularize the term sustainable development. It furthermore emphasized that poverty as well as excessive consumption put damaging pressure on the environment, and defined key issues upon which attention should be focused. The report was debated in 1989 at the United Nations General Assembly, and led to the organization of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. The report is divided into three parts. The first part, ‘Common Concerns’, explains the threats to the environment and development (poverty as well as excessive consumption are threats to nature), defines the concept of sustainable development (the most cited of the countless definitions of the concept), and suggests the potential role of the international economy in enabling

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sustainable development. The second part, ‘Common Challenges’, defines the key areas where action should be taken in order to achieve sustainable development. The key issues are as follows: population and human resources, food security, species and ecosystems, energy, industry and urban challenge. The third part, ‘Common Endeavours’, contains two final chapters, one dedicated to the managing of the commons (space, oceans, Antarctica) and the other to the link between conflict and the environment (environmental stress as a cause of conflict and conflict as a cause of unsustainable development). Bureaucracy At the time when ideas of modernity started to strongly influence perceptions about the role and functioning of the state, the demands made of civil servants and officials changed as well. In pre-modern times (often equated with medieval, monarchist nations), the civil servant’s role was directed towards the maximization of benefits for the state’s established leaders by levying taxes and administering the goods. After the revolutionary developments from the 18th to the 20th centuries, when many states changed from monarchies into republics, the state official was seen as the servant of the public, altruistically serving society by administrating and monitoring the public processes. It was in this phase that the number of officials in public offices (from the French term bureau) grew drastically. According to Max Weber, the innovation of bureaucracy was that public servants were no longer answerable to individuals, but to rules. This means that they are, ideally, not venal, and make disinterested decisions based on rationality, not political favour. This ideal picture is often not borne out in practice. In a contemporary understanding, bureaucracies are depicted by critics as massive, complicated and machine-like public systems, where responsibilities overlap, the outsider cannot determine the interaction or frictions in the system, and public funds disappear in complex, obscure mechanisms. Here, civil servants are pictured as uncommitted, technocratic and inflexible bureaucrats who are interested in employment, increased wages and influence: opportunistic and selfish rather than committed to societal benefits. This perception also shapes the understanding of hydrocracies. The amassing of funds, self-interest and power within a bureaucratic system has important political implications, inhibiting reforms that would constrain the bureaucratic system’s power basis and spheres of influence, and at the same time influencing the fate of political processes.

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C Capillarity A physical phenomenon: the unique appearance of liquids ascending or descending in pipe-shaped cavities, tubes or, more generally, through porous media. It results from the liquids’ physical characteristics, their surface tension. Water, as most other liquids, ascends in tubes as a result of the cohesion between the liquid’s molecules and the adhesion forces between the liquid, a solid surface and the gaseous environment. In soils, water ascends as a function of the soil’s porosity, the below-ground water table, the extraction of soil water by plant roots and generally through evapotranspiration. Capillary rise of water assures water supply for agricultural plant production even in dry periods, depending on the soil’s water storage capacity. It is also the principal agent of solute salts ascending in the soil and precipitating after the water has evaporated, leading to salinization if these salts are not flushed by rain or irrigation. Catchment area (Catchment basin, Drainage area, Drainage basin) The area that is drained by a specific river or body of water. The amount of water reaching the river, reservoir, lake or underground water body (as they all constitute a ‘terminus’ within the overall river basin, hence the common drainage point of a sub-basin) from its catchment area depends on different factors such as the size of the area, the geologic formations (causing interlinkages between groundwater bodies), the amount of precipitation and the loss through evaporation. Although there seems to be quite some overlap with the concepts of watershed and river basin, the term should not be confused with the former two. The expression catchment area is mainly used to define the zone within a river basin where most of the precipitation falls. From a hydropolitics perspective, the catchment area is a very important territory to control as it feeds a specific body of water. To control it means to control significantly the amount of water flowing into a river or water body. See also River basin. Chronic water scarcity Water scarcity has different degrees, each corresponding to a determined level of water availability. As far as chronic water scarcity is concerned, the value 225

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developed by Falkenmark to classify the severity of water-related constraints for sectors and societies is 1,000 cu m per person/p.a. as a benchmark. This value is based on empiricist assumptions of a certain development level and water use patterns, and may not always reflect the severity as experienced by different groups of a society or sectors of water use. Under this annual 1,000 cu m level, countries or regions are exposed to chronic water scarcity (see also the entry on Data). Even if scarcity is a relative concept, it is useful to know that these benchmarks are used in decision-making by most water-related institutions. In other words, the levels of scarcity can be used to prioritize action in a particular country or region. It is also an indicator of the state of water resources in the world. Climatic changes Changes in the local and/or global climate affect the hydrologic cycle. Predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stress the severe impact that an average increase of some 2°C will have on the availability of water, as higher temperatures also mean higher potential evaporation, and thus a higher water demand by, e.g., the agricultural sector if food production levels are to be maintained. In the hydropolitics domain, some actors use the predictions made by the IPCC to justify infrastructure development, the construction of new storage devices, and investments in irrigation to prepare for unpredictable climatic variations. Commodification The definition in the fourth Dublin Principle of water as an economic good with a value is seen as proof of the change in perceptions about water use and management. Assigning efficiency and benefits to the ‘invisible hand’ of the water market gives way to a new paradigm, different from the implicit, traditional ideas about water as a god-given natural resource that cannot be withheld from anyone and accessibility to which the governments should oversee as the ‘national custodian’. Besides the volumetric pricing of water (taxes or some sort of maintenance fees for water delivery services are common in most cultures), the privatization of formerly state-delivered services and infrastructure is an important aspect. From an economic point of view, the use of privatization as a political instrument to control water use through volumetric pricing and service taxes would contribute to cut public expenditure. However, for poorer members of society, the privatization of the management, and the control of the water delivery infrastructure by private companies constitute a potential restriction on meeting basic demands for either drinking water uses or subsistence farming. Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) The range of laws and regulations concerning agricultural production in the European Union (EU) member states, from production quotas to subsidies

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Common pool resources (CPRs) and bans on certain production practices, is called the Common Agricultural Policy. Its relation to the water domain can be seen in the effects of intensified agriculture during the development of Europe’s agricultural sector. Through inputs such as pesticides and chemical fertilizers, as well as feed imports from abroad, and their subsequent leaching to riparian ecosystems, in many regions where the CAP was designed to drive agricultural economic productivity to a higher level, water resources were subject to increased exploitation and pollution. Another development was the increased utilization of irrigation to make use of the potential productivity of climatically favourable areas, often not acknowledging adverse side-effects or even increased basin closure. Common pool resources (CPRs) Economic theory traditionally defines goods first according to their characteristics concerning the abstraction of benefits from their use and subsequent benefit decreases for other users and, second, according to the management of the good as required by its characteristics in relation to excludability of others from the resources’ utilization. Four categories are defined (private goods, club goods, common goods and public goods), with private goods as the best example of individual users’ complete control over subtraction of benefits and the highest degree of exclusion; club goods have the same degree of excludability, although benefits can be derived by all members of a (paying) user group. Pure public goods like air cannot be withheld from anyone, thus the difficulty of exclusion is high, and use of the resource (in an idealized view) does not constitute an abstraction of utility from others. Water usually fits into the last category of economic goods, the common pool goods: once made accessible through (often) public investment in infrastructure (water resource development, or so-called hydraulic property creation by a particular group of villagers, often coupled with questions of ethnicity and territory), its use minimizes the prospects of other users in terms of quantity, and its pollution withdraws quality from the CPR. New institutional economics defines the problems occurring with the management of CPRs in the categories of appropriation and provision. Appropriation difficulties relate to the finiteness of water, both in time and space in the hydrologic cycle as well as in systems developed for water delivery and drainage. Provision problems encompass the specialities of the operation and maintenance of the resource delivery systems, and the impracticality of determining cost elements such as opportunity cost, the rating of externalities and the ‘simpler’ questions about cost attribution to individual users for water delivery structures. The utilization of CPRs thus necessitates the existence of institutions that regulate access and use to safeguard the highest possible benefits for all members of the community affected by the rule-set; these institutions should include rule-enforcement mechanisms. Such institutions include water rights and the related water rights regimes that govern the entitlements of individual

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users to the resource. The evolution of the water rights regime in a local context should also keep pace with contestations due to water scarcity; and the administrative and/or operational management may be carried out by a state authority, a private company (following the subsidiarity principle) or a group of individual actors. Concepts By definition, a concept is a widely held idea about things and processes, or what they should be like. Concepts can also be definitions of perceptions, worldviews that only have meaning through the human interpretation and conceptualization of reality. Climate change, although a reality, has existed as a concept only since the early 1990s, although its effects had been taking place for over a century. Some concepts become truisms, mainstream, but in this respect also trash-bins—so-called container-concepts into which everything fits. In this way, concepts become overloaded or bloated, some concepts or disciplines reminding one of the fashion industry: environmental economics, political ecology, etc. The power, and at the same time the danger, of many concepts touching upon water management and/or the management of natural resources is the aforementioned mainstream flavour of popular concepts that seem to combine so many interests because of their broad definition and their fit within contemporary discourses. Some concepts, through their mantra-like repetition, can even become hard to avoid, a necessity in communication or fund-raising, despite their general character, e.g. integrated water resource management. Like any other human intervention in the functioning of a natural resource that is shared by others, the truism that IWRM has become hides its political nature and suggests the potential prescription of commonplace tools instead of acknowledging the important context of the interlaced politics. Confined aquifer Confined aquifers are defined as bodies of water situated below a permeable or semi-permeable confining layer of solid rock or clay. The use of the term ‘confined’ to mean ‘not connected to surface waters’ has been questioned by recent scientific developments. The use of the term has changed, as we shall see below. It was decided not to include aquifers with no connection to the surface in the scope of the 1997 UN Convention on International Watercourses, in contrast to non-legally binding documents such as the 1986 Seoul Rules, the 2004 Berlin Rules or the 1989 Bellagio Draft Treaty. Although the term ‘confined aquifer’ is not used in the text of the convention, it is clear that the authors were referring to, and choosing to exclude from the scope of the rules, confined aquifers when they wrote their definition of a watercourse. The International Law Commission’s second report on

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Conflict shared natural resources, dedicated to transboundary groundwaters, suggested that draft articles should be prepared on confined transboundary groundwater—a suggestion that will be followed up. The report instigated very important developments by suggesting the inclusion of all types of aquifers in its scope, but also by criticizing the use of the term ‘confined’ as it is used in the UN Convention. Conflict Water has always been a contentious element in human history as its availability, control and access heavily influence individuals’ or communities’ prospects for wellbeing and prosperity. Conflict can be conceptualized in two ways: either in the form of ‘events’, when violence, sanctions or diplomatic frictions appear as indicators of serious conflict; or in the understanding of ‘conflict as an enduring process’, where the ongoing disputes between two or more riparian parties do not necessarily lead to a violent act such as the famous but—at least on the international level—non-existent water wars, an issue of hydrosecurity and securitization. In general, independent from its manifestations, conflict describes disagreement among parties with different objectives over one party’s claims and activities or basin-wide initiatives. Water conflict is often related to a change in water availability or lower water quality traits for one of the parties or to contested control and access possibilities. Conflict is not always bound to boil over into conflict events; it can either endure over the years as a contained conflict or, in the most desirable case, be resolved mutually through co-operation. This type of hydropolitical behaviour by one or more riparian states does not necessarily mean that conflicts are being resolved for all parties: in the case of more than two riparian states, for example, the coalition of two parties against a river basin organization or initiative can constitute a continued blockage against attempts to find mutual solutions on the basin scale. The most common case is enduring conflict between two or more nations situated along the same water body, with one hegemonic power that imposes its objectives on others by the use of multiple hydro hegemonic instruments, such as economic investments in infrastructure to control the water flows, or subtle open threats in the form of sanctions, military presence or intervention. Two solution domains exist to de-intensify the conflict potential over scarce water supply and to adapt to resolving the issue through the problemshed rather than on the river basin scale. One is the utilization of virtual water to substitute the water needed, for example, for food production with imported grains, and to free the resource and reallocate it to other sectors, such as vital drinking and domestic use. The second ‘remedy’ is social adaptive capacity, an issue also outlined under water scarcity: a society’s adaptive and engineering capacities to tackle water stress on the demand side rather than on the already scarce supply side of water use domains. The same path may offer

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solutions for other sources of water-related conflicts, such as the quality of water, or the question of control and access to water resources. Control Water control is the main subject of water management and a key determining factor for power (while at the same time power is the foundation for successful control) in relation to decision-making about, and appropriation of, exclusion from, and beneficial utilization of, water. It is also seen as the distinction between waters that are potentially available from a hydrologic perspective on the national scale and the real, spatially and timely available water that is controlled through the development and management of infrastructure, organizations and institutions. Water control (both use and regulation) has three dimensions. First there is the technical side, manifest in dams, canals, pipes, gates and pumps that are used to intervene in the hydrologic cycle and retain, regulate and redirect the natural water flows. The second, organizational, dimension of water control, from a socio-technical perspective, relates to the water management necessary for operation and maintenance, as well as to investment in techniques, knowledge and manpower. This second dimension is again inseparably linked to the third dimension of social, economic and political control through the institutions designed and negotiated in political processes by (parts of) society. Societal, economic and political objectives are implicitly inscribed in controlling organizations and infrastructure. For this reason, and also because of water’s vital role and finiteness, the control of, and decision-making about, water are inherently political. Co-operation Conflict is not the only phenomenon occurring between riparian parties. Cooperation is sometimes a response by riparians to conflict situations and does not necessarily result from an unselfish mindset on the part of one of the parties. In other cases, a mixture of conflict and co-operation over related issues attached to a single resource or dispute exist in a fragile equilibrium. The two co-exist in many cases: the domains and forms of conflict and cooperation are multiple and, therefore, even when political actors start to securitize (see securitization) an issue, there can be continued compliance with formal agreements or informal customs, constituting a persisting form of co-operation. The readiness to take mutual action on a given issue is known as hydrosolidarity; balancing livelihood interests between users or the economic interests of riparian states. According to some water policy scholars, the dictum of solidarity should guide transboundary water issues. Co-operation can be manifest in benefit-sharing of water resources or be only loosely related to water if the co-operation activities take place in the economic, security, political or other domains of the problemshed. Co-operation can thus have

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Corruption very different motivations, aims and degrees of institutionalization. Ad-hoc co-operation occurs only after consultation among two or more parties on a case-by-case basis, whereas exploitative types of co-operation usually do not have any other, solidarity-like motivations but for the aim to sustain access, and exploit and control the resource (i.e. maintain the status quo). Other notions of co-operation are token-co-operation, where in the large political space of coexisting conflict and co-operation intensities, interaction is characterized by consultation, information exchange and sometimes emblematic signs of goodwill, but does not result in fundamental change regarding the watershed problem. Coercive co-operation is a result of hydro hegemonic power being imposed on a weaker riparian, and usually constitutes an act of conflict avoidance. Corruption Corruption is a violation of norms and standards of conduct. There are always divergent and conflicting assessments of whether a particular course of action is corrupt. More narrowly, corruption refers to the abandonment of expected standards of behaviour by those in authority for the sake of unsanctioned personal advantage (in the form of bribery, favours and influence). This definition is applied for government officials selling government property for personal gain. A distinction is made between petty corruption, usually connected to the implementation of institutions (e.g. to safeguard water availability under conditions of scarcity, bending the rules in one’s favour or making sure that control staff apply the rules as designed), and so-called grand corruption. The latter is a form of rent-seeking, where public officials on the higher levels of the bureaucracy together with private businesses—by lobbying—manipulate the formulation of rules. The benefit to the bureaucrats is that they can expand their own domain because of the operationalization and control of new institutions, and the private businesses benefit from either the exclusion of competitors or the direct flow of funds.

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D Data Hydrologic data are a sensitive issue when it comes to disputes or conflicts about transboundary water resources. Water-related data are used in planning and decision-making, as well as being the object of hydropolitical frictions. In order to be able to perform rationality-based water management, knowledge about variations and availability of water (both in quantitative and qualitative terms) in time and space constitutes vital information. However, although there are numerous ways of assessing and accounting for water resources, there is often—and this is more important in transboundary settings—an interest in keeping strategic data confidential for the sake of hydrosecurity. Data handling and manipulation by an interest-driven representative of one state may thus not be reliable or may be deliberately incomplete, or highlight only certain selected aspects; scientists and professionals are an integral part of a nation’s epistemic community and thus part of hydropolitical complexes. In recent years, this fact has fostered water resource assessments by international organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme (in co-operation with several research institutions) in order to provide a neutral and comprehensive database for potential transboundary co-operation. In the compilation of indexes to illustrate the availability or scarcity of water for certain sectors or whole nations, the aggregation of data is an important issue. Numerous ways exist to highlight the water realities, some with a hydrologic character, accounting for influxes and withdrawals, others with a more socio-economical dimension, such as the Social Water Stress Index. The ‘simple’ indexes appearing in the media are often based on easily available data from censuses (to account for the per capita of a nation) and on remote sensing (to measure the big fluxes of precipitation and evaporation), while hardly considering ‘higher resolution’ issues, such as regional, temporal or sectoral water stress and its impact on development. Demand see Water demand Desalination The term characterizes the technical treatment of salt-containing sea water in order to provide freshwater for situations and regions where the supply of

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Discourses potable water and freshwater is insufficient. The chemical process is highly energy intensive; desalination plants today are often driven by fossil fuel resources. These energy needs constitute high running costs, which lead to sustainability concerns about the socio-economic efficacy of such enterprises, especially where this costly water resource is used for irrigation purposes instead of being substituted by virtual water from imported food products. As an effect, pressures on freshwater supply could be released locally. This is especially important for the worlds’ ‘better off’ urban populations living in coastal areas with limited natural freshwater sources. There, a ‘new source’ of water could be desalination plants. A decrease in demand for natural flows of sweet water can also mean that there is no longer a need for sectoral re-allocation of freshwater as total supply of water resources increases. Whether and how the additional urban wastewater would be reused is open: It could be, once treated to a degree that does not constitute considerable health risk, re-used for irrigation or as environmental flows; or treated to a higher degree for reuse within the urban sector. Development The concept of development has two meanings in the water politics context. In its widely known meaning, it characterizes the issue and process of economic growth and social security towards a country’s prosperity and the improvement of its people’s livelihoods, as well as the intellectual development of a society, which can be interpreted as an investment in future ingenuity. In almost every stage of a nation’s development, the exploitation and use of natural resources such as water play an important, if not the key role. Hydrocrats and members of the epistemic communities present in the water management context of a nation often use the second notion of development. Here, the meaning of the often abbreviated infrastructure development is the ‘making available’ in the sense of the withdrawal, abstraction and utilization of formerly ‘unmanaged’ water resources (referred to as ‘losses’ for the country, as undeveloped resources do not contribute to economic benefit) to contribute to the initiating party’s objectives of supply, economic growth, protection, modernity or the management of the environment: its hydraulic mission. Discourses A discourse involves spoken word, texts, images and gestures that actors draw upon in the production and interpretation of meaning, opinion and the related assumptions and attitudes towards an issue. Its analysis can help to elucidate both the general attitudes of actors as well as the utilization of discourses around an issue for related political issues (e.g. the importance of safeguarding a nation’s water rights so as to generate a feeling of national identity). Discourses are also the basis for coalitions. The common ground for

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a political coalition is the shared conceptualization of processes and developments, of wrong and right—even if the concrete arguments vary in their origin. In the political domain, policymakers’ self-serving assumptions and one-sided interpretation of data are used as so-called sanctioned discourses. Unwelcome data and critical interpretations are discursively demoted, ignored or shifted out of sight. Prominent examples of sanctioned discourses are the promotion of integrated water resource management as a remedy for almost any water-related problem, and the debate about the privatization of water services that is claimed to be necessary for wise and economic utilization of scarce resources. Downstream see Upstream

Drainage area / basin see Catchment area and River basin

Drinking water Also termed potable water; all water resources that are dedicated to drinking or food processing and preparation need to be of superior quality. The term thus describes water that is free from pollutants or hazardous substances, as well as disease vectors. In most cases, drinking water supply implies a previous treatment and purification; only in rare cases can drinking water be abstracted of sufficient quality to be directly used for drinking purposes. Access to drinking water is, besides the increased provision of sanitation services, the main focus of water-related development activities in the developing world. In the western world, where most drinking water systems of the world have their origin, the water supply (and sanitation) network usually only provides water of drinking water quality, whether for domestic purposes, industries and sometimes even irrigation. The provision of good quality drinking water incurs continued costs, not only for the development of the relevant infrastructure, but also for continued operation, maintenance and monitoring. Drinking water is considered as a basic human need in discourse about water scarcity; this point is widely agreed upon by the international community (see Human rights). Dublin Principles The essence of the International Conference on Water and the Environment, held in 1992 in Dublin, Ireland were four principal guidelines, known as the Dublin Statement. The principles were used as the water community’s input for the UNCED in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil later that year. Constituting the contemporary, integrated foundation of IWRM, they elicited agreement throughout the world’s water community; however the fourth principle was

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Dublin Principles extensively debated, and the perception of a commodified public good caused a lot of friction. 1. Fresh water is a finite and vulnerable resource, essential to sustain life, development and the environment. 2. Water development and management should be based on a participatory approach, involving users, planners and policymakers at all levels. 3. Women play a central part in the provision, management and safeguarding of water. 4. Water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an economic good. The fourth principle received most of the attention on account of its debated underlying assumptions and anticipated negative effects (exclusion from access to water of economically weak groups and/or sectors; the continued framing of natural and undeveloped watercourses as a loss), whereas the other three principles achieved unchallenged agreement. As these are only guidelines agreed upon by a wide range of politicians and professionals without any priority, the principles are only vague and thus prone to interpretation. Contradictions between principles can occur if, for instance, the operationalization of Principle 4 relies solely on economic instruments, and thus leads to an exclusion of economically weak stakeholders (violating Principles 2 and 3). The international organizations’ policies (International Monetary Fund and World Bank) focus strongly on the fourth Dublin principle under the guise of IWRM.

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E Economic valuation of water According to the fourth Dublin Principle, water should be regarded and treated as a scarce resource. This statement, together with the first principle (stressing the finiteness of water), resulted in the economic conceptualization of scarcity—a necessary precondition for effective distributive effects of the ‘invisible hand’ advocated by economics-inspired water professionals and international development organizations. In the late 1980s and 1990s, water pricing and tariffs were increasingly viewed as panaceas for the successful trading of water rights on water markets and the re-allocation of water from economically lowvalue use sectors, such as agriculture, to the higher-value water use domains in the industrial sector. During the last 25 years, the discussion has moved on from being a perception clash between economics-inspired scholars and practitioners on the one hand, and critical, human rights-oriented scientists, practitioners and non-governmental organizations on the other. Today, the economic valuation of water is treated in a more diversified manner, and in some contexts is seen as a viable solution to the lack of water infrastructure investment incentives, especially in the domestic water sector, whereas at the beginning of the discourse, the more fundamental questions about fairness, equity and frictions and contradictions with human rights were raised. Also during the last 25 years, natural resource economists, inspired by new institutional economics, further developed the concept of common pool resources with an emphasis on the peculiarities of water. One key contribution to the debate about the commodification of water has been the consideration of different elements of the full cost of water, thus highlighting the difficulties of determining economic externality costs, environmental externality costs or crucial opportunity costs. Ecosystem The term ecosystem describes the interplay of physical and biological processes taking place in the environment on different spatial and temporal scales. As opposed to the term environment, ecosystems are explicitly seen as dynamic, resilient and self-regulating systems; the concept hence is less human-centred (with a conceptualization of environment as the milieu surrounding mankind).

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Engineering On the global scale, water can be seen as both an aquatic ecosystem and an integral part of the global ecosystem driven by solar radiation and the earth’s atmosphere. Water plays an important role as an agent of environmental processes (combining the physical and chemical geological domain of the upper crust of the planet with the ‘living’ processes of the biologic world), as the most important element for biological processes, a regulator of temperature and a transport agent. As mankind today is the main interfering force in ecosystem processes, and the benefits provided by the exploitation of environmental goods depend on the perpetuated provision (apart from petroleum or groundwater) of these goods ‘produced’ by nature, the scientific community dealing with the exploration and protection of ecosystems advocates an ecosystem approach when it comes to the integration of human intervention in the living environment. The ecosystem approach centres ecosystem functions and services as the targets to be preserved—as opposed to the anthropocentric approach, where the socio-economic demands and needs of humans are the central point of concern, and the impact on ecosystems is seen as a necessary sideeffect in a trade-off between development and protection. Functions such as regulation (e.g. water filtration in wetlands, oxygen production by plants), production (e.g. crop, fibre or timber), habitat (providing living space and niches for species, vital for biodiversity), and information (man’s experiences of nature, aesthetic values) are services provided by local natural systems, as well as by the global ecosystem of the hydrologic cycle and the oceans, which cannot be substituted by techniques and are valued every year at approximately three times the annual global economic capacity. Ecosystem thinking has also influenced the conceptualization of social and political processes among human actors and their organizations, especially in structuralist approaches analysing the political ecology (the institutional framework, resources and competitors) around and within a group of actors. Ecosystem boundaries are often blurred in comparison with hydrological boundaries, as the individual elements constituting an ecosystem are numerous and exhibit more dynamics than H2O, which in a hydrological sense is driven by biophysical processes only, and not by, e.g., population dynamics and competition among species. Managing natural resources according to one of the above-mentioned approaches thus leads to an unavoidable incongruity, particularly in the case of larger-scale and complex interlinkages of both water systems and ecosystems, as for example in deltaic wetlands (see Ramsar Convention). Engineering The term describes the discipline of applying scientific, technical knowledge to the design of artefacts and structures through the use of material and devices to regulate processes in the physical, biological or chemical environment on different scales.

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Many of the ancient and modern-day achievements in water management are strongly linked to technical solutions and large-scale intervention by civil and hydraulic engineers. The ability to defy nature’s incalculable variations by water storage in dams and conveyance in structures such as pipes and canals, and to provide protection from floods by dykes and drains is an achievement of the engineering community in dealing with water. Often, these engineers and technicians are part of the epistemic communities encapsulating waterrelated debates and of hydrocracies charged with everyday operation and management decisions. In the socio-technical domain of water management, engineers are thus key persons in water distribution. On a large scale, water capture and regulation is tackled by the construction of dams (blocking water, usually making use of geologic situations, such as valleys with a narrow gorge) or barrages (impounding water in front of a structure that diverts water, the intake). Sluices are devices to provide for height differences in the techno-natural water network used for navigation and large-scale regulation of water levels in river basins. Intake structures can be regulated by gates or weirs (where water either flows under or over the device, respectively), where water conveyance is based on the gravity flow of water induced by height differences, a so-called non-pressurized system. Pumps are the contemporary complements of the ancient water wheels or buckets used to lift water (such as groundwater) from lower levels up to its point of distribution or utilization. The development and extensive utilization of all these devices throughout the world are all engineering solutions interfering with the hydrologic cycle. Entitlements An entitlement can be described using synonymous expressions such as a right, a claim, permission or a privilege. However, sharing the notion of being allowed to benefit from a livelihood resource, the above-mentioned terms, in comparison with entitlement thinking, fall short of capturing the fact that, in a socio-political and dynamic context, rights can be issued, altered and withdrawn from the holder of an entitlement, be it confirmed by documents or heralded by administrative decrees. The scientific domain of poverty-focused development research was introduced to the descriptive concept of entitlements by Nobel prize laureate Amartya Sen, who in his work about famines in Asia in the 20th century defined it as a set of alternative commodity bundles that a person can command in a society using the totality of rights and opportunities (in terms of self-reliance and legal access) that he or she faces. In his works, Sen stressed the fact that it is the legal, institutional entitlement that makes the difference between general availability of—in this case—food resources and access to them or famine on account of a lack of entitlements. In situations of scarcity of livelihood resources, especially in poor rural areas, entitlements granting access and withdrawal rights, as well as social resources make a difference for the security and vulnerability of people to external changes or stress.

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Equity Environmental flow The term environmental flow is used to describe a certain volume or discharge (volume per time unit) necessary to sustain ecosystems such as wetlands or the aquatic habitats of rivers and lakes. It should be noted here that the considerations of environmental flow regimes with a defined range between minimal and maximum flows and a seasonality to provide a ‘natural flow’ have meaning only for rivers that are dammed or otherwise impaired in their natural flow. A range of actions and initiatives, such as the Brisbane Declaration, aim to protect rivers from being degraded by the uniformity of flows throughout the year. Epistemic communities Epistemic communities are loose groupings of politicians, professionals, engineers, economists and other scientists that set agendas by the use of discourses. They shape perceptions about topics through assumptions, constructed knowledge and the use of their societal status. In relation to assumptions in particular, an epistemic community is characterized by the same convictions, beliefs and shared perceptions of how the world is and what it should be like, sharing their story lines. An example of a strong epistemic community is the loose coalition of water privatization advocates, who all refer to the idea of the efficiency forces of the market’s invisible hand to achieve the highest beneficial water utilization and management (e.g. the World Bank, the IMF, the WWC and the GWP). Diametric to this coalition, the epistemic community opposing the view that water markets and privatization are desirable consists of scientists, globalization critics, environmentalists and other civil society organizations that share a common conviction about the unjust, inequitable and environmentally dangerous tendencies of privatization and a related general scepticism about the ability of purely market-based institutions to avoid the adverse effects of resource overuse. However, among the critics there is a strong conviction that in the end it is about adequate institutions to govern the resources—with a strong foundation in and acceptance of civil society and public control mechanisms. The epistemology underlying each party’s arguments is inspired by different philosophies and perceptions; their relative influence in the relevant arena— water privatization, in this case—also results from a world view shared with those (such as stakeholders, the public) that they address during discursive activities (story lines). Equity In contrast to the domain of economics (where equity is more related to economic values), in the water domain the word equity has strong connotations of fairness, justice and equality on account of the socio-political dimension of water rights, water access and control.

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The term is rather vague. In formal definitions it is often referred to as a situation in which nobody faces disadvantages and everyone receives equal treatment. This statement already reveals the high degree of interpretation one could apply, and the moral nature of values and perceptions towards what is fair, just and equitable. Equity is a matter of point of view, is relative in terms of the social, cultural and economic circumstances, and hence can never be universally applied; still, target definitions such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) can be interpreted as more generally acceptable values set to achieve equity on a global scale. However, in view of the lack of a definition about who exactly should be targeted, which criteria apply for the identification of action zones, and prior issues in relation to the aim of ‘halving the number of people not having adequate access to adequate water supply and sanitation’, the MDGs are also an example of the difficult social and scale issues. From the viewpoint of a citizen of a G8 country, the water and sanitation situation in many countries of the South is highly inequitable compared with her or his own circumstances, whereas people suffering from difficult access to drinking water in the Sahel might perceive the provision of improved sanitation to an urban slum as an unnecessary, luxurious enterprise. Thus, converting general equity considerations like the MDGs into on-the-ground action entails potential political friction. As a code of conduct or operational regime for development or intervention concerning water and the hydrologic cycle, equity is contested because of the interpretability of what the result of equitable interaction and participation should be, and because of the absence of acceptance in many contexts of the aim of ‘sharing equally’. Like justice, equity is thus a morally-based value. Claims about water equity as an end in itself are thus futile as long as they are not supported by several parties in a multi-stakeholder process and related to improvements and progress in adjoining issues; the latter being part of the larger problemshed and offering many, but potentially vague options, such as security, economic growth, health issues, etc. Four equity domains can be discerned. The intergenerational equity aspect being a main foundation of the sustainability concept, it addresses the availability of, and benefits derived from, water across generations. Gender equity is an important consideration in view of the disparities between the genders in effort and investments, access possibilities and the sharing of benefits derived from water use. Equity also has a spatial aspect, the creation of hydraulic artefacts by infrastructure such as dams or canals being an example of intervention where upstream–downstream dependencies are created. Equity’s main domain is that of social equity, which refers to the status of just and fair resource access and distribution among people—and ethnic groups—living in a given region. European Water Framework Directive The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) came into force in December 2000 and is seen as the most holistic, legally binding international water law

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Evapotranspiration in the world with a strong emphasis on ecology and water quality. The main objectives of the WFD are a) the prevention of further deterioration of water quality and the enhancement of its actual status; b) the promotion of sustainable use; c) the reduction of discharges of hazardous substances from point and nonpoint pollution sources into surface waters, and of the pollution of groundwater; and d) the mitigation of floods and droughts. The directive obliges all member states to initiate the planning processes with detailed action and implementation plans for the definition of river basins, and with comprehensive assessments of actual hydrological, water quality, and water management issues, and provides flexible procedures for member states who started the process late on account of their recent member status and the significant amount of research necessary to provide the data. Furthermore, the WFD obliges EU member states to define transboundary river basins and to make appropriate administrative arrangements. The full operationalization of the WFD is envisaged for 2012, and the quality targets are to be met by 2015; it will then replace all existing water-related directives, from inland and near-coast fisheries directives, through pollution directives, to drinking water regulations. Its methodological backbones for implementation are river basin planning, public participation and a common implementation strategy—added in 2002 on account of the complexity and interpretative difficulties—that guides all members on the way to full implementation. The WFD as an institution reflects the European situation of (in most states) temperate and humid climates, the existence and availability of water-related data, and an administrative, legal and juridical framework fit to monitor progress and to enforce implementation. Despite the framework’s provisions made for adaptation to its member states and the respective river basins’ particularities (according to the principle of subsidiarity and the IWRM principle of management decision-making on the lowest appropriate level). Its function as a role model for other world regions is thus restricted. Evapotranspiration The term is a combination of the two words evaporation and transpiration. The former describes the physical process of water vaporization into its gaseous phase resulting from the disequilibrium between the water vapour pressure (the air’s moisture content) and the water body or soil surface. Wind speed or higher temperatures increase the process. Transpiration is the biophysical process of water being transported from a plant’s root zone through its cells and leaves into the atmosphere; this also is driven by the differences in water vapour content between the atmosphere and the leaves (which need to open the stomata to permit photosynthetic respiration). The combined process is a major driver of the terrestrial part of the hydrologic cycle. In most cases, the term evapotranspiration is used because it is difficult to measure each process separately and because the issue of interest usually is the combined ‘loss’ of water from an irrigation system or ecosystem through plant growth.

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F First order water scarcity A distinction is made between first order water scarcity and second order water scarcity, with the objective of describing two different concepts of water scarcity. First order water scarcity is a concept used to designate strictly the shortage of water, where water supply does not meet water demand. It is uniquely focused on the quantity of available water resources and does not acknowledge the dynamics of adaptation. Flood A flood is a hydrologic concept. Floods occur where the capacity of the land surface and watercourses to drain excessive rainfalls is exceeded. The effect, flooding, usually has devastating effects for riparian communities. The impact of floods as a continuous threat is sometimes not considered in spatial planning, which allows vulnerable sectors (industries, urban residential areas) to settle in flood-prone regions. Traditional communities in tropical zones adapted to water level variations by using specific house construction methods or by settling on slightly elevated spots on a floodplain. Floods, besides their destructive effects, usually also have a positive side, namely, the delivery of fertile sediments that improve the availability of plant nutrients for agricultural crops—a reason why many cultures, despite the risks of flooding, settled in deltaic and floodplain areas. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) FAO, founded in 1945, is a specialized agency that focuses on the achievement of food security for all. FAO’s mandate is to raise levels of nutrition, improve agricultural productivity, better the lives of rural populations and contribute to the growth of the world economy. FAO, with its involvement in the achievement of food security and agricultural efficiency, is also interested in water resources preservation and management. Its major point of focus is logically the use of water in agriculture (which is criticized for being by far the biggest water consumer and also a major water-polluting sector).

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Freshwater FAO has a Land and Water Development division concerned with the development of technology, strategy and policy, and the provision of advisory and technical services to FAO members to ensure a more productive and efficient use of land and water resources, irrigation facilities and plant nutrients in order to meet present and future food and agriculture demands on a sustainable basis. Among other things, it provides tools and databases such as AQUASTAT, FAO’s information system on water and agriculture in all member states. As a specialized UN agency, it is part of the epistemic community defining policy directions for global agricultural water use. Food security Security in the availability of, and entitlement to, food and/or the capability to produce it, and the availability of production inputs for self-sufficiency are encompassed in the concept of food security. The absence of food security, the emergence of hunger or even the fear of starvation are facts for a considerable part of the earth’s population. Despite the clear connotations of the word security and its highlighting effects in the case of its absence during food crises or famine, the concept of food security is rather complex. Food security is the endeavour of several United Nations agencies, such as the World Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations or the United Nations Development Programme. The concept is different from food sovereignty, which denotes high resilience to global food price increases through self-sufficient food production on the local or national scale, with low reliance on international markets for the exchange of food. Fossil water—non-renewable groundwater resources Water infiltrated into an underground water body during an ancient geological period under climatic and morphological conditions that differ from the present, and stored since that time. These aquifers have a non-renewable character, and their detection and exploitation is a development of recent decades, as they can be deep lying or geologically sealed by a hard rock formation (incurring high drilling and installation costs) and necessitate high pumping energy inputs when there are long distances between the earth’s surface and the pump level. Fossil water is a resource to use carefully; extracting it always constitutes groundwater mining, as the recharge component is absent. Freshwater Natural water resources with low levels of salt concentration and/or pollutants of any origin. A widely used threshold value to distinguish freshwater from other sources (saline water, or wastewater in some cases) is less

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than 0.5 parts of salts per thousand. Below this threshold, water is generally considered as suitable for withdrawal and treatment to produce potable water. It is estimated that the total volume of water in the earth’s hydrosphere is more or less 1,400m. cu km, but freshwater only represents 2.5% of that amount, the rest being saline water. Out of this small percentage of freshwater, only a small amount is readily available as surface water (see entry on groundwater for more figures).

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G Gender As opposed to the narrow meaning of gender to distinguish male from female biologically, the concept of gender in the fields of sustainable development, equity, women’s rights and natural resource management is used to describe relations of power between members of households and communities. Women and men are positioned in their families (both in the Western, European nucleus type and in the traditional family forms found in cultures of other continents) relative to their socially constructed ideas, identities, assumptions, abilities, attitudes, behaviour patterns and practices concerning access to and control over resources determining their livelihoods. Ideologies and practices are constituted by and are used to constitute related social constructs, such as membership status in certain religious communities, or a caste, or ethnicity and race, or a social class. The development community, concerned about the role of women and paying special attention to the societal institutions governing women and children’s fate, has provided insight into the role of gender relations within and between households, has raised the acknowledgement of gender relations, and has increased understanding about the key role these relations play in determining issues such as poverty, food security, health and social security. While shedding light on the adverse and diverse effects that human intervention in local communities, the ecosystems and livelihood resources can have on the role of women, the development community calls for gender-sensitive approaches in development intervention. The necessity to understand the implications of a ‘gendered’ social network around water management, whether on a national, regional, local or household level, becomes clear when one thinks about the role of water as a productive input for agricultural activities (which employ and provide resources for subsistence for the majority of the world’s population) and the traditional gender division concerning water (fetching drinking water, caring for domestic and hygiene issues by women; irrigation water management conducted mainly by men) prevalent in many countries. Access to common pool resources like water and land is vital for the prospects of weaker members of communities and households, often women. Hence, water management intervention, such as the socio-technical reorganization of spatial and natural realities in irrigation schemes or the volumetric

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pricing of water during water service privatization, has an impact on the rights and responsibilities of women; the outcome of this intervention is often complex, and acknowledgement, equal participation and integration in planning and management should cater for the needs of weaker community members. On the international scale, the Gender and Water Alliance advocates the mainstreaming of the gender approach, that is, the inclusion of gender-study informed insights into all policies and official institutions, development intervention, and education and information programmes, as well as the equity of women and men. Global Environment Facility (GEF) The GEF was founded between 1989 and 1991 as a response to the request by the developing nations (represented by the G77) and the insight of some G7 governments increasingly to fund ‘green projects’ under the auspices of the World Bank. A precondition for funding eligibility for countries taking loans is the signing of major United Nations conventions on biodiversity, climate change, persistent organic pollutants and other domains of environmental conservation. Today, it is the world’s largest government-backed fund devoting money to projects dealing with environmental protection. The GEF has been criticized for its conservative, economic approach to evaluating environmental benefits and for the supposed political interests of the initial European funding countries to a) deflect beforehand far-reaching demands from the developing countries towards the developed world with regard to a decentralized funding mechanism, and b) influence developing countries’ natural resource management practices and governance frameworks in favour of the traditional World Bank approaches (privatization and cost efficiency, for example). After restructuring, the representation basis grew considerably, to the extent that today 179 governments participate in the GEF. However, there is continuous criticism of the fact that it operates according to World Bank policies in respect of lending (and hence debt accumulation, tied to wider obligations such as structural adjustment) and co-operation mainly with governments (rather than civil society groups, which often have different conceptions about successful environmental protection practices) through its implementing agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme or the World Bank. Its activities in the water sector centre on issues of security and participation. Through capacity building, scientific data assessment and multi-stakeholder platform-based visioning processes, it has achieved considerable success, e.g. in the Danube basin. Global Water Partnership (GWP) The Global Water Partnership was created in 1996, the same year as the World Water Council, by the World Bank, the UNDP and the Swedish

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Green Cross International International Development Agency. The idea was to propose a working partnership between all internationally organized actors involved in water issues. It is officially committed to the Dublin Principles and the principles agreed upon by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, comprising concepts such as sustainable development, integrated water resources management and the classification of water as an economic good. The latter point in particular makes certain authors state that the Global Water Partnership, like the World Water Council, is a tool of the World Bank and of private companies, defending their vision of water management where water is an economic good, and thus privileging privatization. The GWP delivered the From Vision to Action Report at the Second World Water Forum in The Hague, Netherlands in 2000. It was intended to complete the World Water Council’s global vision of water management, delivered in the World Water Vision report at the same international event. These organizations, along with the World Commission on Water for the 21st Century, offer a very complete and coherent vision of what water management should be. The GWP’s technical committee (TEC) publishes practical guidelines and position papers on hydropolitical issues; the organization provides widely recognized, science-based story lines in the form of documents and reports that foster recognition among the global, solution-oriented epistemic community of IWRM, which calls for effective water governance and political co-ordination of water issues. These organizations are very close to each other in terms of thinking, but also in practical terms. Different personalities linked to the World Bank are involved to varying degrees in one or more of these organizations. Links also exist between these organizations and private companies, which may be affiliated members of the organizations or have some of their former or current members holding an important position in them. The French company, Suez, is a particularly good example of these existing connections. Green Cross International The Switzerland-based international non-governmental organization (NGO), Green Cross International, has its origins in the post-Earth Summit (see United Nations Conference on Environment and Development) endeavour— initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, the former president of the Soviet Union—to establish a global network of environment-related ‘emergency interventions’. With its main focus on the legacy of cold war military contamination and the responsible destruction of stockpiles of persisting pollutants, the organization aims to foster a change in values and approaches in mankind’s relation with nature. In its focus on water, Green Cross International advocates access to drinking water and sanitation services, transboundary co-operation, and conflict resolution. Because of its international and political focus, the organization can be seen as a major lobbying force, campaigning for the recognition of a right to water (see human rights), the ratification of the UN Convention on the

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Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses 1997 and the prevention of water-related conflicts through secure access. Green revolution The term is used to describe the vast increase in agricultural productivity from the 1950s to the 1970s, foremost in tropical and subtropical climates. The green revolution was based on improved plant breeding and the increased utilization of agricultural inputs, pesticides, fertilizer and irrigation water. In Asian rice production systems in particular, the yields significantly increased on account of the double- or triple-crop patterns made possible by short-duration varieties and the drastic input increase. Besides rice (Oryza sativa L.), research and promotion focused on the other two major food staples, maize (Zea mays L.) and wheat (Triticum durum and aestivum). The proponents of the green revolution glorified the modernization of agricultural production in the countries of the South as proof of the falsity of the Malthusian theory of the disparity between the exponential growth of the human population and the merely linear increases in food production that, according to Malthus, would necessarily lead to shortages in food supply and famines. Critics of the green revolution underline the one-track view of the adverse—but on a macro-level positive— impact of development. The increased input demands for the new cropping systems created a new type of dependency on the input markets (that sometimes only functioned weakly) for pesticides and fertilizers, making small farmers susceptible to market price fluctuations; the same holds true for the output markets, which as a result of the increased supply reacted with a lower producer price per unit of output. Moreover, the impact of the agro-ecologically detrimental overuse of inputs left its marks on the environment: water systems faced overabstraction as a result of the increased development of irrigation infrastructure; drainage discharge carried agricultural residues, and polluted groundwater and surface water bodies; chemical-related diseases jeopardized the livelihoods of rural families; and the generally high biodiversity drastically dropped in highintensity cropping areas. Despite the criticism of the green revolution and the need for a differentiated view on its positive and negative aspects, prominent international leaders called for a new, ‘blue revolution’ to create awareness of the pressing need for secure access to adequate and safe drinking water and sanitation services, as well as to put pressure on the agricultural irrigation sector to increase water productivity in crop production in order to free valuable water resources for other purposes. During the development of the blue revolution discourse initiated by the former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, the pre-existing slogan ‘more crop per drop’ was introduced to a wider public to summarize the objective of water savings in agricultural production. Green water Green water is the water that has infiltrated into the soil from precipitation, and is stored by the soil matrix until it either percolates to deeper-lying strata,

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Groundwater directly becoming blue water or, after being evaporated by plant leaves, rejoins the hydrologic cycle. It can usefully be considered as a large natural storage of water, similar to groundwater, but accessible to natural and agricultural vegetation only. Volumes of green water are notoriously difficult to quantify, although they clearly exceed volumes in man-made reservoirs. Human appropriation of green water is almost in an order of magnitude greater than the appropriation of blue water. Green water storage and the green water fluxes between soil, vegetation and the atmosphere depend largely on land cover and management. Effective land management can improve the agricultural productivity of green water (mostly by reducing unproductive losses), and this can contribute significantly to alleviating water scarcity in cases where renewable blue water is already fully exploited. However, there is continued discussion about what can be considered an unproductive loss, as, in the river basin approach, there is no actual loss, but rather shifts in utilization: evaporation by natural vegetation from an agricultural productivity perspective is often considered as a lost fraction of scarce water resources, and little attention is paid to ecosystem needs and the related environmental services provided in relation to water storage and/or quality aspects. Grey water The term grey water is used to designate domestic wastewater, excluding water from toilets. Usually treated before being released to water bodies, it can be reused for a range of purposes such as irrigation—but only after thorough consideration of potential risks for human health, the ecosystem and the quality of water in adjoining water resources. Groundwater Blue water contained in aquifers below the earth’s surface is known as groundwater. It can be distinguished from soil moisture or green water as it is not usually available for most annual plant species and has to be lifted by wheels, buckets or pumps. The retarding characteristics of aquifers make groundwater resources a readily available source for human uses in many areas of the world. Constituting reliable storage of water over longer time periods than in the case of surface flow. When evaluating world water availability, most authors and researchers refer to the framework of UNESCO’s International Hydrological Programme. It is stated that of the total freshwater (i.e. the terrestrial fraction of the hydrologic cycle, not including water in the atmosphere) in the world, approximately 69% is captured by glaciers and in permanent snow cover, 30% comes from groundwater, and less than 1% is contained in lakes and rivers. Groundwater is considered as a stable resource on account of the optimum storage place offered by aquifers. It is obvious that groundwater is a resource

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of major importance and that it needs special attention in its use, management, share between users and protection. Groundwater played a major role in the development of highly productive and intensive cropping systems during the green revolution, foremost in Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Although groundwater is often safer for consumption than surface water resources, the purifying effects of the aquifer’s sediments are sometimes overestimated, or the sediments themselves contain soluble salts in concentrations too high for human consumption and heavy metals hazardous for humans. Groundwater mining This occurs when an aquifer is overused, the withdrawal of water exceeding the aquifer’s recharge. If the situation becomes permanent, it will result in the decline of the water table. The resulting risks are increased pumping depths (incurring higher energy costs), the intrusion of salt water and, finally, the exhaustion of the aquifer.

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H Helsinki Rules Adopted by the International Law Association in Helsinki, Finland in 1966, the Helsinki Rules constitute a milestone in the development of international water law. In six chapters, the principles mentioned under five different articles are developed. The development of these principles also put older doctrines (developed as universal theories by riparians in a specific upstream or downstream situation) into a river basin perspective. For example, the so-called Harmon doctrine, emphasizing a nation’s absolute territorial sovereignty, states that a nation is free to use waters flowing through its territory without further account of what happens downstream. Diametric to that, the absolute integrity of the river theory claims that upper riparians should not do anything to diminish the natural river flow in quantity or quality. It may be seen that, with two contradictory principles proclaimed by the upstream and downstream parties, agreements and solutions are hard to achieve. The core principles of the Helsinki Rules address this paramount question by the ‘reasonable use’ and the ‘no harm’ principles, opening the discussion space for considerations of benefit-sharing and co-operation. The ‘reasonable use’ principle considers a range of relevant factors that need to be taken into consideration to determine whether a use is reasonable—among others (but not limited to) the hydrology and climate in the river basin, existing uses, comparative social and economic costs, population needs and the avoidance of waste of water. The ‘no harm’ principle obliges nations to take all possible preventive measures for the avoidance of harm. In the event of harm being caused to another riparian nation, the causing party has to take appropriate measures after consulting the affected nation. It should be noted here that there is no general definition of what can be considered as harm caused by water withdrawal; the concept of harm is vague and thus depends largely on the perceptions of involved stakeholders. Nevertheless, within the Helsinki Rules clear priority is given to the principle of equitable utilisation. Only, in Article 5 (Paragraph II) which outlines the relevant factors determining equity it is made reference to the noharm principle. Paragraph II: 11 states “The degree to which the needs of a basin State may be satisfied, without causing substantial injury to a co-basin State”.

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Human rights The international community, mainly represented in international organizations like the United Nations General Assembly, recognizes a diverse set of moral values as basic human rights that can not be withheld from anyone, and have to be provided by the national and international legal, administrative or socio-economic system. Human rights reflect western liberal individualism, which does not sit well with the ideology of socialism and group- or community-based cultures, and thus represent lip-service on the part of the international community, dominated by western convictions; their conversion into an operationalized entitlement remains the task of a more narrowly defined cultural community. What is generally considered as a human right evolved from the first declaration of human rights in 1948, where basic values such as the inviolability of the integrity of human health, social and economic security, and food needs are the main issues. These represent civil and political rights that require the state to refrain from certain actions, such as detention without trial. Later on, the rights of women and children, and those concerning political participation, and the right to development were explicitly mentioned in the subsequent covenants and declarations. These socio-economic rights require action to be taken to guarantee a right (such as the right to work), and this partly explains why they were agreed upon later: they are much harder to guarantee and enforce. Principles such as the right to food and adequate health and well-being all entail sufficient quantities and qualities of water. However, there is no international declaration explicitly mentioning water access as a human right, although some, such as the Mar del Plata action plan (see international conferences), the Dublin Principles, Agenda 21 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development, acknowledge, to varying degrees, the vital and central role that water plays for human development or well-being. A central question is the discussion about whether rights to water should or could be in the form of a legally guaranteed minimum resource access expressed in terms of a fixed volume and water quality threshold. The implicit mentioning of water in principles such as the human right to health, basic food requirements and development, for instance, carry an inherent obligation to provide the necessary services and see water as a right. The difficulty here is to define a just and equitable amount: should one have an actionable right to water only for personal needs, or has a human also right to utilize water (in its function as a production input for almost all primary economic activities) for productive purposes—and in what environments does this still make sense, given the fact that, from an efficiency perspective, crop production in arid (and hot) environments is more wasteful than in less arid, temperate climates? Proponents of the rights-based approach to water for everyone (as opposed to the needs-based approach, following Marx’s slogan ‘from each according

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Hydraulic mission to his ability, to each according to his need’) underline the possible impact of a universal human right to water: besides improving the livelihoods of billions of poor people and thus helping to meet the Johannesburg Millennium Development Goals, the recognition of the central and vital role of water would also help to strengthen the implementation of water quality legislation and end the ignorance of the fact that wise environmental practices also have a feedback effect on water in natural ecosystems of which humans ultimately make use. Another important aspect is that of equitable access, and distribution of the right to access and control regional water resources. Equity has social, spatial and temporal aspects, the latter addressing the intergenerational sustainable development concept not to overexploit resources, in order to safeguard the wellbeing of coming generations. On the spatial level, equity considerations in the context of a human right to water stress the importance of adequate supply to all regions, including remote villages as well as urban slums. The social aspect is the core consideration in the context of a human right to water: a just and equal distribution of water to all inhabitants (regardless of ethnicity, social status or gender) is seen by most people as a moral duty for the ruling powers as well as for local communities. Despite the immense burden that this would imply for some states, where the development of infrastructure for water management is comparatively limited (and where the international community would be obliged to help because of international obligations), securing the human right to water is a necessary step in order to fulfil international commitments to development and security as stated in the Millennium Development Goals. Hydraulic mission Through the development of water infrastructure for conveyance, storage and irrigation, physical artefacts are created (usually by hydrocracies) that can be used as a legitimizing factor for the right to a territory and its utilization, controlled by the state. This is known as the first paradigm of the hydraulic mission. The second is that of industrial modernity: rooted in the belief in engineering capacities, in the need and capacity to invest, and in ‘enlightened’ science, this modernity paradigm is exercised effectively in the agricultural sector and thus also in the technical aspects of irrigation, with a resultant tremendous expansion of the irrigated area in many parts of the world. By the mid 20th century, this part of the hydraulic mission was manifest in both the East and the West, and was readily exportable to the South, forming an integral part of the green revolution. The two paradigms together result in strong linkages of interests between engineers and the ruling powers, creating a positive hydropolitical complex (including those two parties) by the alteration of the socio-technical environment (withdrawal of access and control for some and appropriation for others), and social realities in areas and issues that before were difficult to control.

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Hydrocracies Hydrocracies are key factors in water management; they consist of technically and economically oriented engineers, technical employees of state or federal departments, ministries, and state secretaries concerned with water issues. Inspired by insights from political economy, a hydrocracy can be depicted as the bureaucratic organizational framework that not only operates as a neutral control body, but that is also driven by its own interests for employment, funds or bribery. Usually, the members of hydrocracies form an important part of the epistemic communities setting water agendas by the use of discourses and political influence. Hydro-hegemony The word hegemony derives from the Greek hegesthai, meaning ‘to lead’. It is used in the context of international relations and is understood as authoritative leadership imposed by one powerful actor, such as a state, over a weaker one. In the water domain, hydro-hegemony usually describes hegemonic interaction over transboundary water resources in river basins shared by two or more nations; however, it can be utilized for the exertion of power and control within a state as well. Control by the basin hegemony may be exerted in the form of resource capture or containment of challenges (through exploitation of infrastructure development and potential) of riparian position, and of power asymmetries. A number of tactics may be used to attain and maintain control of transboundary rivers, all of them relying on various forms of power. Perceptions of transboundary allocations may be shaped, for instance, through the sanctioning of discourses (see sanctioned discourse) relating to asymmetries in distribution at the national and international level. Other identified tactics include the agreement of skewed treaties and more brutish forms of coercion. Manifestations of hydro-hegemony range from coercive co-operation with an inequitable distribution of benefits derived from resource use, to domination. The ongoing competitive struggles over control of scarce resources are shaped by the hydro hegemonic apparatus, with outcomes reflecting the favourable position of the most powerful actor, and possibly of less powerful actors, if aligned with power resources such as international political and financial assistance. Hydrologic cycle (see illustration) Water is a very dynamic element that is in perpetual motion. The hydrologic cycle is a complex, dynamic global process whereby water circulates through different means (infiltration, precipitation, evapotranspiration, runoff) in different states (liquid, solid, gaseous) between oceans, land and atmosphere.

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Figure H.1 Hydrologic cycle

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The climatic variation in a given geographic zone adds to the complexity caused by the interrelations of transport form and physical state; extreme variations in precipitation intensity, frequency and volumes in many regions of the world make the estimation of forthcoming water availability a difficult enterprise. Each year, 511,800 cu km of water evaporates from the oceans, rivers and lakes. The rest, 65,200 cu km, evapotranspirates from land and plants. Thus, each year, 577,000 cu km of water is recycled through the global hydrologic cycle, representing only 0.04% of the water (in all its forms) present on the globe. The different forms of water in the hydrosphere are fully replenished during the hydrologic cycle, but at very different rates. The complete recharge of oceanic waters takes about 2,500 years, for permafrost and ice some 10,000 years, and for deep groundwater and mountainous glaciers some 1,500 years. Water storage in lakes is fully replenished over about 17 years and in rivers in about 16 days. These figures are based on assessments of the world’s water systems. However, recharge and complete turnover rates are subject to climatic changes; the resilience of the world’s water resources as a set of ecosystem services influencing availability and security are subject to climatic variations and human interventions. Hydropolitical complexes Given that water, besides its characteristic of being a vital resource for all living processes, represents a political issue (as a resource for security or development), it is also interlinked with other topics from the political domain. Acknowledgement of this fact sheds light on the sometimes complex issue-linkages of water with other domains such as development, environment, security and national economics, very often straddling the political national boundaries to the dynamic water problemshed. Hydropolitics is thus part of a complex that is most apparent in transboundary disputes, touching upon or even violating national security issues. The concept of virtual water, and its often silent application, is a conceptual tool (see Concepts entry) to understand the complexity of water politics: as water is an important resource for agricultural production in many arid and semi-arid economies, there is a need for progressive development policies to free the resource for more economically efficient and beneficial uses, a prime example being to increase food imports so as to safeguard water availability for non-agricultural sectors. On the other hand, giving up the (political) commitment to food self-sufficiency would, in many countries, according to the opponents of the virtual water prescriptions, jeopardize the prospects of the majority of agriculture-dependent families and weaken a nation’s basis for negotiation in discourses about transboundary water resources, since claims to water are often made on the basis of high agricultural water requirements, thereby attempting to secure the highest possible water share under the veil of commitment to equitable water accessibility.

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Hydrosecurity Hydropolitics There are numerous definitions of the term politics. It is important to acknowledge that, in general, politics encompasses more than just the act of lawmaking and parliamentary negotiation. As opposed to legal, administrative and bureaucratic processes, there is no underlying set of rules for the procedure of politicking. It is basically an open arena for all parties (but this does not mean that all stakeholders are involved, nor that those who are involved in a political process are crowned with success!) having an interest in an issue, be it only secondary, to advocate on behalf of those interests without necessarily being assigned a particular responsibility. Whereas many people equate hydropolitics with the political complexes around transboundary water resources at the political-administrative level between federal states and nations (focusing on agreements, allocation, conflict and co-operation), others perceive all aspects of water management, on the local and international level, as being political. Their understanding is inspired by the fact that water abundance (floods), water scarcity and reallocation all affect people’s livelihoods, and contestations about water are never just private, but are public because of the differing interests and representation of groups, the determination of authoritative allocation being a characteristic of political processes. Hydropower Hydropower describes electrical energy generated by the potential energy of water stored in dams and converted into electricity by turbines. It constitutes a non-consumptive use. Most modern-day dams do not only store water, the volumes released are usually used to generate energy as well. Thus, the infrastructure serves several purposes, linking water allocation for, e.g., irrigated agriculture with the issues of valuable hydropower, especially where other, fossil energy is not available or more expensive. Depending on the climatic situation, frictions can occur between agricultural stakeholders who need water in the summer season, whereas state policies sometimes favour the generation of electricity. On the other hand, win-win situations are possible, where the timing, volumes and frequency of water releases match with two or more parties’ objectives. In recent years, the idea of improving and upgrading ancient water wheels that were traditionally used for grain milling has resulted in the realization of socalled micro-hydels. These mini hydropower devices can provide electricity for simple purposes, such as light or radios, and do not necessitate barrages or blocking structures, as they are installed at places where water already falls freely, as in drop structures of irrigation systems, or mountain creeks. Hydrosecurity The sense of security or the necessity to sustain it in respect of water is a crucial issue, both for water users in local contexts and for a nation’s prospects in

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transboundary river basins. It implies the sustained supply of water resources and also carries the notion of ‘planning security’ for future developments. It is crucial because of the important function of water in every country’s activities, be there water scarcity, abundance or quality considerations. Five different security sectors can be distinguished: political, military, economic, environmental and societal. To secure water control, access and influence, stakeholders make use of intervention in all five sectors by different tools such as discourses or military force, usually with an increase in strategic thinking from the local to the international level. The sense of security (in its ontological sense of feeling safe) and its potential or anticipated loss is thus a main political driver (see securitization) causing drastic behaviour that might be perceived as irrational by outsiders.

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I Infrastructure Characterizes the entirety of physical artefacts introduced into nature by man in order to access, regulate, impede, protect, store or improve the environment for his purposes. Infrastructure permits services such as transport on roads, energy supply in grids and, of course, the manipulation of natural water flows. The operation and maintenance of infrastructure requires specific tasks that necessitate a) continued investment in maintenance works and b) knowledge about the modes of operation at the socio-technical interface between the person manipulating devices and structures and the artefact itself. The vital role that infrastructure plays in controlling environmental processes and in containing nature’s seasonally occurring adverse effects is sometimes overlooked. If this happens, then the infrastructure deteriorates, and after a certain period of time does not fit its initial purposes anymore; sometimes, this is simply an economic fact, e.g. when, after the privatization of costly and immense concrete water conveyance structures in irrigation systems, the water user association is not able to cover the maintenance costs. Often the deterioration of infrastructure is the result of a lack of attention to the provision of maintenance services, such as clearly elaborated responsibilities or a defined level of both the service and the desired state of the respective infrastructure. Infrastructure development Describes, in its most common meaning, the design and construction of devices, grids or other physical structures and the physical realization of (expansion) plans to meet the objectives of infrastructure, and the people deriving benefits (see development) from the installation of a network (roads, energy grids, canals or sewer pipes). In its second, less utilized meaning, the expression embraces the evolution of technical artefacts in the course of sociotechnical feedbacks between designers, techniques and users. In the water domain, there are numerous examples of this evolution, from primitive diversion and distribution dams and canals, through simple retention dams, to the modern-day combined use of immense dams to divert drinking water, provide storage and controlled release of irrigation water, manage floods, and generate hydropower.

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Infiltration Water precipitating from rain, snow or fog follows different pathways depending on climate and land-use type. Whereas a proportion of water, the runoff, flows away superficially, interception is the part that does not reach the ground, but evaporates directly from the intercepting plants. Infiltration (or percolation) accounts for the rest of the precipitation, causing the recharge of the soil matrix with water. This water feeds into both near-surface groundwater, which re-enters the surface after a short time span at springs or as tributaries to a water body, and deeper geological layers. Deeper infiltration recharges water bodies (far) below the earth’s surface and becomes groundwater in a saturated zone of the ground, an aquifer. Ingenuity see Adaptive capacity

Institutions An institution, according to new institutional economics, is defined as a set of rules, mechanisms and norms governing the processes and interactions between people and groups of people. As opposed to organizations, they are perceived as the principles and delineations that individuals, groups and organizations follow. They can be of both a formal and an informal nature, and are nested in the organizational and spatial realities as well as in the cultural and socio-economic context. There is a strong intersection between the ‘rules of the game’ inscribed in institutions and the more manifest, visible organizational reality: organizations are shaped by the rules and regulations, and again other bodies shape the institutional framework. In the management of natural resources and water management, institutions establish coercions, incentives and flows of information that at the same time restrict and permit access to water resources by water users and their organizations. Institutions, in their notion of practices being transferred into rules in use, persist because they are perceived as useful and grounded on commonly shared values and perceptions. The overlap between the concept of institution and organization stems from the idea of ‘institutionalized’ rules and values in organizations which, because of their ‘usefulness’ and correspondence with the values, necessary procedures and—social, political and cultural—norms become an ‘institution’. Integrated water resource management (IWRM) IWRM was developed as the water communities’ contribution to the global sustainability discussion, mainly based on the four Dublin Principles. Besides the four general guidelines, IWRM also suggests methodological approaches to achieve effective water management: participation in management processes;

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International conferences decentralized, subsidiary regulation; and the watershed as the appropriate management level are the promoters’ solutions for the looming water crisis that is already visible in water-scarce parts of the world. According to the Global Water Partnership, integrated water resource management is a process that promotes the co-ordinated development and management of water, land and related resources, in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems. Critics of the concept claim that the new approach does not differ significantly from former general blueprint recipes (with an engineering and development bias to keep on extending existing systems according to the traditional hydraulic mission) and that, despite the acknowledgement of the need for co-ordination of water development and stakeholder participation, IWRM fails to consider sufficiently its applicability in a concrete context. Furthermore, IWRM does not put enough emphasis on the fact that other issues may play a more important role (see hydropolitical complexes and problemshed), as water is politically contested, used and abused for political reasons, and negates the role of culture and traditions present in the rule-sets of many, e.g. indigenous, water users. One of the cornerstones of the principle—defining the river basin as the appropriate scale for effective management— has been criticized for its lack of proof as to the superiority of this approach compared to a conservative, administrative approach; others see the creation of river basin authorities and initiatives as a rescaling of centralization approaches. Internal renewable water resources Average annual flow produced within the boundaries of a country from endogenous precipitation. This notion is important in the assessment of water resources and may be used as an indicator of the overall status of the water resources of a region or country. International conferences On the international scene, since the 1970s, several, sometimes trailblazing high-level political and professional meetings have been held with water as the main focus (or as part of the living environment, as for the Rio conference). The United Nations conference on water held in 1977 in Mar del Plata, Argentina, can be seen as the event that, within the UN system, raised most water issues that were—and to a large extent still are—relevant, with the exception of the transboundary water resources topic. This first intergovernmental meeting substantially defined issues such as gender, equity, secure access to safe drinking water, the problem of degradation and pollution, and many more. Additionally, it raised the subsequently heatedly debated

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necessity to adopt appropriate financial policies to achieve efficient water use with a focus for social objectives. The Mar del Plata action plan resulted in a sustained, international process of water assessments and the International Decade for Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation from 1981 to 1990. The first, emblematic meeting of the 1990s was the UN Conference on Water and the Environment held in spring of 1992. Intended as the water communities’ preparatory meeting for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Rio conference) later that year, it hosted water professionals and government representatives from over 100 countries. The meeting’s essence was the Dublin Principles, the basis for debate, and the development of water management concepts such as IWRM. Another effort to set the international agenda and to point out priorities was the World Commission for Water for the 21st Century’s process of consultation among governments, professionals and civil actors. Organized outside the consensus-based UN system, it did not receive recognition on the intergovernmental scale; however, because of its independence from government funding, its statements critically raised the necessity of increased political will and behavioural shifts in the future to make way for more sustainable international water management, and it was the forerunner of organizations like the World Water Council and the Global Water Partnership. International Law Association (ILA) The Brussels-based International Law Association (ILA) is a professional NGO dealing with the development, study and clarification of international law. Although ILA does not have a legally binding say in international water issues, its contributions to the topic, such as the Helsinki Rules and other water-related rules, are widely recognized. These rules were used by the UN’s International Law Commission to draft the UN Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses. International Law Commission A special UN body created by the General Assembly in 1947 to develop international law and its codification. The Commission is composed of 34 members, elected by the General Assembly for five years, who serve in their individual capacity rather than as representatives of their governments. The Commission prepares drafts on topics of international law. These are transmitted to the General Assembly, which usually convenes an international conference of plenipotentiaries. The draft articles are used as a basis for negotiating a convention. The member states are free to join the convention. This was, for example, the process followed by the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses.

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International watercourse International Monetary Fund (IMF) The International Monetary Fund is an international financial institution having its origins in the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreements. These agreements also gave birth to a twin institution, the World Bank. The two institutions are part of the UN system and comprise 184 member countries. Their actions are complementary in order to achieve the improvement of global living standards. The IMF is more focused on global monetary co-operation, economic growth and securing financial stability. Therefore the IMF delivers economic advice and technical assistance, but also loans in order to solve nations’ liquidity problems. Like the World Bank, the IMF, through its lending policies to states (though not for concrete projects), requests that the borrowing nations undertake neo-liberal reforms in the public sector, of which the water sector is often a prominent victim on account of its capital-intensive operation and maintenance. International rivers This US-based non-governmental and non-profit organization is an important supporting body for civil society movements (particularly in the South) opposing water resource development plans and water management practices by governments or international donors. Through campaigning, education, research and advocacy, it aims to protect river basins in their integral function as ecosystems, and to support deprived populations in their fight against resettlement in the course of dam construction and in coming up with alternative, environmentally and socially sound alternatives to meet energy needs and to achieve flood protection. International watercourse The 1997 UN Convention on International Watercourses defines a watercourse as a system of surface waters and groundwaters constituting a unitary whole by virtue of their physical relationship and normally flowing into a common terminus. An international watercourse is described in Article 2 of the convention as a watercourse, parts of which are situated in different states. Although this definition seems synonymous with the term international river, it is much broader and also comprises groundwater. The Convention’s definition of a watercourse recognizes that most freshwater is underground and that there is a relation between surface and groundwater. However, it excludes groundwater that is not connected to the surface, i.e. confined aquifers, from its scope, and does not emphasize the crucial relationship between surface and underground waters in the management of water resources to the same extent as do the Seoul Rules, the Berlin Rules or the Bellagio Draft Treaty.

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The term international watercourse used in the UN Convention is comparable to the definition of international drainage basin in the 1966 Helsinki Rules. International water law The role of international water law is two-fold. Under the substantive rules, the riparian states’ rights to the benefits derived from a water source are determined, and procedural rules establish the necessary codes of conduct for development and for dealing with potential conflicts about the water resource. Because of the increasing pressures on the world’s water resources, the regulation of transboundary water resource control is becoming more and more crucial, and the clarification and weighting of different norms and hydropolitical doctrines is paramount for successful conflict avoidance and resolution, as well as for sustainable co-operation. International water law can have three different sources: international customary law, international treaties (agreements and treaties) and decisions of international courts. The International Law Association (ILA) brought forward important principles for the development of contextualized international water law; the most important step was the development of the Helsinki Rules in 1966 (mainly general considerations about surface waters) and subsequent principles dealing with the peculiarities of groundwater in the Seoul Rules (1986) and Berlin Rules (2004). International customary law is mainly characterized by the absence of formal agreements on transboundary co-operation. In contrast, international treaties have a mutually agreed upon legal foundation; they can be of bilateral or multilateral origin, depending on the number of riparians involved, or have a global character like the UN Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (1997). The latter is the most universal legal document at present, elaborated by the UN’s International Law Commission over more than thirty years and drawing largely from the principles developed in the Helsinki Rules. There are, besides this universal set of rules, more than 3,000 local bilateral or multilateral agreements regulating international water issues. One speaks of ‘codified’ law when, as opposed to customary rules, the principles and practices are written down in a treaty, agreement or contract and thus also constitute a juridical issue, compliance with which can be claimed at, e.g., the International Court of Justice. International Water Management Institute (IWMI) The International Water Management Institute (formerly International Irrigation Management Institute) is part of the non-profit Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR, see www.cgiar.org) network of research institutions dealing with agricultural and rural development. With headquarters in Sri Lanka, IWMI today has six regional offices in Asia and

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Irrigation Africa and is an important scientific hub for agricultural water management research. From the beginning of its formal operations in 1985, its scope and work have evolved from pure irrigation management to an integrated research approach, comprising the four domains: water availability and access; productive water use; water quality, health and environment, and water and society. Intrusion of saltwater The intrusion of salt water is a phenomenon of aquifers that suffer from groundwater mining. Coastal groundwater bodies carrying freshwater constitute a natural barrier against saltwater from the sea. Once overexploitation takes place to a degree where the level of the water table is lower than, or the hydraulic pressure is insufficient compared with, the sea, saltwater will flow into the freshwater aquifer and thereby cause saline groundwater. Saltwater intrusion as a result of human extraction of water is a sign of serious mismanagement and constitutes a major threat for the ecological and social viability of often highly populated coastal zones. IRC The Netherlands-based IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre has been working in the sector of water supply and sanitation for more than 40 years. Its mission is the sharing and provision of information, knowledge and expertise for the strongly development-related topics of water supply, sanitation and health (see also Millennium Development Goals). The autonomous foundation aims to assist in finding appropriate solutions for water-related health issues all over the world, foremost in developing countries. Irrigation The term in its technical meaning is defined as the conveyance and application of water to the soil’s root zone in order to provide land users with the necessary water resources to safeguard or improve the yield of agricultural crops, for landscape uses in parks or on golf courses. A broader definition of irrigation that corresponds to the integrated manner in which water management is being treated today would characterize irrigation as a human intervention in the hydrologic cycle that manipulates the availability of water for the production of crops in time and space. The term human intervention highlights the central role of social actors in this domain and indicates the political nature of manipulation and availability. Many people see irrigation as the solution for rural development problems in semi-arid zones, while during the last 30 years research has shown that a) the effects of allocation of water by infrastructure can have negative social (see socio-technical) and environmental impacts and b) that the single provision of a productive input does not necessarily improve rural livelihoods.

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Irrigation management transfer (IMT) IMT is the politically motivated process of restructuring irrigation-related institutional set-ups in irrigation schemes or even on the national level. IMT evolved out of participatory irrigation management, which only targeted the lower level (tertiary irrigation scheme level, as opposed to the primary—main canal—and secondary distributaries, crucial for water delivery to individual farmers’ plots) of irrigation systems and focused on maintenance contribution without increased control, either in the larger system or on the tertiary level. IMT comprises the increased influence and responsibility of local water users, their organization in water user associations (WUAs) and therefore the presumed increase in accountability of the water service organizations to their WUA clients. During the IMT process, irrigation departments are usually split up (separating the construction, financial and operational units) and transformed into entities responsible for operation and maintenance only, both on the national level and in lower administrative units. Besides the need for increased accountability and efficiency, in many countries the process is initiated by the demand for institutional reforms and the call for privatization of public services by international donors such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. IMT’s success varies within and between different countries, mainly on account of radical, blueprint institutional rearrangements or the considerable opposition and interference in the process by the existing hydrocracies. Other factors for the success of IMT are the initial state of infrastructure (whether completely deteriorated or still easy to rehabilitate) and the economic profitability of the farming enterprise (market-oriented production decided by individual farmers or subsistence farming of mainly food staples). The role of institutions in local IMT contexts is crucial, as they have to correspond to the present infrastructure, linkages between water rights and land right reforms (e.g. land redistribution) and the objectives of the transfer process. Increased profitability of land resources, poverty reduction or equitable resource access are objectives that necessitate detailed, well-contextualized approaches much more than just the modernization of infrastructure. Irrigation schools Also known as irrigation approaches, irrigation schools originate from the colonial powers that used to rule in southern, semi-arid and tropical countries and produced agricultural goods for their national economy. In order to realize the colonial objectives, engineers and irrigation managers came up with very different solutions to respond to the special colonialist aims and to shape the social and physical environments. The concept is mainly absent in places or countries, where irrigation management evolved from ancient linkages of power with the rule over water access without major colonial influences. In previously colonized areas three schools can be distinguished: the British, the Dutch and the French.

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Irrigation and Water Engineering Group Criteria that distinguish one school from another include the structures used to control water flows and the related (institutional) mechanisms for the colonial rulers to manage and control them. The British irrigation engineers found themselves in a situation where most rivers (Ganges and Indus in former British India) carried high sediment loads that had to be conveyed as far as the last outlet to avoid siltation and subsequent blockage, overtopping and canal destruction. The British school is characterized by structures that require little operation. This irrigation philosophy is also known as continuous flow with proportional water division. Under a protective irrigation system, the water flow is spread over as large an area as possible to provide supplementary irrigation to prevent famines; here the maximization of land productivity is not the main concern. Nevertheless, in British colonies throughout the world there were also highly productive irrigation systems in place. In contrast to that, the French school, responsible for the introduction of irrigation infrastructure along the almost sediment-free rivers of northern and western Africa, had different objectives and thus different technical responses. The structures had a higher management demand for conveyance and irrigation, while at the same time the objective was to secure high productivity of cotton and other plantations. Additionally, irrigation development was used as a method to settle French farmers in those parts of the colonies where the native population was small in numbers. In order to attract settlement by French people, the reliability of water availability had to be comparatively much higher than in British India. The system’s philosophy can be classified as an on-request system with downstream control in the canal system. The Dutch school is characterized by structures that allowed the preferential allocation of water along the commands. Main attention was given to the regulation of water. For instance, the Romijn weir is an inlet sluice controlling the amount of water from the canal to farm level. As in the case of Indonesia (humid tropics), on the larger scale the canal infrastructure had to be fit to withstand frequent flash floods carrying high sediment loads as a result of the geological and topographical conditions. Here, the focus was very much on sediment transport and canal design, establishing flow rates large enough to prevent silting and small enough to avoid erosion. The main problem was the stability of head-works. The drainage problem was incorporated in the distribution structures. In Java, the Dutch constructed a large number of different structures (weirs, canals, aqueducts, reservoirs, etc.) to improve rice and sugar production. As in the case of the French school, the Dutch also focused on high productivity. Irrigation and Water Engineering Group The chairgroup of Irrigation and Water Engineering (IWE) of the University of Wageningen, The Netherlands, is a research body working on issues of water management, water governance and questions about equity, power,

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gender and participation, and the social effects of the latter issues from a multidisciplinary research perspective. Initially an engineering school for hydraulic engineers in the Dutch colonies, over the decades it developed into a differentiated and cross-cutting research group that today engages in a wide scope of research and education relating to the socio-technical interfaces between people and their technical, social and natural environment, as well as the political processes around water policy formulation and the realization that water is a politically contested resource.

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J Justice Giving a general definition of the concept of justice is a difficult enterprise. In the water context, justice is often equated with egality, equality, equity, fairness and participation in decision-making. These, in turn, are based on the ethical, religious, cultural and social morals (or values) of a community or a nation (for the latter, the values and basic principles may be found in the constitution). From the above it becomes clear that the perception about what is just or unjust is strongly linked to traditions, cultural ethics and a community logic; the understanding and outcomes of justice in different contexts thus vary over a wide range. Justice in relation to water is understood as the equitable and secure access to water resources and includes the possibility of making claims that are treated in a fair manner by the legitimate authority (a court, a local administrative body, etc.). The realization of water justice is complex as it has many different domains where just or unjust practices can occur, the most crucial being water allocation and distribution, and decision-making, with all the specific tools (property rights to water, the socio-technical realities created by infrastructure control and multi-stakeholder platforms) and forms of functioning. In debates about transboundary as well as intrastate water issues, the aspect of justice is mostly inscribed in the guiding principles of national or international water law; however, most international interactions on water are not based on moral ideological values such as justice or equity, because the basic understanding for what justice means is, as mentioned above, rooted in a nation’s cultural set of values. Additionally, as a result of water’s politically contested nature, the application of moral principles is hindered by one-sided security, control, hydro-hegemony, power and development considerations.

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L Land and water The issue of land tenure, access rights and entitlements to land is strongly interlinked with water issues. Especially in regions where irrigated agriculture plays an important role in agricultural production, both land and water rights are important for the viability of farming activities. Water and land rights are not treated in the same way in all contexts; sometimes entitlement to the use of land at the same time justifies the use of adjoining or underlying waters, whereas in other situations both are treated separately. In many cases, the right to land is inseparable from the right to use water resources, either by pumping the groundwater underlying the piece of land or through riparian use rights. On the larger scale, occupation of territory also creates a justification for claims in respect of the control and use of water resources that are part of the newly controlled land. Legal complexity In most regions of the world and for many cultural groups, there is more than just one set of rules about the management of natural resources. The values shared by a community of people (be they citizens of the same state or members of an ethnic group) underlie the understandings of justice, fairness and equity formulated in legal texts or in customary practices and informal rules. The different, present rule-sets can cause frictions between the organizations responsible for enforcing compliance and water stakeholders who are confronted with contradictory or overlapping rules. Until not too long ago, customary, traditional legal systems were perceived as fundamentally non-compliant with the modernist understanding of legal accountability of the sovereign state and thus as obstacles to efficient natural resource management and allocation. The scientific recognition of the validity of alternative foundations for a rule-set stems from social-anthropological research. The issue of complexity makes the formulation of unrestrictedly valid laws a difficult political enterprise, since every normalization of traditional customs and their mainstreaming in the process of law-making constitutes a neglect of the cultural basis of traditional communities.

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Local water rights Livelihoods The term is used to describe the bases of existence of individuals, families and groups in relation to resource availability and entitlements to draw from them. The core domains of livelihood assets are natural, financial, physical, social and human resources. The combined reliance on, and links between, those assets define people’s vulnerability (or potential opportunity realization) in their living contexts to new trends, shocks, seasonality and long-term changes. The livelihoods approach is used to analyse, describe and explore rural poor people’s living conditions and future prospects. In poor countries, the right to gain access to, and control over, water often constitutes an important determinant of use of the natural resource asset, as well as of the health aspect. The livelihood framework, in comparison to the entitlement concept describes a person or a community’s fate and prospects in a more holistic manner. Local water rights The rights to control, to access and to participate in decision-making about water resource use are the main categories of the rights-bundle concerning water resources for users in local settings, in contrast to the national scale, where water rights are often an issue of national sovereignty and identity, defined as a share or bulk amount of water per time period. A state authority on the national scale legitimizes modern, legal water rights by law. Rights are then issued as permits, licences or property rights. Often, customary (traditional, tribal or clan) rights exist, and overlap or contradict the legally recognized ones in a local context. The latter’s norms can be phrased as ‘whoever came first can first claim the right’, as the development trajectories of water resources in a local context are often related to land rights and the hydraulic property creation by those contributing to infrastructure development, and thereby potentially excluding latecomers. Hence, access to and control of water resources and the related land rights regime are often inseparable. Water rights vary largely in their practical manifestations; some are closely related to the size of the adjoining land (in the case of water used for irrigation), whereas others are defined by the rightholder’s labour contribution during the development of control structures. In certain contexts, water rights are inseparably linked to membership of a community. In customary settings, water rights are not defined in fixed volumes (monitoring and measuring require techniques and manpower). Rather, they are defined as a time-share in a canal’s flow or as the right to a number of turns in a fixed period. Water rights are a major issue every time disputes occur or when competition over a common pool resource increases as a result of further development. Water rights regimes have to be adapted over time with changing demands in respect of the resource, usually with stricter regulations and enforcement mechanisms. Water rights are also a necessary precondition for the privatization

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discourse. According to advocates of water use efficiency, only with an existing water rights regime in situ can reallocations take place. The validity of one single rights regime, with the national state as the sovereign legitimate owner or principal steward of water resources, is often contested in situations where other constructs of legitimization exist, such as customary rules in indigenous communities or religious principles of non-exclusivity. Another reason for disputes over water rights is the discourse about the necessity to normalize and formalize ancient/indigenous rights at all. Exponents of the grass-roots-oriented organizations advocating recognition of indigenous understandings of ethics, equity and justice claim that, through a process of reformulation of customary rules with the concepts of the prevailing national legal system, the powerful impose their legitimizing force on traditional rule-sets, thereby negating the validity of other understandings and definition bases of legitimate rights to access and control. London Water Research Group The group is based on the PhD students and colleagues of Tony Allan (SIWI Stockholm Water Prize Laureate, 2008), originating from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University. Prior to the late 1990s, Allan had supervised mainly mid-career and end-of-career PhD students who focused on a broad variety of water topics. He offered an MSc module on water politics, organized evening seminar series with invited speakers for interested students as well as practitioners, consultants and scholars living in the proximity of London, and established a wider outreach through the SOAS Water Issue Paper Series. By the end of the 1990s, Allan had an inflow and side inflow of students who were only starting their career and wanted to formalize the SOAS water issue group. Still at this point, the focus of the PhD student group was diverse when it came to regions or themes. In the early 2000s, the geography departments of SOAS and of King’s College were merged. A new generation of PhD students focusing more on the politics of water streamlined the profile of the group towards transboundary water politics, agreeing with Allan’s conviction that it is ultimately politics that makes the difference in water issues. The new group established a loose international network of water researchers and practitioners, mainly based on regular workshops on hydrohegemony, as well as an on-line discussion group. Even though the group never formalized and today is more a network of former and current PhD students and associates, one could classify it as a more or less coherent epistemic community, focusing on the politics of water on the river basin level.

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M Mar del Plata 1977, UN Conference on Water In 1977, the UN held a conference on water in Mar del Plata, Argentina. It was the first conference dedicated to water that was held at a high political level. Its goals were numerous: a) to establish an assessment of water resources by processing and compiling data on water resources; b) to increase water use efficiency; c) to ensure that the world had an adequate supply of quality water available to meet the planet’s socio-economic needs; and d) to raise awareness about the possibility of a global water crisis before the end of the 20th century. The conference provided an important outcome with the Mar del Plata Action Plan. The plan was constituted of two parts, one dedicated to all aspects of water management, the other composed of 12 resolutions covering specific topics. The conference also allowed many developing countries to participate. It resulted in the production of reports, compiling new data concerning water use, availability and management in these countries. One important action was the recommended launch of the International Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981–90). It can also be considered as a milestone in the launch of the IWRM principles. Critics of the results of the major water conferences argue that the neglect of hydropolitics during this period and the reduction of water governance to mainly technical and economical aspects is a significant shortcoming; the absence of political considerations at the subsequent fora is one reason why it is difficult to discuss transboundary water issues on the international scene. Millennium Development Goals The United Nations and development-focused international organizations agreed upon eight development goals and 18 related targets—the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—during the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000. Of the eight objectives, at least four are directly related to water management: a) eradication of extreme poverty and hunger; b) reduction of child mortality; c) improvement of maternal health; and d) the safeguarding of environmental sustainability. Additionally, the goals to: e) combat diseases; f) promote gender equality and women’s empowerment; and g) achieve universal primary education, are indirectly related to water management and

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development. Although explicitly mentioned in the MDGs’ target number 10, to ‘reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water’, water is a factor inherent in all the targets. The case is similar for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: in Article 25 the right to an adequate and safe standard of living and security is postulated without an explicit mentioning of water, although it inherently plays a key role for food production, health and sanitation, and other aspects of mankind’s social needs. Modernity The term describes a complex of perceptions, institutions, attitudes and culture based on science-grounded, dynamic socio-economic and political order. The concept of modernity has its foundation in the enlightenment ideal of rationality in decision-making and radically new perceptions about the political role and functioning of nation states based on elected representatives. Modernity in contemporary understanding encompasses the human-centred intervention in, and transformations of, the natural environment for man’s benefit, market economies based on industrial production and growth, and a strong belief in future progress as the solution to present problems. It is, from a political perspective, also the foundation of the modern democratic republic, which is, compared to historical forms of governance, more dynamic and ready for change—progressively evolving its institutional framework and its economy, which is at least partially state-supported. In the field of water management, modernity paved the way for vaunted developments like the green revolution, the hydraulic missions of states and engineers during the 19th and 20th centuries and, of course, modernization of water and irrigation infrastructure. Modernization The term is used to describe a broad principle inspired by scientific enlightenment and the belief in the science-based, human domination of development and the mastering of the environment. In the water context, it characterizes both the technical and the institutional reform processes necessary for the implementation of modern-day concepts like water equity, accountability and efficiency. In the irrigation domain, modernization refers to construction of infrastructure that permits flexible water control as well as secure delivery to the very end of canal schemes. However, successful modernization needs the parallel development of appropriate institutions that regulate and govern the objectives of efficiency, accountability and equitable access. The need for modernization is not only related to the installation of cutting-edge techniques such as automated remote control; in the first place, its underlying motivation is to overcome the gaps between actual social, economic and environmental performance and that envisaged prior to the implementation

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Multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) and multi-stakeholder processes of the irrigation projects. Modernization measures therefore go hand-in-hand with approaches such as irrigation management transfer. Multidisciplinary research Water-related research focuses on numerous aspects of human life, the natural hydrologic cycle and the interaction between the two. As in other fields of research, scholars dealing with natural resource management became aware of the fact that disciplinary (in the sense of ‘pure’) research alone is not fit to tackle problems and questions arising from complex interactions of humans with the natural environment, and the socio-political, ecological and economic repercussions. Several expressions capturing the notions of integration, cross-cutting and linking exist, such as inter-disciplinarity, multi-disciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity. However, the underlying research problematization that, by a combination of methods, data handling and interpretation in different ways, tries successfully to address complex questions does not relate solely to research management. The latter deals with the practical questions of how co-operation can be realized and in which way disciplinary methodology boundaries can be blurred to enable cross-fertilization. Combining, e.g., natural sciences with sociology in order to generate added value in terms of ‘cutting-edge’ results that comprehensively address society’s request to science is much more a question of the epistemology inherent in different disciplines. Positivism and structuralism are very different ways of framing reality and approaching problems; hence, the combination of different disciplines becomes a difficult enterprise depending on the respective researchers’ convictions; difficulties are often avoided by adding or piling up information, rather than joining conceptual frameworks from the start and ‘digesting’ findings in a common manner. This insight is important for the field of water sciences, as researchers dealing with hydrology (a rather ‘pure’ science), civil engineering-oriented water resource scholars, hydropolitics adepts and people dealing with the gender dimension all inform professionals and decisionmakers. This information, desirably of an ‘integrated’ nature, is subsequently used for the implementation of concepts like IWRM, itself claiming to be integrated, despite the fact that a definition of what disciplines should be integrated for a comprehensive understanding of water management issues, and on what ontological foundations it should be based, is far from delineated in most cases (as science in respect of water is a political issue, and funding is defined by disciplinary thinkers). Multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) and multi-stakeholder processes Stakeholders are people or groups of people having a stake (an interest) in an issue, either because they want to derive benefits from it, are by law obliged to care for it, or suffer from it.

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The term multi-stakeholder is used to designate the different organizational and motivational backgrounds of actors coming together in a forum (platform), e.g. from non-governmental organizations, to private companies and public sector bodies. A multi-stakeholder process can be called a platform once the gathering of actors and the exchange of information and opinion is of an institutionalized nature that can be found in organizational rules and official documents. In this sense, one should see the MSP process as something ubiquitous, as interaction is always present, although not necessarily all stakeholders (as defined above) are involved in an informal MSP. Numerous labels exist world-wide to give the foregathering of actors with different origins and interests a name, ranging from dialogue, forum, to panel or partnership. What these expressions have in common is the issue-centred and interest-centred gathering of actors, usually focused on a limited geographic boundary and concerned about a shared resource. IWRM stresses the importance of multi-stakeholder processes for integrated catchment management as a means to find the best, socially accepted solutions for water problems in a political context. MSPs can be of very different types, and their performance in terms of ‘best’ outcomes depends, on the one hand, on the expectations raised beforehand and, on the other, on the support, participation, political interests and mandates of members (stakeholders). Furthermore, a successful MSP needs to be aware of the arena in which it is operating (sectors, representatives’ backgrounds), the common goals and the internal power play. Internal power distribution can tell a lot about the MSP in terms of personal agendas, process-capture by powerful actors, etc. Usually reflected in the distribution of seats in representative assemblies and governing boards or voting power, the organizational allocation of influence determines the MSP’s acceptance. Still, in many platforms decisions are not made according to majority vote but by consensus, based on arguments and inspired by a sense of realistic—rather than idealistic—rationality that takes account of the plurality of stakes and identities represented and the political nature of negotiations and exchanges in the process. An antagonistic example of the very different MSP types would be a government-induced panel with a pre-defined mandate and trajectory versus a grass roots-based, non-governmental public movement seeking consensus among ‘winners and losers’ and ‘deprived’ groups with an undefined outcome and the consideration of overlapping problemsheds. An MSP needs to be examined in terms of the numerous dimensions that determine the effectiveness and beneficial outcome of social and political interactions.

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N Natural flow Hydrological measure that expresses the average volume of water flowing through a stream or river during one year. The volume is generally expressed in cu m per year or cu km per year. The expression also captures the ‘familiar’ flow rate as opposed to peak flows and floods, as well as the flow that would be descending a watercourse if man had not introduced structures to retain or withdraw part of the flow. When such data are presented, the reader should be careful to establish whether the given data refer to a natural flow or not. An average annual natural flow expresses the average volume of water flowing through a stream or river during a year but without taking into account water withdrawals or the consequences of facilities that have been built on the river or stream, such as dams or hydropower plants. However, this conceptual, average volume reflects neither the natural fluctuations throughout the year nor the inter-annual variability of flows. The average annual flow is used as an indicator for various purposes; generally it gives an idea of the importance, the volumetric size, of the river or stream. It is furthermore used in the management of the resources of a river and gives an indication of the availability of water, although availability of water does not rely only on the flow but also on the storage capacity. From a hydropolitics perspective, data such as the average annual flow of a river or stream are very important as they are generally used by parties in conflict or are implied in negotiations on the sharing of transboundary water resources. Usually, the parties will try to manipulate the data in order to sustain their interests and point of view. Water-related data can therefore be highly politicized and thus completely biased. Non-consumptive uses In the natural resource literature, non-consumptive resource use is understood as use by one person that does not subtract from another person’s use, as in the case of pure public goods (see Common pool resources theory). Water uses in which evaporation and transpiration of water do not play a significant role are considered to be non-consumptive uses. Examples are the use of rivers and streams for navigation or the generation of hydropower from water released from storage dams. Although these uses do not have an inherently

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consumptive character, water always evaporates from surfaces and thus there is always a fraction of loss even from non-consumptive uses. A second criticism of the non-subtractive resource use idea for the special case of water is that, even if the total volume utilized by one user does not diminish another user’s volumetric availability, the quality of the water may be significantly decreased by industrial uses or cooling, by agricultural return flows containing salts and pesticide residuals, or by other human intervention in the terrestrial phase of the hydrologic cycle. Finally, the fact that water is stored upstream can be a risk for its timely availability (in quantity and quality) downstream, and thus a non-consumptive use does not necessarily equate with availability for others.

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O Organizations An organization is a group of individuals with a common purpose and aim, as defined by institutions such as statutes, codes of conduct, policies, procedures and organizational reports. They can be of a non-profit, public character as well as a private entity and, in line with their institutional framework, have to rely on financial support and an administrative branch, as distinct from the operational part implementing, promoting, observing or enforcing the objectives set by the relevant institutions. For organizations, these institutions can be framed as performance criteria, the drivers of, and yardstick for, all organizational activities. There are differing perceptions about the relation between organizations and institutions; however, both do stress the strong feedback between the two. The first perception is that organizations are shaped by the institutional framework (policies demand the establishment of departments, committees, etc.); once established, the organizations, in turn, shape, change and formulate institutions themselves. The second perception distinguishes organizations that represent agreed and valued, ‘institutionalized’ rules from those that are established on the basis of a single issue, and whose persistence in this form is consequently restricted.

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P Participation The institutional environment matters a great deal for the functioning of multi-stakeholder processes occupied with the political process of joint, mutual and participatory resource management; however, the aspect that most crucially needs to be understood is the concept of participation. Defined as a strategy deployed by actors to influence their livelihood basis and their fate, participation can be of a very informal, ad-hoc character or be institutionalized in boards. The second Dublin principle, stating that water development and management should be based on a participatory approach, involving users, planners and policymakers at all levels, is an important pointer for the way decisions should be made and acknowledges the very political nature of water issues. The prescriptive IWRM process adopts the ideas about participation with the call for multi-stakeholder platforms where all stakeholders come together to participate in decision-making about water resources and water management. Although participation is generally an approach that can yield widely accepted outcomes of negotiations, it remains questionable whether participation is understood by all stakeholders in the same manner and whether an equity-inspired approach that allows equal participatory interaction to all stakeholders is at all envisioned by the initiating parties. Participation in the water domain can take the form of mutual planning with only few prior assumptions and an open mind about the results, shared by all stakeholders. The underlying rationale for participation is the wish for greater awareness among all concerned stakeholders, regardless of their influence or organizational size; this therefore is a basis for ongoing, institutionalized interaction about water to achieve a sustainable situation. However, participatory planning, decision-making and management are political processes, with self-interest and one-sided motivations being the cornerstones of what is achievable. In water resources planning, participation can also simply have the characteristics of an information meeting, the purest form of unidirectional participation. This is why in discourses and documents dealing with the practicalities of participation and multi-stakeholder processes the concept often becomes a co-optative tool for a utilitarian approach to water governance so as to effectively implement a water management regime.

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Power Periodic streams / Wadis Streams, the flow of which varies seasonally and at times dries out completely with no surface water flowing on account of the seasonality of the source. Wadis are a good example of periodic streams. Wadi is the term used in the Arabic world to describe a dry riverbed where water flows seasonally during periods of precipitation. Perennial stream Continuous stream that flows all through the year, usually exhibiting seasonality in water levels. Polluter pays principle A prominent environmental law principle in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and EU countries. The principle places the responsibility for the pollution of a natural resource and the resulting environmental damages fully on the polluter. Being a principle inspired by economics thinking, it implies that, because a charge is levied for damages (thus internalizing environmental external adverse effects), the production process causing the pollution will be modified to cause as little pollution as economically reasonable. Its main shortcomings are the need for a strong system of monitoring, legal characterization of pollution, and control and enforcement of laws; these services are often absent in economically weaker nations. A further point of criticism is the fact that some pollutions, such as, e.g. diffuse pollution of water resources by nitrates, is an effect of other, contradictory policies, in this case the subsidizing of intensive agricultural production. Power The origins of the word power lie in French terms (influenced by Latin roots); one, puissance is understood as ‘might’ executed through various capabilities in the domains of politics, economics and the military (security) sector. The second characterizes power as the ability to influence situations from whatever prior position in one’s own favour; its French origin is the word pouvoir. Power describes the way in which relations are shaped by social interactions and the effects of these interactions on the actors involved; this in turn defines the actors’ capacity to influence their destiny. So, power is determined by the interconnections between actors in a social web and the characteristics of these linkages. In the water domain, the concept of hydropolitical power is used to describe interactions on water resources between actors, be they different administrative systems such as nation states, allocation practices for and between different sectors of water use, or the intra-sectoral competition between farmers for water in an irrigation scheme.

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On the transboundary level, power determines the relations between actors and the prospects of the hydro-hegemony. Structural power describes the broader political setup and the prevalent modes of interaction between actors engaged in economic relations (or dependency), presence of military force or political influence. The riparian position, the size (of territory, economy, population, etc.) and support on the international scene by other states are structural power characteristics that determine the ability of a hydro-hegemony to influence the fate of water disputes or quarrels in a river basin context. On the other hand, bargaining power is applied by actors whose structural power prospects are weak: if an actor is in an unfavourable riparian position and has little political, military or economic might, it is necessary to apply strategies that work on the moral foundation of a hydropolitical imbalance and the values of involved actors, and thereby influence the characteristics of power relations in ‘small steps’ through specific agreements. Strategies of power execution depend on cultural, historical and economic facts and can range from soft, co-operative forms of interaction to hard power (most often in the domains of economic and military interactions), where the actions taken to perpetuate the more powerful actor’s position in transboundary conflict or cooperation are based on threats and inducements. Ideational power describes the ability of actors to influence others’ perceptions by story lines, preventing them from demanding changes, making complaints or being critical; this ideational power makes actors satisfied with the status quo because by their discourse they exclude the possibility of alternatives, or because of the perception of being in a beneficial situation. In a situation of large socio-cultural differences between the actors, two main forms of power are applied. One is termed coercive power, whereby actors within hard power strategies are forced to co-operate and comply with the rules of the game set by the more powerful actor; it is an exclusive mode of power, as non-compliance with only one rule out of the whole set of imposed rules is often a reason for the cancellation of all co-operation or for coercion to be applied. Capillary forms of power are no less a way of enforcing co-operation and compliance, but they differ from coercion in that they are not exclusive. Although participation and joint decision-making are a soft, co-operative form of interaction and political water resource negotiations, in the end the primary purpose of resource and rural development is to make groups from different cultures comply with the rules set by the state, e.g. in the form of accepting law-based property rights. Privatization and public-private partnerships (PPP) A contemporary approach to the efficient management of water is the privatization of water infrastructure and the largely independent operation of it by a private contractor according to legal rules. A direct link is thus established between the water supplier and the customer, who is then often obliged to contribute to the cost recovery of a formerly state-run enterprise, but many

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Private sector such processes are driven by weak public funding and external reform demands (see International Monetary Fund and World Bank) rather than by concern for efficient and fair water delivery. Although private control of water infrastructure can be a solution for situations where users are able to pay for the services they receive, in poorer communities the financial burden can be unbearable for the individual household. There, the transfer of management tasks (as with irrigation management transfer) constitutes a ‘fairer’ solution if the additional responsibility for individual users does not exceed their capacity in terms of time and knowledge. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) is a collective name for many forms of co-operation between private, profit-oriented organizations and public authorities; they are also termed public sector participation (PSPs). In the development context, PPPs are seen as powerful tools to boost investment and efficiencies of public services. In water management, the provision of water-related services by a private company can have different degrees of responsibility transfer and duration. In service (or management) contracts, the management of infrastructure is contracted out to a private operator, while full ownership and investment in the asset remains with the public sector. These are usually short-term (up to five years) agreements. In lease agreements, public bodies lease infrastructural assets to contractors on a mid-term basis (generally of the order of 15 years) and take over maintenance works and costs; ownership remains with the state and usually safety clauses are part of these agreements to guarantee the public sector’s superior role in the event of violations. Concessions are the PPPs that usually have the longest contract durations, where only the ownership of the infrastructure remains with the public sector; investment, operation and maintenance are the contractor’s responsibility. ROT (rehabilitate, operate, transfer) and BOT (build, operate, transfer) agreements are special forms of concessions, where much responsibility is transferred to the private sector. As tools to improve the development of infrastructure, the high initial investments are usually born by public/private consortia. The period of operation and transfer is then dependent on the amount of the initial investment and the cost retrieval, as is the case to a lesser extent with lease agreements. The existence of a legally agreed transfer of responsibilities and benefits from public to private actors and concomittant positive effects on public expenditure or economic efficiency of water facilities should however not be confused with development in the sense of equitable access to livelihood resources. Private sector In the debate about increased water management efficiency and the reduction of public expenditure for the provision of water services (advocated by international organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), the private sector is a key focus of attention. Water management is administered on the river basin scale, and public assets (major water infrastructure) are operated and managed according to PPP contracts following

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the ‘French model’, promoted globally by privatization advocates since the 1990s. Multinational companies in the water services sector, providing services such as wastewater treatment, water delivery, sewerage infrastructure and drinking water, offer whole packages of services for the public sector. The most prominent of them are three companies with European roots: RWE Thames (UK), Suez and Vivendi (both France); with the increasing importance of privatized water services, the sector is steadily growing world-wide. As described under Privatization and PPP, different forms of co-operation exist between the public sector and private companies. Criticism of increased involvement by private companies is mainly directed at the questions of financial power of the former publicly served clients, the accountability of the contractor for operation and maintenance (gradual deterioration of infrastructure during the contracting period and the billing of system losses to clients is seen as an externalization of maintenance cost), and the absence of competition on the local, infrastructure-related market (as a supply or sewerage system can only be contracted once). Problemshed The tackling of water-related problems and conflicts often necessitates a less hydro-centric view and approach. Although for technical intervention and physical management the river basin is an appropriate management unit, one should not forget the social linkages of watersheds with the nation states’ administrative boundaries. It is on this level that nation states respond to water scarcity by different measures, the most prominent example being the importation of virtual water. In more complex situations, where water scarcity not only impedes agricultural food production but also involves other uses, such as hydropower generation or the use of water for mining, the term problemshed shows the whole ‘playing field’ on which analysis and intervention should be based. Problemsheds thus not only denote geographic and hydraulic units interlinked by human intervention, but also point to the so-called nexuses where issues like water, food, energy, environment and the societies are strongly linked and cut across pure natural or geographic units. Property rights Traditional views on water resources, e.g. in indigenous communities as well as in the Shari’a principles of Islam, promulgate the non-excludability of others from basic water needs, to meet personal hygiene demands, for household activities like washing and cooking, and of course for drinking water for humans and animals. The concept of property rights to water in such a scenario is alien to social and cultural principles, although all cultures prioritize the concept of a right to basic needs. Most of the time, water for drinking, cooking, household purposes like cleaning, and washing (including ritual washings) are considered as basic requirements that everyone should be

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Property rights enabled to meet. Depending on the religious and cultural backgrounds, in some contexts there is no such thing as an exclusion from uses: everyone is eligible to access the resource if the necessary investments (in such diverse forms as fetching water, providing labour for lifting or pumping water, constructing an intake or buying a pump) can be made. The way rights are created and justified differs as well. In some cases, user communities determine the sharing of the water resource in terms of hydraulic property creation, the labour contribution to the development and maintenance of infrastructure. In other cases, access and a sort of tenure right to land is inseparably linked to the right to withdraw water, without any defined limitation in volume or time. In modern thinking, the view on property rights to water is often dominated by efficiency-driven economic thinking about natural resources and the dire need for institutions that regulate access and abstraction (see also allocation). It seems appropriate to talk about the particulars of property rights here, because in the discourse about privatization, the investment incentives for the private sector, and the envisaged higher social benefits resulting from a market-based reallocation of water between sectors, there is a need for a clear legal foundation guaranteeing the safety of operations and the eligibility of a party to make exclusive claims. In general, a property right is an enforceable, authoritative institution that defines the actions that individuals and organizations (groups of individuals) can take regarding a good in relation to other entities. One speaks about rights-bundles, characterizing different types of uses and the degree of the users’ decision-making power in respect of the good. The right to access is usually related to a geographical territory delivering certain goods (e.g. tranquillity in a forest), while withdrawal rights authorize the individual or organizational body to obtain defined units of the resource (water diversion, hunting) in a defined area or spot. As opposed to the former two use rights, the three other dimensions of property rights are much stronger in the way that they allow or exclude individuals from decision-making. Management rights permit the regulation of uses and the transformation of the resource (in the sense of improvements, e.g. lining earthen water canals with concrete), exclusion rights give the rights-holder the power to determine who has the right to access and withdrawal, and how these rights can be transferred (heritage, trade, etc.), and, as the most complete dimension of property rights, the right to alienate confers the possibility of leasing or selling the rights to access, withdrawal, management and exclusion. The expressions used to characterize rights-holders range from authorized entrant, user and claimant, to proprietor and full owner. For common pool resources, that is water in systems developed to convey and provide water for a limited number of users, such as canals (apart from piped, pressurized drinking water and wastewater systems serving individual households), the rights usually only permit users to withdraw a share of the resource, whereas management rights often remain with either a public

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authority or a water user association (WUA), and the state normally keeps the rights to exclusion and alienation as the custodian of a nation’s resources. In brief, in most cases property rights in relation to water are used to characterize the ownership of infrastructure and the related control and management rights, permitting for-profit organizations to generate benefits from investments, and only bottled water and water in containers can really be perceived as a property that can be transferred and traded.

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Q Quality of water Despite the important concerns about the available quantity of water resources, in the end the quality of water is a decisive factor in the options for its utilization in different sectors. Quality can be severely affected by non-consumptive uses. Agricultural drainage and the translocation of soluble salts and agrochemicals are wellknown examples; even worse is acid mine drainage, water that is discharged into the environment after being used in the extraction of ores by mining companies. The addition of aggressive acids to extract the minerals from the soil poses a serious threat for adjoining environments. Water quality can at the same time be diminished by consumptive uses, as all water that is extracted from water bodies constitutes a loss of water availability for ecosystems and also cannot dilute polluted waters that re-enter the hydrologic cycle after utilization. Quality is usually measured in chemical, physical and microbiological terms, e.g. parts per million (ppm) of solute salts, nutrients and trace elements, in units of acidity or alkalinity (pH) or as biochemical oxygen demand (BOD, the higher, the worse) caused by waterborne organisms that use up the dissolved oxygen.

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R Ramsar Convention Signed in 1971 and in force since 1975, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance is a major environmental agreement on water and ecosystems. Its mission is the conservation and wise use of a wide variety of wetlands. So far, 159 states have signed the convention as contracting parties. However, the convention lacks enforcement mechanisms to safeguard wetland ecosystems from further degradation, and its guidelines have a general character. Gathering and disseminating information about the world’s wetlands is the task of Wetlands International, a Netherlands-based not-forprofit organization with the mission to sustain and restore wetlands on the global scale. It is the operational branch of the Ramsar Convention. Information on the success of the convention is unfortunately lacking, as mapping and monitoring activities cannot protect wetlands from humaninduced degradation. However, Wetlands International is lobbying for wise use of wetlands and, through this adaptive management strategy, shows a constructive approach to sustainable wetland development. Recharge area / Replenishment area Area that contributes water to an aquifer by direct infiltration or by runoff and subsequent recharge (see also Catchment area, Average annual recharge). Remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) Remote sensing is the acquisition of geographic, meteorological and other natural data, usually by remote (i.e., distant, not physically intervening with the object of examination) observation. A geographic information system is a computer-based information system to store, analyze and display information relating to a specific location. The use of data and information generated through the sampling, collection and storage of measurements (usually from satellite data), and its subsequent referencing (linking datasets to defined points or areas on the globe), arrangement, classification and analysis is a recent development in research about water resources as well as water management. Despite the need for calibration of mathematical models that are used to estimate the actual evapotranspiration, and hence the water depleted from a 288

Riparian (states) river basin, the use of these modern techniques can provide information about water withdrawal and related water productivity issues even from inaccessible areas. Remote sensing and the processing of information in GIS has a wide range of applicability; research on groundwater can be informed by the balancing of meteorological and GIS data to approximate the hard-to-measure aquifer recharge, irrigation system efficiency can be determined and potential improvements identified. Together, remote sensing and GIS are crucial tools for the operational part of integrated water resource management. In the hydropolitics domain, the availability and accessibility of information about transboundary water resources is a sensitive issue on account of the fact that water data are part of the complex and often irrational hydrosecurity concerns. Rent-seeking Behaviour, defined as the conduct of direct, unproductive profit-seeking (better known as corruption in its two main manifestations of petty and grand corruption) that in no way adds to the value of the service or product paid for, is a main factor for inefficiency and insecurity of water supply in environments where there is no direct link between the controllers of the supply and beneficiaries such as rural irrigators or urban households. Many reforms in the water sector therefore seek to establish a direct link between supplier and user to establish accountability and control by water users. Reservoirs A device of varying size to store and retain water is termed a reservoir. It usually serves more than one single purpose. Tanks, dams for hydropower generation and other, artificial artefacts introduced into the hydrologic cycle of a river basin by man are all reservoirs, although their purpose usually differs widely as a function of climatic, topographic and socio-economic circumstances. Flood retention and storage or diversion of water for off-stream uses and staggered releases are some of the main motivations for the construction of reservoirs. Since the development of electricity turbines, hydropower generation is an important purpose, providing continued energy supply. Return flow The portion of withdrawn water that has not been consumed (by evapotranspiration) and thus returns to the source from which it has been withdrawn or to another body of water. The return flow is in most cases of inferior quality. Riparian (states) Being a riparian in general terms means being physically situated along the course of a water body, be it aquifer, lake, river or the sea. Riparians are thus interconnected by the shared water resource.

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International waters like transboundary aquifers, lakes and rivers receive inflow (drainage) or recharge (in the case of fossil aquifers, only withdrawal of water) from or to more than one country’s watersheds. These countries with a stake in the transboundary waters are defined as riparian states because their surface and subsurface runoff contributes water, or because the country makes use of the water resource, or because the water body marks its border. River basin River systems consist of more than one branch of the water body: these socalled estuaries that contribute to the total surface runoff (see hydrologic cycle) of a river basin are also termed affluent or confluent, but more frequently the term tributary is utilized. The drainage area (where precipitation and subsequent runoff take place) of a river, lake or stream is termed catchment area or drainage basin, while the complete system of tributaries in a river basin is termed watershed, drainage basin or catchment. These expressions all define the area where all water, whether surface or groundwater, drains to a common point, the terminus. The watershed concept is helpful in understanding the linkages and dependencies occurring in river basins, and stretching further than just along the main branch of a river. The difference in use between the expressions river basin on the one hand, and catchment or watershed on the other, is usually seen as a difference in scale: watersheds are often characterized as sub-basins (tributaries in the case of surface waters) of a major basin; however, the terms watershed, basin and catchment are used interchangeably in literature and by professionals. A phenomenon showing the limitations of the watershed concept is the fact that some groundwater aquifers do not follow the rule of draining to the same point because of subsurface geological formations that lead to subterranean linkages between otherwise separate basins. An alternative definition of watershed pictures the term watershed as the infinitely fine line between two basins that separates the water at the highest elevation. River Basin Initiatives River Basin Initiatives and their legally recognized and supported counterparts, the River Basin Authorities constitute efforts on the transboundary as well as the national scale to achieve mutual management of water resources between different administrative bodies such as departments, federal and nation states according to hydrological boundaries. Basin Initiatives are conceptualized as multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) that are to varying extents responsible for management and decision-making on the basin scale. Runoff Runoff characterizes that share of the water that does not infiltrate into the soil after a rain event or irrigation (either because the soil is sealed by human

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Runoff activities or because it is saturated) but searches its way on the surface, feeding into creeks, rivers and streams. Runoff is a transport agent for all sorts of pollutants and sediments that are translocated with the surface water flow in rivers. The share of the water that infiltrates only into the upper layers of the soil and is then taken up by the roots of vegetation is called consumptive use by evapotranspiration. In a river basin context, the runoff characterizes the total volume of water carried by surface water bodies over one year, and is known as basin runoff.

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S Safe yield / sustainable yield The amount of water that can be withdrawn from an aquifer or surface water system on a long-term basis without affecting its quality and net storage, and without causing considerable negative environmental and social impacts to it. Respecting the safe yield of an aquifer or surface water system means avoiding its overuse. It is a concept more and more used in water management. It is often used to describe the potential of a resource. It is also useful to note that the term is often used incompletely and in this case only refers to the replenishment ability of the resource. For an aquifer, for example, it means that its use is based on its recharge capacity—and thus on its average annual recharge—but without taking into account the discharge component, meaning a loss of water to an interconnected water resource, e.g. the sea, in the case of coastal aquifers. Sanctioned discourses A discourse concept that captures the normative limitations of a given context. If a certain discourse is sanctioned, it means that constraints exist about what can be said out loud or otherwise voiced by someone who perhaps wishes to escape a discursive hegemony set up by an epistemic community, such as a hydrocracy in the water context. Dominating opinions, as legitimized by this élite, determine what will be qualified as an inadmissible deviation and what is considered as being the widely agreed-upon consensus. Sanitation In general, sanitation means the hygienic prevention of health risks associated with disease vectors, faeces and other wastes of a hazardous nature. In the complex of water supply and sanitation, the treatment of grey water and wastewater is a paramount activity to safeguard the purity of water resources; however, the necessary infrastructure to provide good quality supply and sanitation services is a costly investment. The term sanitation is used in numerous ways. In the water context, sanitation is usually equated with the access to basic services such as e.g. latrines and the subsequent evacuation, treatment and purification of water that has been polluted with human

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Securitization excreta and waste. In the Millennium Development Goals, people suffering from inadequate basic sanitation are targeted by several goals, since child mortality and maternal health, the spreading of infectious diseases and environmental sustainability are all related to the way the issue of hygiene and water use is approached. Saturated zone Zone under the line defined by the water table where every available pore space is filled with water. Water in this zone is stored under pressure equal to or greater than that of the atmosphere (see confined aquifer). The term constitutes the conceptualization of groundwater from its origins, the precipitation of water on the earth’s surface and not, as in a hydrogeology sense, from the groundwater upwards (the equivalent expression here is vadose zone). Second order water scarcity A distinction is made between first order water scarcity and second order scarcity in order to show two different concepts of water scarcity. Second order water scarcity is a concept used to designate the lack of social adaptive capacity to a water scarcity situation. In other words, it refers to the inability of a social entity to find tools to cope with the consequences of first order water scarcity. It is not focused on the lack of water resources, but on the capacity to adapt and to cope with water scarcity. This concept has the merit of emphasizing the fact that scarcity is relative and that what is stressful in one environment is not necessarily so in another. Evaluation of what is to be considered first order and what is to be considered a situation where, with ingenuity (see Adaptive capacity), challenges could be tackled is a matter of interpretation. It is thus a relative concept, comparing similar cases and assuming the same range of options for all situations encountered by different countries. Securitization Securitization is a story line (discursive action) that involves the construction of a shared understanding of what is to be considered, and collectively responded to, as a threat. The labelling of a political or administrative issue as being a matter of security alone can denote a particular development or issue as threatening, thereby justifying drastic responses or the sustenance of the status quo despite increased external attention or pressures. This definition of securitization is frequently used in the hydropolitics domain; here one should note that the act of labelling an issue as a matter of hydrosecurity drastically diminishes the political scope to negotiate between different stakeholders or riparians. Closely related is the speech act of violization, when securitization is followed by the threat or the use of military force.

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Seoul Rules Adopted by the International Law Association in 1986 in Seoul, South Korea, the Seoul Rules on International Groundwaters were intended to complete the ILA’s 1966 Helsinki Rules. They furthered the legal framework regarding transboundary groundwater. Their major innovation consists of including, unlike the 1966 Helsinki Rules, all types of aquifers, even those not connected with the surface, as part of an international drainage basin. The Seoul Rules also insist on the complexity of the connections between surface and groundwater and on the necessity to consider that relationship in the management of water resources by introducing the notion of conjunctive use. Socio-technical (approach) This central concept of water control as being an intertwined reality of socioeconomic facts, political interests, and the functioning and capability demands for operation of technical artefacts is a derivative for the water domain of the approach called the social construction of technology (SCOT), developed by the Netherlands-based Irrigation and Water Engineering Group within Wageningen University. The SCOT approach is both an analytical concept to understand technological change in relation to society and a theory about society’s repercussions on technological development. The adaptation of the constructivist approach to the water domain originates from the insights gained through research on the management of water resources in the context of irrigation world-wide; activities to manage water for crops are strongly interlinked with control structure activities and organizational activities. The interrelations between the physical (bulk water, technical artefacts such as canals or gates), the technologies (knowledge about the operation of technical artefacts embedded in the structures or text-based information) and the social (e.g. water user associations) are the focus of this research approach. Through this and the multidisciplinary research methods integrated during information sampling, it sheds light on the political nature of water management on different spatial levels of analysis (be it tertiary irrigation canals, whole systems or river basins), as well as on different domains of man– technique–nature interactions at the interfaces linking those interactions. The strength of the approach lies in its ability (inherited from the SCOT approach) to act as an explanatory theory for historic and contemporary developments concerning the remaking of agro-ecological and hydro-social networks, as well as to identify potential political—in the non-organizational, informal sense—entry points for future improvements. Because of the constructivist nature of the approach, the analysis is not limited to the visible water management spheres, but can be extended to questions of wider state socio-economic developments and issues of water governance.

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Story lines (discursive activities) Storage capacity A major factor regarding the availability of water resources. Storage capacity allows total water availability to be increased, and variations in water availability and water demand to be managed. Precipitation in most regions of the world varies seasonally and annually. High seasonal and annual variations in precipitation are generally encountered in arid and semi-arid regions, and periods of low precipitation often coincide with periods of high potential evapotranspiration. Precipitation and the distribution of water resources also vary regionally. It is essential to store water in water-poor regions and to avoid water losses. Water may also be carried via canals or pipelines from water-rich regions to regions characterized by low precipitation and low availability of water resources. Water resources may be stored in natural reservoirs such as aquifers, lakes or wetlands, or in artificial reservoirs such as artificial lakes resulting from the construction of dams. Three types of capacity measures can be distinguished: gross storage is the sum of the two components, dead storage and live storage. Gross storage is the extent (or percentage, depending on the measure) to which the capacity of storage devices is utilized. Usually, this amount is not fully exploitable because of the natural, geological and technical characteristics of the reservoir or dam and its surrounding area (minimum levels have to be maintained for, e.g., aquatic life). The non-utilized and thus permanent storage defined by the minimum levels of the storage device is called dead storage; the remaining fraction, available for consumptive uses off-stream, i.e., not within the storage lake (for navigation, fisheries, etc.), is defined as live storage. The building of storage installations may cause several problems, such as environmental harm due to flooding of valleys behind the dam wall, or tension between states sharing transboundary water resources. The construction of a dam allows the upstream state to control the flow volume of a river over time (its discharge) and thus increases its control over the waters flowing towards the downstream riparian state. This may be a cause of tension and dispute. The capacity to store water on a country’s territory over the seasons or even over the years can thus be regarded as a capacity to overcome variations in water supply and water demand, thus potentially altering the power setup of a region’s hydropolitics over water resources. Story lines (discursive activities) As explained under discourses, political actors in multiple ways utilize information, myths and unquestioned or constructed assumptions to serve either their individual purposes or to create a ‘common’ understanding about debated issues. The aim is to gain or safeguard support for someone’s

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definition of reality; the success of such a discursive story line is dependent on trust in, credibility and acceptance of, the person or organization providing the definition among the addressed audience or public. Story lines combine different discourses into a socially constructed narrative about reality; hence they bridge gaps between different elements of a problem context (e.g. the water scarcity in a river basin and the transboundary conflicts that result from this, see securitization) by adding patches to an argumentative, political story that has some credibility gaps, while at the same time reducing the complexity of an issue to a degree that almost everyone can grasp. Thus, story lines are the argumentative binding agents between different members of hydrocracies and epistemic communities that define a common ground. Supply The term characterizes the provision of a good or the delivery of a certain service. In the water context, the supply of water and water services constitutes one side of the whole technical (and infrastructure-intensive) water cycle designed to provide water delivery and sanitation services. In a more conceptual and economic manner, the supply side is, contrary to the demand side, the part of the water sector where wells are drilled, dams are built and infrastructure for service provision is installed to augment the availability of water volumes in space and time. Surface water Surface water represents only a very small proportion of available freshwater in the world, although it constitutes the principal source of water for many people in many regions around the world. This is due to its characteristics, as it allows easy access and use. Moreover, water from rivers and lakes has the ability to renew itself very fast compared with other types of water resources. In the hydrologic cycle, all natural water resources will be fully replenished, but at different rates and in different timeframes. River water replenishment takes on average two weeks (see hydrologic cycle). Sustainable development The definition of a development that is, according to the notions and interpretations of the term sustainable, sound, reasonable, non-exploitative and generally positive, was for the first time defined in the international context by the Brundtland Report: a ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. The definition is a short and general synthesis of the report’s considerations about human impact on, and feedback about, the living environment and the natural limitations to growth. Despite the important achievement of the World Commission on Environment and Development to shed light on

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Sustainable development the future challenges that mankind will face and on intergenerational equity, the definition as well as the whole concept of sustainable development are criticized. Often, the three pillars of sustainability, economic, ecological and social considerations, which have to be balanced against each other to guarantee sustainable development, are used to illustrate the concept. Critics argue that decisions are usually not based on rationality and are not the result of common priority negotiations among all concerned parties (as in multi-stakeholder platforms) and that making compromises between economic, ecological and social needs does not necessarily mean that future generations will actually be able to profit from the same resource base as their ancestors.

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T Tank A tank in the water context signifies a device to retain and store water resources in a small, dam-like infrastructure. The practices of rain water harvesting or diversion from surface water bodies are very prominent on the Indian subcontinent, where for millennia small tanks have been managed as a common pool resource to even out the availability of water between dry and wet seasons. Territories In a political understanding, a territory is defined as a nation state’s area within its boundaries; however, the term stresses the notion of a nation’s spheres of influence, the control exerted over people and organizations within those spheres, and also the new lands under a nation’s rule that do not yet have the same legal status as national territory but are claimed as a state’s property. Territories are also the subject of power exertion by the creation of hydraulic artefacts, the development of water infrastructure in areas where the modern state cannot yet fully rule over inhabitants and control their economic activities; the socio-technical understanding of control over water resources implies control over the respective territory to which the water is supplied. In a geographical sense, the spread of large-scale technical transformations of the environment also straddles cultural boundaries and promulgates modernity and progress-driven claims. Total renewable water resources Total amount of water available in a country or region. It represents the sum of internal renewable water resources and incoming flow originating outside the borders of the country or region. This notion is important regarding the assessment of water resources and may be used as an indicator of the overall status of the water resources of a region or country. Transboundary aquifer A transboundary aquifer is shared by two or more states. The use and management of transboundary aquifers is complicated by the uncertainties concerning

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Tributary / affluent / confluent the physical properties of aquifers. Delineating precisely an underground water body is often difficult. The relationship between groundwater and surface water is also complex. A transboundary aquifer may thus be an aquifer divided by an international boundary, but the following cases may also exist: a) an aquifer lying entirely in the territory of one state linked with another aquifer lying in a neighbouring state; b) an aquifer lying entirely in the territory of one state linked with an international river lying in a neighbouring state; c) an aquifer lying entirely in one state with a recharge area in a neighbouring state. The 1997 UN Convention on International Watercourses recognized the relationship between surface and groundwater, but excluded from its scope aquifers not related to the surface. However, non-legally binding documents, such as the 1986 Seoul Rules or the 2004 Berlin Rules, deal with such aquifers. International water law regarding transboundary aquifers is therefore still lacking. The case of a confined aquifer divided by an international boundary is not covered by the UN Convention, for example. The International Law Association is furthering its work to include such cases within international law. Transboundary water resources and water courses Watersheds, river basins and aquifer systems often do not match administrative boundaries. Around 300 river basins of the world are shared between two or more riparian states. The prefix trans refers to ‘across’ and ‘beyond’. The term transboundary thus refers to the multiple boundaries that are crossed in international water issues. Most of the time one talks about national administrative boundaries, but federal boundaries can also cause frictions or disputes on account of diverging interests and priorities. The main reasons for these disputes are upstream water abstraction, diminished quality, or interference in natural flows by barrages and dams. In the case of transboundary aquifers that do not necessarily match the hydrologic boundaries of the surface water on account of differing geologic formations, conflicts about their yield, depletion and recharge may occur because of their invisible nature and deviations in data quality and interpretations. In the case of transboundary waters that mark a nation state’s borders, the disputes can also comprise issues of navigational uses in addition to quantity and quality concerns. Tributary / affluent / confluent Secondary or subsidiary stream or river that flows into another river or body of water to which it contributes its waters. The difference in the terms reflects mainly use and custom, the two latter terms being more archaic. Control of tributaries is a major element in the control of the waters of a river or body of water, as is the control of the catchment area.

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U United Nations The UN system is involved through a variety of means in environmental, sustainable development and water issues. With its contribution to the development of international water law, which resulted for example in the most global and authoritative water-related convention—the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses—the UN has played a main role in providing a framework for multilateral agreements on transboundary water resources. Its specialized organizations are linked with water through their actions: UNESCO, FAO, WHO, UNDP, UNEP. It organizes, or participates in, international conferences or fora such as the UN Conference on Human Environment (Stockholm, 1972), the UN Conference on Water (Mar del Plata, 1977), the International Conference on Water and the Environment (Dublin Principles, 1992), the UN Conference on Environment and Development or Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), and the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Johannesburg, 2002). The UN’s general discourse on water relies on pillars identifiable as the principles of sustainable development. It promotes integrated water resource management and, since the Dublin Principles (1992), the recognition of water as an economic good (full cost recovery in water services, water becomes a human need instead of a human right). United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) / Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro 1992 The intergovernmental conference held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 is also known as the Earth Summit. It is one of the largest events to date organized on environmental matters and, more precisely, on sustainable development. One main objective was to rethink economic development in its entirety. The will existed to raise awareness of the fact that environmental effects have to be taken into account in economic development and that the understanding of governments and the public about environmental issues needed to be raised. Another aim was to show that poverty and excessive consumption put damaging pressure on the environment. Of specific importance was the raising of awareness about the growing scarcity of water.

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UN Convention of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses The conference resulted in five documents, among which ‘Agenda 21’ and the ‘Rio Declaration on Environment and Development’. The three others are: the ‘Statement of Forest Principles’, the ‘United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’, and the ‘United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity’. ‘Agenda 21’ is a 40-chapter programme for action aiming to achieve sustainable development. Chapter 18 is dedicated to water resources use and water management. The ‘Rio Declaration’ is a set of 27 non-binding principles supporting ‘Agenda 21’s’ goal to achieve sustainable development by defining the state’s rights and responsibilities regarding environment and development. A commission on sustainable development was created in December 1992 to monitor and report on the implementation of the agreements obtained at the UNCED. The commission decided in 2001 to produce a report, World Water Development Report, every three years. Rio agreements and principles were reaffirmed 10 years later at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm 1972 The Stockholm Conference was the first held under the United Nations banner to be dedicated to the environment, the need for improvement in living conditions, and international co-operation to achieve this. The conference led to two main outputs: the ‘Stockholm Declaration’, which contains principles on environmental and development matters and also practical recommendations to implement them; and the creation of the UN Environmental Programme the same year. Among other things, it was decided in Stockholm to convene a second conference of that type, resulting 20 years later in the 1992 UN Conference in Rio de Janeiro, also known as the Earth Summit. The importance of this conference and the others that followed is that they deliver a message of concern, understanding and acknowledgement that human activity has consequences for the environment and that caution is needed in order to protect and preserve the environment by adapting human development. The Stockholm Conference can be considered as a milestone in the propagation of the concept of sustainable development. United Nations Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses 1997 The UN General Assembly asked the International Law Commission in 1970 to draft a set of rules governing the non-navigational uses of international water courses. The International Law Commission finalized its draft articles in 1994 after more than 20 years of work, and transmitted them to the UN General Assembly for further negotiation and debate. The Convention was adopted in 1997. The UN Convention is the most important water-related

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treaty: it has a global character; it has been negotiated to have universal applicability; it is endorsed by an international political body, the UN, which automatically grants the Convention a more official character than the Helsinki Rules. The convention provides rules and recommendations on a wide variety of topics. It can be seen as the most important milestone in international water law on account of its provision of starting points for future agreements, the basic elements for a general architecture for managing international watercourses. Four main pillars can be distinguished: 1. The water-sharing principles that have already appeared in other documents such as the Helsinki Rules: the equitable and reasonable utilization principle (Article 5) and the obligation not to cause significant harm to other watercourse states (Article 7). The UN Convention sets out a list of factors in Article 6 to accomplish relevant equitable and reasonable utilization of water resources. It is stated that in determining what is a reasonable and equitable use, all relevant factors are to be considered together and a conclusion reached on the basis of the whole. The two principles are conflictive in nature. Changes in formerly inequitable water distribution, as envisaged by one party, might be perceived by the other parties as ‘harmful’ changes. The principles are not prioritized, one over the other: they remain to be interpreted and negotiated in specific cases. 2. The convention clearly enunciates an obligation to co-operate on shared water resources in its eighth article and determines how this can be achieved: regular exchange of data and information (Article 9), information, notification and consultations concerning planned measures (Articles 11 to 19), and joint commissions and mechanisms (Article 24). 3. The protection, preservation and management of watercourses, but also of the ecosystem surrounding them, are a main objective. 4. Dispute settlement: Article 33 provides a set of provisions to help concerned parties to settle a dispute. It includes negotiation, good offices, mediation or conciliation by a third party, use of a joint watercourse institution or submitting the case to the International Court of Justice. The article also states that in the event that the negotiations fail, any state involved in the dispute can request unilaterally the creation of a fact-finding commission to assist in its settlement. The UN Convention represents a step forward in the field of international water law but it still shows deficiencies, such as its definition of a watercourse, which excludes aquifers unconnected to the surface, i.e. confined aquifers, according to the terminology used for the Convention. The legal framework concerning transboundary aquifers remains less developed within legally binding documents than in non-official documents such as the Seoul Rules, Berlin Rules and Bellagio Draft Treaty.

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United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) The UNDP works on water themes from a development perspective, as water is a key resource for rural and agricultural as well as urban and industrial development. Fostering principles of good governance, the organization also inspired the water governance approach. Like other United Nations agencies, the promotion of an integrated approach (see IWRM) to water management is a paramount objective. The organization operationalizes its mission through assistance to member countries on a local scale, with crosscutting working areas such as sanitation services, and the gender and water topic. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) UNESCO is a specialized United Nations agency founded on 16 November 1945. It made water one of its principal fields of activities and conducts its water sector projects through different programmes. In 1975 UNESCO launched its intergovernmental scientific programme on water resources, the International Hydrological Programme. It aims to improve the scientific and technological knowledge that will allow the development of methods for rational water management, including the protection of the environment. Initially more focused on scientific research, it has widened its scope to social sciences, conceding the fact that solutions to the world water problems may not be found in technology improvements alone. In its role as the knowledge-creating branch in the UN system, UNESCO, through its programmes and projects relating to water, is a major player in the international epistemic community concerned about the way in which water will be managed in the future. Through the UNESCO-IHE, the international institute for water education, UNESCO helps to form future water professionals and to develop science-based solutions. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) This organization, part of the UN system, is the international platform for environmental co-operation between states. Founded after the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, the UNEP today has numerous multi-million dollar programmes to provide leadership and encourage partnership in environmental issues. It promotes the widespread application of the principles of integrated water resources management, like every other UN agency. In its freshwater theme, the organization aims to foster water resource policies, laws and regulations, as well as the scientific assessment of, e.g., freshwater resources through its Global International Water Assessment. Like WHO, FAO or UNESCO, UNEP works on cross-cutting themes in the water domain.

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United States Agency for International Development (USAID) This governmental agency is in charge of conducting programmes and projects in accordance with the political development aid objectives set by US policies. It is one of the best-funded government bodies providing funds and capacity for US partner countries in a broad range of fields, many of them addressing rural populations. Its activities relating to water management do not focus on investments in infrastructure, but on management capacity and water governance. The organization promotes approaches such as participation and river basin planning. Despite its massive and continued funding, USAID is criticized as being an agency that implements US political interests in partner countries, opening up markets for US companies and interfering with domestic political processes in favour of the US administration’s political agenda. Unsaturated zone Area located between the land surface and the water table of an aquifer. In that zone, the pore spaces in the soil are not constantly and totally saturated with water. They may contain water and air partially. Water in that zone is stored at a pressure inferior to the atmospheric pressure. Upstream and Downstream In the domain of water management these terms describe the spatial location of water users along a command area of a technical water delivery system or within the geography of a river basin. They describe the usually good water supply and few water quality concerns at the beginning of a watercourse or the upper parts of catchments (river basins) and the often difficult situation of users situated towards the end. For downstream users, because of sometimes unregulated access or discharge of waste and drainage by the upstream parties, the reliability, frequency and amount of water availability gives rise to quantity as well as quality concerns. It has to be noted that, in most temperate areas, quality concerns outweigh volumetric considerations by far, whereas in semi-arid and arid environments, with considerable irrigation infrastructure development, water withdrawal diminishes natural flows to such an extent that the downstream users only receive water that has been used several times and contains numerous residuals and pollutants. It should be noted here that water control is usually executed physically upstream with the help of infrastructure, whereas, downstream, water control within a basin in which there is an upstream riparian can only be executed using economic or military power. This upstream–downstream pattern is also reflected in the distribution of water-related benefits along the run of a river, as reliance on water as a vital production input for all economic activities also determines the production options for downstream uses and users. The expressions upstream and downstream correspond to the terms head-end and tail-end used to describe the spatial order and the water availability situation within irrigation schemes.

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V Virtual water Originally, the term was defined as the water needed to produce one unit of a staple crop, but in recent years the concept has been extended to include the amount of water needed to produce a unit of industrial product. Its origin lies in economics, where it was first used to depict the potential savings for waterscarce national economies of importing the water ‘embedded’ in food grains from other, water-rich regions. Rather than mobilizing scarce blue water for domestic food production, the widespread interpretation of virtual water’s utility is that green water can be imported virtually in the form of food in order to free water resources for other productive uses. The concept has been widely acknowledged by many people around the globe for its simplicity and potentially positive economic trade-offs. In some water-scarce MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries, the fight over (transboundary) water resources is part of the dominating sanctioned discourse of policymakers around the issue of water scarcity. This can be seen as a discursive construction of national identity through the struggle for water. Despite the wide utilization of the advantageous fact that water imported via food grains can save valuable water resources, in these countries the economic reality (showing a de facto dependency on food imports) is not publicized in order to sustain the political potential of story lines about the importance of self-sufficiency and thus the claims about, and the securitization of, transboundary water resources.

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W Water balance This concept is a major notion in the assessment of water resources. It expresses the balance between all the factors relating to the inflow (precipitation, recharge) and the outflow (withdrawal, consumptive uses, evaporation) of water. It may be used as an indicator of the overall status of the water resources of a basin or administrative unit (country). Reliable indicators are essential in order to achieve sustainable management and use of water resources. Water demand There are different ways to use water resources and thus different types of demand. They are generally classified in five categories/sectors: agricultural use for irrigation or watering animals, industrial use, domestic use, recreational use and environmental use. In several parts of the world, water demand already exceeds supply. This situation will probably continue to worsen in the future with both demographic growth and economic development, which often lead to a more ‘wasteful’ resource use (in the urban sector) and increased meat consumption (which necessitates feed grain, the transformation of which is an inefficient process from a water use perspective). In order to cope with this issue, there are two visions or strategies. First, the management of the water supply, with the aim of raising the supply of water by engineering solutions, such as water pumping from very deep-lying aquifers, desalinization, the construction of dams or water harvesting. Second, the management of demand, with the aim of lowering demand and raising the efficiency of water resource use. There are different possibilities such as: a) instituting a change in attitudes and habits in the consumption of water (in the agricultural sector this is only possible through a shift to low-consumptive crops and in the urban sector by the introduction of water pricing); b) a political solution that reallocates (see allocation) water from a high waterconsumptive sector (agriculture) to a less consumptive sector (urban and industrial sector); including c) the need to use new technologies that offer more control and fewer losses of the water resources in agriculture, for example different irrigation practices, such as drip or sprinkler irrigation instead of furrow or flood irrigation (depending on the crop), or a reduction in

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Water distribution the agricultural sector; and d) utilizing urban and industrial wastewater in the agricultural sector. Water dependency ratio Expresses the importance of the proportion of renewable water resources that originate outside the border of a country and thus the level to which a country depends on its neighbours regarding water resources. From a water politics perspective, the dependency ratio may prove very useful and may be considered as an element to take into account in studying conflict and co-operation among riparian states. On the other hand, it is questionable whether this dependency ratio takes into consideration the water footprint and the climatic conditions of a country. A country with a high dependency ratio may find itself in a position of hydropolitical weakness (depending on the country’s location) and may need to secure the element of its water resources that originate outside its borders. This situation may lead to conflict as well as co-operation at the basin level or on a wider problemshed level, also based on adaptive capacity. Water depletion / overexploitation Water is withdrawn at a greater rate than the rate of replenishment of the water resources (aquifer, reservoir or river), leading to a long-term water level decline (in aquifers, reservoirs or basins) in the event of continuous overuse. Overexploitation of water resources is the driver of basin closure. Water distribution Water distribution in non-pressurized systems is the task of canals; their characteristics depend on the water volumes conveyed, the geological situation (the larger and steeper a canal, the more concrete lining is necessary to avoid score; small canals on the lower hydraulic level of an irrigation scheme can be of clayey soil only), the availability of water, the initial costs of investment and date of construction. The interplay between hydraulic laws, the control infrastructure in use and the socio-technical linkages between techniques, users and providers often leads to typical patterns of distribution (proportional flow and rotational system, request system, head-end or tail-end control) along the command of irrigation canals (see irrigation schools). In a pressurized system, water is conveyed and delivered in closed pipes (of PVC or steel). The pressure necessary to overcome both the friction in pipes and the height differences (if water is being lifted vertically) is generated by pumps driven by combustion engines or electricity; pressure variations are regulated by valves. The advantages of pressurized systems include relative independence from topographic height differences and the possibility of conveying water below ground, thus saving space on the surface that would

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otherwise be intersected by canals and ditches (which necessitate bridges to cross them). On the other hand, pressurized systems necessitate a higher degree of financial and energy inputs, more know-how for operation and maintenance than visible (and thus permitting observation of flow) non-pressurized surface infrastructure and a higher level of water quality (sediment free, and less saline). Consequently, the system could be utilized for high-value cash crops, but it is doubtful whether it could be applied for poor small holders and subsistence agriculture. Hence, there may be a discrepancy between the goal of water savings and rural poverty reduction. Water footprint The water footprint is an indicator of water consumption (but should also take into consideration water pollution) that can be related to the consumption of goods and services by an individual, a product or an organization. It is thus a benchmark for quantitative water use, but it should also take qualitative issues into consideration. By relating to single units of consumer products, be they food or industrial products, the water footprint highlights the total volume of water resources necessary to produce and supply a product. It is thus a useful indicator in the debate about sustainable development and consumption. Table A1 presents the water footprint of some selected food items. Table A1 Water footprint of some selected food items (showing quantities without consideration of water quality necessary for production). Food item

unit

global average water footprint (litres)

Apple or pear Banana Beef Beer (from barley) Bread (from wheat) Cabbage Cheese Chicken Chocolate Coffee Cucumber or pumpkin Dates Groundnuts (in shell) Lettuce Maize Mango Milk Olives Orange Peach or nectarine Pork Potato

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

700 860 15,500 75 1,300 200 5,000 3,900 24,000 140 240 3,000 3,100 130 900 1,600 250 4,400 460 1,200 4,800 250

kg kg kg glass of 250 ml kg kg kg kg kg cup of 125 ml kg kg kg kg kg kg glass of 250 ml kg kg kg kg kg

(continued on the next page) 308

Water governance Table A1 (continued) Food item

unit

global average water footprint (litres)

Rice Sugar (from sugar cane) Tea Tomato Wine

1 1 1 1 1

3,400 1,500 30 180 120

kg kg cup of 250 ml kg glass of 125 ml

Source: Hoekstra, University Twente – The Water Footprint of Food, 2008.

Water governance In the late 1990s, after the concept of IWRM had become broadly used to stress the importance of an all-encompassing and integrated way to manage water, the term water governance was coined as the counterpart of the ‘good governance’ discussion advocated by the United Nations Development Programme. The analytical side of the literature on water governance can help to explain and frame the societal and political contexts in which decisions about water management are made, and which issue-linkages (see problemshed) exist in the hydropolitical complex. Water governance, according to the Global Water Partnership, refers to the range of political, social, economic and administrative systems that are in place to develop and manage water resources, and the delivery of water services, at different levels of society. Contrary to the deterministic notion of ‘good’ as opposed to ‘bad’ governance, the epistemic community that first used the term and set out to define it implicitly characterized water governance as the ‘efficient’ political way of making decisions, and acknowledged the broader socio-political context in order to have a level playing field for the successful implementation of IWRM. Hence, the debate about how to achieve the most socially desirable outcome and best conceptualizations of multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) around the narrower concept of IWRM necessarily led to the development of a broader concept. Water governance can thus also be conceptualized as a broader MSP that takes economic frameworks, societal perceptions and administrative systems into consideration—without the notion of being a hierarchical, manageable tool such as IWRM. Criticism of this latest water domain ‘buzzword’ relates to the fact that, despite the acknowledgement of the deeply political nature of water governance, it focuses on the institutionalized, legally organized forces present in society, whereas in fact a more chaotic environment with spontaneous appearances and coalitions can be expected. Another aspect is the implicit tendency of the prescriptive governance literature to deliver blueprint solutions—not only in relation to water governance but to all water ‘remedies’—that do not sufficiently consider contextual peculiarities, such as religious and cultural foundations of countries, and the socio-political and economic possibilities and priorities about which

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type of governance to provide, despite the ‘good’ tools to achieve it, like transparency, accountability, new public management and entrepreneurship or outsourcing. Water harvesting The desire and the technological approach to capturing and storing water from precipitation, either directly from fog or rain, or in most cases in the form of surface-runoff is defined as water harvesting. There are numerous techniques to retain water in a given region. They include a combination of capturing structures and a storage medium; the latter range from buckets and drums, through tanks, to the refilling of groundwater in aquifers near the surface. The approach has its roots in millennia-old practices of both rural and urban inhabitants around the world who were forced to dwell under conditions of water stress. As in the case of the large-scale capturing of surface water in dams, the harvesting or capture of water constitutes a technical intervention in the hydrologic cycle. Agricultural development efforts in arid and semi-arid conditions apply this approach from the plot to the river basin level. Difficulties for the efficacy and success of such intervention include the need for a combination of surface uses, whereby, in agricultural areas, crop production sometimes has to compete with water harvesting, and the need for appropriate and maintained infrastructure, such as small tanks or wells to refill an aquifer. From a river basin perspective it should be underlined that any intervention in the upstream part of a watershed that retains water causes a diminution of water availability downstream. Water management In order to make water available and accessible for human uses, to regulate adverse environmental conditions resulting from its utilization (or from its employment as a waste-carrier), and to safeguard multiple objectives, such as drinking water quality, irrigation water timing and quantity, and wetland quality, water needs to be managed. The more traditional understanding of water management comprises mainly technical responses and engineering solutions to develop water resources by infrastructure construction, managing natural flows, and by extensive supply-side management. This addresses the question of water availability from an environmental and civil engineering perspective, rather than from the demand side, where solutions are more likely to be successful if they address societal questions about the needs, habits and attitudes about water use (e.g., water saving) along with the technological solutions. During the early 1990s, the water community developed the concept of integrated water resource management. Like the traditional approach, it views water as a vital resource for human development; however, in the understanding of its advocates the stress lies now on the integration of all stakeholders in

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Water resources multi-stakeholder platforms, the acknowledgement of all uses, and comprehensive management on the river basin scale in a de-centralized manner, according to the principle of subsidiarity (see Integrated water resource management). Subsidiarity can potentially be organized according to lower hydrologic units, such as sub-basins of a bigger watershed; however, there is the danger of either just renaming existing bureaucratic structures or creating unnecessary and incongruent management organizations; these subsidiarity principles entail the danger of contradicting the principles of pure hydrologic boundary management. In its contemporary meaning, although hardly ever mentioned explicitly, water management is perceived as having a political nature; water allocation, economic valuation of water and the recognition of a multitude of actors, objectives and solutions, as well as the modes of interaction between the latter three are part of the range of political options available for water management in its broader sense. Over the decades, the concept of water management has thus evolved from a purely technical, engineering domain to a broader understanding about necessities, driving forces and consequences of intervention in the hydrologic cycle. Water markets In the debate about the economic valuation of water, the issue of trading water volumes or water rights is a crucial point. Advocated by many prominent resource economists and by some elements of hydrocracies, water markets are seen as a tool flexibly and efficiently to allocate water to the most economically beneficial uses. Although from a macro viewpoint this instrument seems a good solution to trade water within an administrative system (trade needs a proper legal definition of property and ownership of the resource), a closer look raises questions about the fairness, equity and feasibility of this approach. Agriculture, for instance, needs a comparatively large amount of water on account of the evapotranspiration of plants. The economic yield per unit of water input is considerably lower than that of an industrial process. Hence, economic competition for water in water-scarce environments could sound the death knell of the agricultural sector that in many countries serves as a major employment and livelihood-securing sector. Water resources The term resources is used extensively, and not only in the field of natural resource management (NRM). The common understanding of the word resource is that of an asset, a means of support to improve or sustain livelihoods and to be drawn upon for effective fulfilment of everyday needs. In the water domain, the expression is used interchangeably in its two meanings. The first carries the notion of reserve and represents the total 311

A–Z GLOSSARY

amount of water present in a spatial unit, such as a nation state or a river basin, over a certain period, usually one year. The second takes the developed amount of water into consideration. Thus it comprises only that share of the total hydrologic availability accessible for human uses through intervention in the hydrologic cycle by infrastructure and control and carries the notion of finiteness much more than the (as finite!) hydrologic figure derived from precipitation data. In the context of water management, contemporary concepts like IWRM frame the integrated management of water resources as the paramount objective, without making a distinction between developed or undeveloped resources; the expression in this case is an umbrella term for all manifestations of water and thus for the different technical and managerial approaches necessary to manage them in a holistic way (manifestations as diverse as, e.g., water stored in the soil profile, evaporation losses from reservoirs, drainage discharge, etc.). Water rights regimes In the process of human settlements along watercourses, with the exploitation and development of the latter and the increasing pressure on the resource on account of its finiteness and increasing demands made upon it, rights regimes developed and gradually evolved out of local water rights over time. Water rights are also mechanisms of allocation—an issue that becomes more pressing once a river basin approaches basin closure, and not only in recent years. However, it is important to note that water rights regimes, in terms of their conceptual understanding and justifications, originated in the development of British customary rule (having a legal status), as applied by settlers in the American South-west. Only later were regimes that were developed by users in customary/traditional irrigation situations added to the framework, although these differed in the ways in which resource claims were made, as a consequence of ancient traditions. In situations of ample supply within a river basin (where the availability of water significantly exceeds demand), the occupation of adjoining land and the development of control structures for the utilization of water is sufficient as a right, and this riparian regime does not need further regulation or administration in the form of permits or licences. The next evolutionary step in the development of water rights regimes is the appropriation doctrine: two distinct types exist, prior appropriation and proportional appropriation. Under the prior appropriation regime, rights can be inherited and traded; the proportional appropriation regime spreads the available water supply among all users according to differing criteria. In contrast to the riparian regime, the appropriation regimes are designed to address water shortages, and they differ in the resulting actions in times of scarcity. Seniority is the decisive factor for continued supply in the case of water shortage in a prior appropriation regime, and rights assigned later will

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Water scarcity not receive priority; thus the date of issuance assigns a security-related economic value. In the proportional appropriation system, water quantities are adjusted regularly to account for real availability and, if water is in short supply, all users share the restrictions equally. Water scarcity The natural availability or absence of water determines the degree of water scarcity, imposing water stress on the uses and users in water-scarce environments. Stress and scarcity, and the resulting water insecurity for people and economies, should be seen as the result of human intervention and uncoordinated, unsustainable socio-economic development. In general, scarcity is defined as a condition of imbalance between water supply and demand, its availability for states and communities in the light of existing and envisaged uses. Absolute water scarcity occurs where, even after the full utilization of all potential water-saving techniques, basic human needs can hardly be met; chronic water scarcity describes a situation where the given water practices (on the supply and the demand side) lead to restricted water availability for certain uses or during periods of the year. It is difficult to specify indicators that reliably convey the degree and extent of water scarcity; however, there is agreement in the water community that the different manifestations of water insecurity are the outcome of a combination of water uses (for drinking, domestic use, food production, economic activities) and that these uses are the root causes of the unavailability of enough water of sufficient quality. (The concept of scarcity itself has also to be defined: physical, economic, institutional and political scarcity can be distinguished.) General indicators define threshold values for a country’s state of water availability as a volume per capita measure (cu m per capita per year). However, the calculation of indicators is always based on an average figure of available water, without consideration of the possible severe variations in annual rainfall. Another issue to be considered in the interpretation of the indicators is the water volume used for computation: in many cases, transboundary water-sharing agreements exist, thus expanding the availability of water in addition to domestic resources. The Falkenmark index is commonly used, which defines 1,000 cu m per capita per year as the threshold for water scarcity, where environmental flows cannot be met all year long, and the availability for economic production is restricted and thus impedes growth; absolute scarcity is defined at an availability of 500 cu m per capita per year, when even domestic and drinking water needs are at risk. Concepts like scarcity or stress are based on assumptions about consumption habits and lifestyle patterns. Thus, absolute values like those mentioned above may not reflect the same severity for different cultures and nations, as the adaptive capacity to cope with environmental challenges is strongly based on cultural values and historical experiences.

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A–Z GLOSSARY

Statistics derived thus, though seemingly giving a good indication of the extent and severity of water scarcity, give only a rough overview. The calculation of water available for a nation is derived from hydrologic data and therefore does not necessarily include water that is not controlled technically and consequently cannot be made accessible for human consumption; hence a stream’s water-rich upper catchment can conceal the rest of the country’s water shortages in these indicators, as the precipitation and runoff data even include floods. First order water scarcity, focusing on quantitative availability, considers physical water endowments (i.e. all water resources, untapped as well as those controlled by infrastructure). Another aspect to be considered in relation to scarcity is the degree of societal responsiveness and adaptability; so-called second order water scarcity conceptualizes water scarcity as a relative problem much more than first order scarcity, and also implicitly entails the notion of social inability to adapt to, and cope with, scarcity. In countries with a low adaptive capacity because of traditional mindsets, or lifestyles that tend to waste water, water stress is likely to occur above the general thresholds; societal capacity (ingenuity, see Adaptive capacity) to adapt the way in which water is used and to implement technical responses is seen as the real determinant of the restrictions that a country may face on account of its hydraulic endowments. Despite all the shortcomings of general water indicators, it should be underlined that their use to inform non-water professionals and policymakers about the water situation has increased public attention and alertness about global water issues during the last decade. Water stress Water stress is defined by the Falkenmark index as the threshold value of 1,700 cu m of annual water availability per capita. Below this value (measured on the national level, and thus not representative of local situations, see water scarcity) not all demands for food supply (assuming national self-sufficiency), industrial and domestic uses can be satisfied. Below an annual availability of 1,000 cu m per capita, nations face scarcity, food self-sufficiency is out of reach and the meeting of other, domestic demands is problematic during some periods of the year or in certain regions. Absolute scarcity is, according to the Falkenmark index, reached at below the threshold value of 500 cu m. Interestingly, the needs-based assessment of basic water requirements does not take questions from the debate about water as a human right into account. Hence the ranges of threshold values are based on the assessment of actual practices and rate the thresholds where important needs can no longer be met—as opposed to the normative human rights discussion, in which only the baseline for drinking, food preparation and sanitation is considered. Nations under stress—normally situated outside the temperate, humid climate zone—are forced to develop responses to the reality of water stress. Both

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Water user association (WUA) the supply side and the demand side of the problem can be distinguished; conventional water management responses usually comprise water resource development to augment availability without restricting uses, or alternatively the encouragement of lower demand. An aggravating factor in the context of water-stressed nations (or of river basins that are on the basin closure trajectory) is a high dependency (see water dependency ratio) on transboundary waters. Water table Describes the level at which the soil is saturated with water. It separates the saturated zone from the unsaturated zone. It is the upper part of a groundwater body, typically called the saturated or vadose zone, with an upper limit that varies with groundwater recharge and blurs through capillary (see Capillarity) rise. The water table of a confined aquifer coincides with the upper aquitard, the impermeable layer sealing the water-carrying part against the overlying strata. The depth of the water table measured from the earth’s surface indicates the minimum level at which a well will have to be drilled to ensure water extraction. Water user association (WUA) A WUA is a group of water users (often dominated by agricultural users) along the technical-hydrologic boundaries of a water delivery (and, sometimes, drainage) system. These associations are usually responsible for operation and maintenance of infrastructure; sometimes they even become fully responsible owners of the systems. The idea to found user organizations developed in parallel with the evolution of irrigation management transfer, when state concerns about public expenditure called for increased user responsibility. The formation of WUAs was promoted with the story line about farmer empowerment, increased equity and efficiency. However, the realization of these positively connoted concepts largely depends on many factors, such as the ex-ante conditions of both institutions and economic viability, the reformers’ understanding of sustainability, the design of rules and regulations internally, enforcement mechanisms (either technical or managerial), and the legal recognition and accountability of these organizations at the national level. Usually, there is a discrepancy between the initial story line used to promote the reform and the results: the concepts of poverty reduction, equity and empowerment of farmers are both vague and susceptible to interpretation; thus the result is sometimes to drive small, nonmarket oriented producers out of the schemes to redistribute the remaining land (as part of an integrated land and water reform) among the more powerful farmers who are able to pay for the service fees. This constitutes an

315

A–Z GLOSSARY

overly strong focus on the economic aspect of sustainability while neglecting the social effects. A frequently neglected aspect is the limitation imposed on more equitable and accountable water control on account of the socio-technical distribution regime inbuilt in infrastructure, an issue usually only solvable by (costly) complete upgrading and modification of whole systems. Another critical issue is the question about the sectoral dominance within rural water user groups. While within the irrigation sector, equity, efficiency and other targets are embraced, the question of decision-making on water allocation between different sectors on the local level remains very often unsolved. Water wars In the 1990s, critical authors, representatives of international organizations and some scholars warned the public about the situation of water scarcity on the global scale. They used the water wars story line to stress the potential for violent conflict in the future. Since the first statements about the possible water wars were made, increased attention has been paid—not only by the scientific community but also by the media—to transboundary water conflict, a matter that increasingly informs hydropolitics and is part of hydropolitical complexes. Because of the absence of armed conflict about water as the primarily disputed issue, today many scholars do not believe in the potential for nations to go to war over water, as water is too vital to be violently fought over, and co-operation provides greater scope for mutual benefits. In addition, the economic view on water utilization and uses in water stress situations has provided the concept of virtual water as a conflict-avoiding and pressure-decreasing mechanism into which nations can tap. Very prominent examples of conflict situations in which water plays a key role are the Israeli– Palestinian conflict and the disputes about the waters in the Jordan basin between Israel and Jordan, where Israel is perceived to hold a hydro hegemonic position, restricting the other state’s water control possibilities through the creation of hydraulic infrastructure and occupation of territories. Here, the issue of water access and availability—which, under conditions of water scarcity such as prevails in the Middle East, is directly related to economic prospects—poses a considerable obstacle to successful peace talks and good neighbourly relations. However, on the local scale, violent conflicts about water are already a reality, although they receive less sensational media attention. The sometimes violent opposition in 1999 by citizens in Cochabamba, Bolivia, resembled a situation of civil war. Given the absence of a ‘classical’ armed forces assault, it is being called a water riot by many today. However, the uprising against an overnight change in water rights and subsequent drastic price increases was answered with immediate force of arms by the Government; hence it is up to the beholder to evaluate what is a ‘real’ water war and what is ‘just’ a riot. Another criterion to distinguish between different levels of water-related conflict is the question of the real issue at stake: is it about physical water

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World Bank volumes and intervention in flow regimes or rather about a changed societal value, a priority shift, like in the Cochabamba case, where public expenditure by local authorities was valued more highly than secure water and sanitation services for the urban poor? Since the Cochabamba incident, violent conflicts are a foretaste of what can happen if the economic principles favouring PPPs and privatization of public water services, enforced in this case by international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, are implemented. In the Cochabamba case, the reckless, profit-oriented transfer of public water delivery services directly contradicted the UN’s Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people not having adequate access to safe drinking water and improved sanitation by 2015. Well A well is the technical structure that permits the tapping of (access to) groundwater. It can be of a classical design, with reinforced walls and a visible water table (a dugwell) where water is lifted by wheels or buckets or, as is the practice with deeper-lying water resources, have the form of a steel pipe (a tubewell) where water is lifted with the help of pumps. Wetlands Wetlands are ecosystems that are essentially characterized by seasonal water flows. Unlike other natural habitats that need water to provide fauna and flora with the essential nutrients, wetlands are defined as grasslands or swamps where the soil is water saturated throughout, or for a large portion of, the year, or coastal lake and sea areas no deeper than 6 m. These special habitats not only provide essential ecosystem services for species such as waterfowl that largely depend on wetlands, or mammals that seek drinking water, but also supply ‘free’ environmental services by retaining water during rainy seasons, which protects downstream regions from flooding, by storing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the form of plant litter, and by filtering pollutants to a certain extent. White water White water is a concept used to quantify the share of water that directly reenters the atmosphere through evaporation. Together with green water and blue water, it gives a full picture of the different types or forms of water resources circulating in the hydrologic cycle. It should not be confused with the other water colour concepts of grey water and black water. World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution with its origins in the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreements. These agreements also gave birth to a twin

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institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The two institutions are part of the United Nations system and have 184 member countries. Their actions are complementary in order to achieve the improvement of global living standards. The World Bank is more focused on long-term economic development and global poverty reduction. Therefore, the Bank provides lowinterest loans, interest-free credits and grants to developing countries to achieve sectoral reforms or concrete projects for education, infrastructure, health or institutional reforms. The World Bank has a strong interest in water. The institution is officially committed to the Millennium Development Goal of halving by 2015 the proportion of people who do not have access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. This statement has been reaffirmed on various occasions and in various documents such as UN ‘Agenda 21’, the UN ‘Millennium Declaration’ or the UN ‘Johannesburg Plan of Implementation’. The World Bank is the largest financier in the water supply and sanitation sector. Along with its lending actions as a financial institution, the World Bank has become an important actor in the construction of the relatively recent discourse that has appeared on the international scene and that is shaping global water management. This discourse is based on the principles a) of greater involvement of the private sector in the water sector through privatization or PPP; b) that water has an economic value and should be considered as an economic good; and c) that water should be distributed on the basis of a full-cost-recovery policy. These principles are, according to their promoters, the solutions to every water issue and should also be the key to better access to water supply and sanitation. The discourse is accepted by the UN, which recognized the economic value of water in its Dublin Principles; but the biggest promoters of this discourse are the World Water Council, the Global Water Partnership and the Commission on Water for the 21st Century. These three interrelated international water agencies form a real network supporting the same vision of what water management should be, an epistemic community. The content of their respective reports and their ties to water companies and financial institutions leave no doubt about their role in the promotion of privatization in the water sector. Finally, the World Bank has the possibility through its loans and credits of imposing privatization of water services. Privatization of the water sector, especially the drinking water and sanitation sector, was and is a condition to access loans. World Health Organization (WHO) The global health organization WHO was founded in 1948. In its activities in relation to co-ordinating global efforts to improve health and security, the organization also touches upon the water domain. Here, its activities relate mainly to drinking water supply and sanitation services, as well as urban agriculture, wastewater reuse and related hygiene concerns.

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World Water Council (WWC) World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg 2002 The World Summit was held in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 26 August to 4 September 2002. It gathered together governments and heads of state, but also NGOs, representatives of the business sector and individuals. The summit’s message focused on the promotion of sustainable development—as it had also done at the Earth Summit in 1992 and the Stockholm Conference in 1972—and thus on the affirmation that human activity has consequences for the environment and that development needs to take this into account. The UN, through these conferences, also put emphasis on the necessity to avoid patterns of unsustainable consumption and production. Water resources fall logically within the scope of such discourse. The World Summit was a follow up to the Rio de Janeiro Conference (Earth Summit) convened 10 years previously. The World Summit, also known as Rio+10, was the occasion to analyze the progress made since the adoption of the Rio principles and Agenda 21 and the further steps that needed to be taken. The Johannesburg plan of implementation was adopted at the conference. It is a set of goals, recommendations and means of implementation to achieve sustainable development. Concerning water, the plan of implementation stipulates that the provision of clean drinking water and adequate sanitation is necessary to protect human health and the environment. In this respect, it was agreed to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water (as outlined in the Millennium Declaration, see Millennium Development Goals) and the proportion of people who do not have access to basic sanitation, including actions at all levels to: a) b) c) d)

Develop and implement efficient household sanitation systems; Improve sanitation in public institutions, especially schools; Promote safe hygiene practices; Promote education and outreach focused on children, as agents of behavioural change; e) Promote affordable and socially and culturally acceptable technologies and practices; f) Develop innovative financing and partnership mechanisms; g) Integrate sanitation into water resource management strategies. World Water Council (WWC) A non-governmental organization based in Marseille, France, advocating and lobbying for water development issues internationally. Like the Global Water Partnership (GWP), the WWC co-organizes the triennial World Water Forum. Critics argue that the strong institutional as well as personal linkages of the GWP and the WWC with the World Bank and private multinationals

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are proof of clearly profit-driven aspirations and neglect of criticism about adverse privatization effects. Former World Bank staff and employees of French branches of Suez or Vivendi (a former Veolia water branch) hold staff positions on the board of the council. The WWC positions itself as a global multi-stakeholder platform to gather together policymakers, companies, professionals and other non-governmental organizations. World Water Forum Following the trend for mega-conferences, emphasizing the participation of representatives not only from government and professional organizations, but also from civil society, the second World Water Forum (a conference in Marrakech, Morocco, had been the first) was convened by the Netherlands Government in The Hague in March 2000. The number of participants, topics discussed in workshop sessions and the variety of representatives increased dramatically compared with the Mar del Plata and the United Nations’ Dublin conference. The Forum took on a new quality because of its public nature and the stress on exchange and discussion rather than on speeches. Moreover, it was no longer organized by a body of the United Nations, but hosted by a national government and sponsored by the World Water Council. The subsequent World Water Forums in Kyoto, Japan (2003), Mexico City, Mexico (2006) and Istanbul, Turkey (2009) saw increasing numbers of participants; in Mexico for the first time an Alternative Forum was held and attracted more critical, civil society representatives. However, a critical reflection on the role, effects and developments of international water conferences leads to the acknowledgement of a standstill. The Mar del Plata meeting is seen by some as the main event on the international scale that brought together new ideas and many different views, but gradually the subsequent conferences developed to a lesser degree new pathways with the potential to lead to real movement and change in the world water situation. Given the amount of time and money invested in these fora, one could ask whether they largely constitute a stage for the production of discourses by the governments and professionals of this world who are driven by self-interest rather than by a problem-solving ambition. Other global environmental issues, such as climate change, environmental pollution or deforestation have resulted in global protocols, and both governmental and civic activities. It is therefore sobering to contemplate the few water-related and concerted actions that have been taken and the absence of recognition of the vital, pressing and important nature of water for all humans on the global scale.

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International River Basins Jens Treffner, Vincent Mioc and Kai Wegerich

Map 1 Amu and Syr Darya

Aral Sea (Amu Darya and Syr Darya) In the Central Asian region of the Aral Sea basin, two river systems, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, drain into the lake that has become famous for its disappearance since the beginning of the hydraulic mission at the beginning of the 1960s, with its large-scale expansion of the irrigated area. The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest lake on the planet. In Central Asia, the irrigated area increased from 5.4m. ha in 1950 to 9.4m. ha (within the Aral Sea basin, 7.4–7.9m. ha) in 1991 at the time of the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The expansion of the irrigated agricultural sector led first to the collapse of the fishing industry on the shores of the Aral Sea, then speeded up the rise of salinity within the lake, and eventually led to most of it drying up. The lake has split into three smaller lakes. Currently, a dam constructed on the northern shore (Kazakhstan side) protects some remaining flow of the Syr Darya from pouring into the wider Aral Sea salt desert lake beds. The dam stabilizes this small northern lake. On the south side, little flow from the Amu Darya reaches the former shores of the Aral Sea. Many small saline drainage lakes have been formed in the lower Amu Darya basin within Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Turkmen Government planned and started the construction of the Golden Age Lake in the Turkmen desert. It is planned to divert Turkmenistan’s drainage waters and some of the drainage flow from Uzbekistan’s territory to the south of the Amu Darya towards this artificial lake. THE AMU DARYA BASIN

The Amu Darya is the largest river in Central Asia. Its length is 2,540 km and its catchment area comprises 309,000 sq km. The average annual flow in the basin is 79.3 cu km, mainly created in the upstream riparian states, Tajikistan (49.6 cu km) and Afghanistan (10–20 cu km). The Amu Darya basin is shared by Afghanistan, Iran and four Central Asian Republics: Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The basin can be described as a large drainage system that terminates in the Aral Sea. The Amu Darya originates in Afghanistan on the glacier in the Vakjdjir Pass. Up to its confluence with the Vakhsh (from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan), the Amu Darya is called the Pyanj. On its way to the Aral Sea the river upstream is the boundary between Afghanistan and Tajikistan as well as Uzbekistan, but also crosses international boundaries mid- and downstream between Turkmenistan 323

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and Uzbekistan. Since some of the upstream—and the whole mid- and downstream—part of the Amu Darya were within one country at the time of the USSR, a basin approach was utilized within the mid and lower part of the Amu Darya. This included the construction of water supply infrastructure that was transboundary in nature. The Amu Darya irrigates an area of 467,000 ha in Tajikistan, 2,300,000 ha in Uzbekistan, 1,700,000 ha in Turkmenistan, 65,000 ha in the Kyrgyz Republic and about 200,000 ha in Afghanistan. The existence of large irrigated areas in the downstream states Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan highlights the inequitable distribution of the water resources within the basin. The USSR had a hegemonic position towards its weaker neighbour, Afghanistan. A meeting of the Scientific and Technical Council of the Ministry of Water Resources of the USSR (1987) determined allocations to the four Soviet Republics in the basin: Kyrgyz Republic (0.4 cu km), Tajikistan (9.5 cu km), Uzbekistan (29.6 cu km) and Turkmenistan (22.0 cu km). Afghanistan did not participate in the meeting. The limits set in 1987 simply assumed a utilization of 2.1 cu km by Afghanistan. At the Kerki metering station (upper midstream), the water flow between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan is divided into two equal shares (of 22 cu km each). About half of Turkmenistan’s share (10 to 12 cu km) is diverted from the Amu Darya into the Karakum canal (length: 1,400 km), and this brings the water from the north-east to the south-west of Turkmenistan. On the way, the Karakum canal is joined by different rivers coming from Afghanistan and Iran. The water flow is utilized for irrigation. Within the Amu Darya basin, the most significant reservoir for irrigated agriculture is the Tuyamuyun reservoir (live storage: 5.4 cu km) located on the lower Amu Darya. The Tuyamuyun reservoir is a transboundary reservoir. The storage area is within two countries, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The upstream Nurek reservoir in Tajikistan, on the tributary Vakhsh, has only a relatively small live storage (4.5 cu km). It appears that the Nurek reservoir was built mainly for hydropower generation for the neighbouring states. However, the high cost of constructing a transmission line led to the utilization of some of the hydropower in South Tajikistan itself, where an aluminium plant has been established. There are no agreements between Tajikistan and the downstream riparian states in relation to the Nurek reservoir, even though the water level variation at Nurek reservoir is characterized by a continuous decrease during the winter and spring months until the minimum level is reached in May. Within the mid and lower Amu Darya basin, the water infrastructure supplying Uzbekistan is partly located in Turkmenistan. Therefore, it was a matter of high security for Uzbekistan to come to a stable agreement with Turkmenistan. This agreement was reached as far back as 1996. Uzbekistan agreed to pay to Turkmenistan US $11.4m. annually as land rent for the Bukhara and Kashkardarya pump stations, as well as for the water storage area of the Tuyamuyun reservoir. The Bukhara pump station (lift: 115 m)

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Aral Sea transfers water from Amu Darya to the Zerafshan basin and supplies a total of 290,000 ha; the Kashkardarya pump station (lift: 132 m) transfers water from Amu Darya to the Kashkardarya basin and supplies a total of 300,000 ha. In addition, within the territory of Uzbekistan the Amu Zang pumping station (lift: 60 m to 100 m) transfers water from Amu Darya to the Surkhandarya basin and supplies up to 143,000 ha. The existing and likely rising costs of electricity will put in question the viability of these irrigation schemes. To increase its energy output, Tajikistan is planning to recommence the construction of the Rogun reservoir, 100 km north-east of the Tajik capital—a project that was started during the Soviet period, but stopped with the Tajik civil war. The Uzbek Government is highly critical of the Rogun dam because it would put Tajikistan firmly in control of the river. However, different stages are proposed for Rogun. In Stage I, Rogun is supposed to provide an annual energy output of 5.6 TWh (terawatt hours). For this purpose, the height should be 225 m, with a live storage of 1.92 cu km. In Stage II, the dam height is supposed to be raised to 285 m (live storage: 3.98 cu km), and in Stage III to 335 m (live storage: 10.3 cu km). It appears, therefore, that neither Stage I nor Stage II would put Tajikistan in full control of the Vakhsh basin; it is only in Stage III that this would occur. Consequently, only Stage III could be interpreted by Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan as a potential threat to their agricultural production. THE SYR DARYA BASIN

The Syr Darya rises in the Tien San Mountains of the Kyrgyz Republic. It is the longest river in Central Asia. Its length is 3,019 km, with a catchment area of 219,000 sq km. The annual flow in the Syr Darya basin averages 37.2 cu km. The river is shared by four Central Asian republics: Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. Up to its confluence with the Karadarya (also from Kyrgyzstan), the Syr Darya is called the Naryn, which contributes about 30% of total runoff. Within the Ferghana valley smaller tributaries (including the Karadarya) have a total annual runoff of 11.7 cu km. Other main tributaries are the Chirchik midstream and the Arys and Ahangaran downstream within Kazakhstan. On the way to the Aral Sea, the Syr Darya crosses international boundaries midstream between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, then enters Tajikistan, goes back to Uzbekistan and finally into Kazakhstan. Since the whole basin was within one country during the period of the USSR, a basin approach was utilized. This included inequitable allocation of the water resources as well as the construction of reservoirs in the upstream Soviet republics to facilitate irrigation expansion in the downstream riparian republics. Within the Syr Darya basin, the irrigated areas consist of about 410,000 ha in the Kyrgyz Republic, 271,000 ha in Tajikistan, 1,883,000 ha in Uzbekistan and 786,000 ha in Kazakhstan. Within the Syr Darya basin, Tajikistan as well

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as Uzbekistan depend to different degrees on lift irrigation. The existing and likely rising costs of electricity will put in question the viability of these irrigation schemes. In 1984 the water distribution limits for the Syr Darya were determined by the Soviet Government. These limits assume full use of the internal water resources of the basin. The allocations are as follows: Kyrgyz Republic (4.0 cu km), Tajikistan (2.5 cu km), Uzbekistan (19.7 cu km) and Kazakhstan (12.3 cu km). As already stated, a basin rather than an administrative boundary approach allowed the construction of reservoirs in upstream republics that facilitated irrigation expansion in downstream republics. Within the Syr Darya basin, three reservoirs, Toktogul, Andijan and Kairakum deserve special attention: Toktogul because of its live storage that allows Kyrgyzstan to control the Naryn (live storage: 14 cu km); Andijan because of its transboundary nature (live storage: 1.8 cu km); and Kairakum because of its strategic location (live storage: 2.6 cu km). At the Kairakum reservoir, the Syr Darya leaves the Ferghana valley and water is allocated to Uzbekistan and a small part of South Kazakhstan Province (Dustlik canal), before the Syr Darya reaches the Chardara reservoir in Kazakhstan. Owing to the focus on irrigation, the upstream water management constructions in the Syr Darya basin, such as dams and reservoirs, did not produce hydroelectric power when it was most needed in the upstream regions, that is, during the winter season. The dams released water during the summer, when the downstream riparian administrative units needed it for agriculture. With the collapse of the USSR and the privatization of industries, the prices of traded commodities such as coal, natural gas and oil rose to international levels, whereas the price of electricity remained artificially low. Under these circumstances, continuing to operate Toktogul reservoir in irrigation mode created disadvantages for Kyrgyzstan, which could not afford to pay the higher prices and import enough fossil fuels for its winter needs of power and heat. Therefore, Kyrgyzstan decreased its average level of summer releases from 75% (8.1 cu km) to average releases of 45% (6.1 cu km) during the period 1991 to 2000. Even though this shift looks quite dramatic, one has to consider that, before 1990, large releases were made at times to prevent overfilling of the reservoir. The average release for irrigation was around 6.5 cu km. The summer water releases after independence have also been around 6.5 cu km when necessary, but water releases when other resources are plentiful have dropped to an average of 5.5 cu km. The situation in the north of Tajikistan was similar. Here, the Kairakum reservoir was operated in irrigation mode during the existence of the USSR. The reservoir (125 MW— megawatts) is the only source of electricity within the northern part of Tajikistan. After independence, in winter the reservoir was operated to maximize electricity generation, and this exacerbated the problems for the downstream riparian states. The capacity of the Chardara reservoir is not high enough to cope with winter releases at Toktogul, and ice jams in the lower Syr Darya limit the capacity to transport surplus flows to the Aral Sea. As a result, the 326

Aral Sea excess water is spilled from the Chardara reservoir into the Arnasai Depression in Uzbekistan. The agreement of 17 March 1998 between the Governments of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan did not lead to stability. Currently, bilateral protocols have been signed only between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan on the operation of Toktogul and between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan on the operation of Kairakum. Despite the agreement between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it is not evident that agreement between the most downstream and the most upstream riparians results in Kazakhstan receiving its water. Even though Kyrgyzstan tried to be energy self-sufficient, it was unable to meet its winter peak demands for energy. Given the lack of other natural energy resources and the high potential for hydropower production within the territory, Kyrgyzstan was planning to revive the former Soviet plans to construct more hydropower infrastructure: Kambarata 1 (live storage: 3.4 cu km) and 2 (live storage: minimal) on the tributary Naryn of the Syr Darya. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have protested against the construction plans. Given that Toktogul already controls the Naryn, it appears strange that the downstream riparian states would contest Kambarata 1. Nevertheless, if Kyrgyzstan operated Kambarata 1 at the same time as Toktogul, there could be even more spills into the Arnasai Depression. From an economic perspective, it seems that the costs of electricity generated at Kambarata 1 and 2 would be too high, and therefore the electricity could not be sold profitably within Kyrgyzstan or to the neighbouring countries.

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Map 2 Colorado Basin

Colorado-Rio Grande-Tijuana

An interesting example that illustrates the large variety of approaches to dealing with transboundary hydropolitics is the case of the three basins of the Tijuana, the Colorado and the Rio Grande rivers shared by the USA and Mexico. In the semi-arid environment of northern Mexico and the American southwest, water withdrawals for irrigation traditionally play an important role, but the precipitation contributing to the flow in the Tijuana, Colorado and Rio Grande basins, with catchment areas of 4,532 sq km, 629,100 sq km and 607,965 sq km, respectively, is comparatively low to negligible, especially in the dry downstream areas of each catchment. All three basins are characterized by over-commitment of water for various sectors, and the drainage and pesticide outflow from agricultural water use causes significant environmental degradation downstream. The Colorado’s water originates in the southern Rocky Mountains; there is no considerable precipitation on Mexican territory. During the late 19th century, and even more so during the first half of the 20th century, water resource development took place on both sides of the border. Water withdrawals were mainly dedicated to irrigation in the otherwise dry region and were utilized considerably to improve agricultural land productivity in Utah, Arizona and California. The high evaporative demands of such water utilization and the adverse affects on river quality, affected by saline drainage outflow, led to drastically diminished flows of the Colorado on the Mexican side and high concentrations of salts and agricultural pollutants. At the beginning of the 20th century Mexico was still in a position to negotiate improved water availability and quality for its own irrigated lands, since a canal to provide irrigation water to California’s south-western Imperial Irrigation District situated on Mexican territory could be used as a reciprocal bartering issue. With the increased upstream control by the USA at the Hoover Dam (damming Lake Mead) and later on the Glen Canyon Dam (damming Lake Powell), as well as a water carrier providing water to south-western California (and thus to the Imperial Irrigation District), Mexico’s position weakened considerably. Water resources in the Colorado basin today are over-allocated, the portion finally draining into the sea being of low quality. The Rio Grande springs in the USA, but has a large portion of its watershed on Mexican territory. When at the beginning of the 20th century investment in irrigation in the state of Texas skyrocketed, Mexico took 329

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advantage of this development, and of the increased drinking water needs of the USA’s lower Rio Grande population, to negotiate on the basis of prior use rights along the river that partially marks the border between the two nations. In the case of the Tijuana, the river descends from California into Mexico and back into the USA again. During the course of negotiations over the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers between Mexico and the USA, the inhabitants of the city of San Diego, dependent on the Tijuana for drinking water supply at that time, asked the Government to include their basin in the negotiations with Mexico as there was fear of Mexico retaining and later on selling the water, as in this case it was in a stronger position than the USA. This hydro-geographic situation opened the possibility for the two riparians to negotiate over the three basins, having similar utilization targets on both sides of the border, in one agreement. Although on both sides of the national borders several federal states are part of the watershed of each basin, the USA and Mexico finally combined all three basins in their treaty, reflecting the hydrologic situations of the catchments’ runoff coming from either side of the frontier. The agreement between the two states had been under negotiation since 1927 but was only signed and ratified in 1945 after serious opposition within the two nations against a linkage of all three basins within one transboundary co-operation agreement. The treaty was only achieved by national tactics—facilitated by the fact that, within the administrative system, transboundary resources were a responsibility of the federal Government—and a trade-off between the basins of spatial costs and benefits (more water for Mexico along the downstream part of the Colorado secured water availability for the downstream US states in the cases of Rio Grande and Tijuana). The International Boundary and Water Commission is in charge of monitoring and joint management; despite this emblematic achievement in the hydropolitics domain, water quantity and quality concerns persist on both sides of the border.

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Danube

Europe’s largest transboundary watercourse, the Danube, covers a catchment area of 817,000 sq km. Its headwaters lie in Germany. Other riparians, all countries contributing to the runoff of the catchment on its way to the Black Sea, include Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Ukraine, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Italy, Slovenia, BosniaHerzegovina, Macedonia and Albania. It has been a major navigation watercourse since ancient times and is approximately five times larger in size and discharge than the Rhine, another European basin. Since 1992, these two basins have been interlinked for navigational purposes through the RhineMain-Danube channel, connecting the two main European waterways and their ports between Rotterdam in the Netherlands and the Black Sea. Early human interventions in the natural flow regime of the Danube date back to the 15th century, when dikes were constructed to control floods. Over the centuries, objectives and infrastructural measures evolved and resulted in control weirs, drainage channels and pumping stations until the 19th century. With the advent of hydropower plants and dredging activities to meet the interests of the Habsburg empire ruling in the middle and lower reaches of the basin, the hydrologic flow regime of the stream changed drastically. Causes for this are the trapping of sediments in reservoirs, and the deepening of the river bed and its lining; the effects were more frequent flood events in what today are the Danube plains of Slovakia and Hungary. The infrastructural activities designed to enable navigation and hydropower generation resulted in considerable decline of the Danube aquifer, Europe’s largest natural freshwater reservoir underlying an area between the Slovak capital of Bratislava and Nagymaros in Hungary, and led to degradation of adjoining freshwater ecosystems. However, environmental and economic concerns also gave birth to plans dating back to the 1950s, when, under the Warsaw Pact, plans were proposed mutually to develop hydropower infrastructure. The approval of such a plan in the 1960s was accompanied by increased concerns about the environmental impact of power generation by fossil sources of energy in the socialist republics of Czechoslovakia and Hungary. An agreement on the specifics, objectives and the sharing of costs of the project, the GabcikovoNagymaros project (GNP), was signed in 1977, stating joint financing, investment and benefit-sharing and its single and indivisible character as the pillars of co-operation. However, political and economic challenges during the 1980s and early 1990s significantly altered formerly envisaged outcomes. 331

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Works on the Hungarian side of the project at Nagymaros that, according to the agreement should have been finalized by the end of 1989, were delayed as a result of mounting economic constraints and growing concerns about the hydrologic and environmental effects (aquifer drawdown, siltation of the old riverbed), and came to a standstill in 1989; in 1992, Hungary unilaterally announced the invalidity of the treaty. Czechoslovakia inherited the Gabcikovo part of the project after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and continued the works on its own behalf. The so-called Variant C was seen as a temporary solution to continue the former bilateral project. It involved a limited range of construction works involving a flow-control weir and a hydropower dam, and the damming works were completed in October 1992. The resulting drop in water level of the Danube downstream, on account of the filling of the new structures, caused an international conflict between Hungary and the newly established Slovak Republic (that officially split from the Czech Republic in 1993), where the infrastructure is situated. Mediation efforts on the part of the European Commission, which conducted accession talks with both nations, did not result in satisfactory outcomes for either conflict partner; hence the case was submitted to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) after both sides committed to the non-political resolution mechanism for the conflict. This marks the first time in history that a case of conflict about nonnavigational issues between two basin states was submitted to the ICJ. After several years of information gathering and consultation, the court ruled in 1997. Its verdict found Hungary guilty of one-sided withdrawal from the 1977 treaty and Slovakia guilty of one-sided implementation of its plans, in a judgment based on the principles of equitable and reasonable use of international watercourses. It also requested the two opponents to come up with a roadmap for the resolution of the situation within half a year of the verdict. However, a separation of the interwoven legal and technical aspects of the conflict had already been attempted by both parties in a 1995 bilateral agreement addressing questions of joint monitoring, data exchange and evaluation. The mutual efforts continued after the ICJ ruling and since then have constituted a working basis for future treaties, none of which exists currently. Bi-national working groups exist instead, meeting regularly to discuss one or more of the following topics: ecology, water management, energy and navigation. The separation of legal-political aspects from management aspects in this case is perceived as beneficial for constructive negotiations and the identification of viable options, and in the political sphere rumours are voiced by representatives of a technocratic denomination that some day the GNP project will be implemented as initially planned three decades ago. Observers of the conflict today comment that in the end it was not only the ICJ’s ruling and its concomitant obligations, nor the establishment of technical committees to negotiate solutions, that enabled conflict resolution. More likely it was the political will of both states’ representatives in the light of EU and NATO accession talks to prove their responsibility and capability in international co-operation, hence creating an enabling ‘problemshed’ for the water-related dispute. 332

Danube Today, the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR) acts as a multinational river basin platform for co-ordination and management of the basin and interactions among its inhabitants. It is in charge of implementing the Danube River Protection Convention and, since 2006, is responsible also for the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive within all relevant EU member states. The implementation here has to meet additional challenges as some of the co-basin states are not EU members (Ukraine, Moldova, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia).

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Map 3 Euphrates-Tigris

Euphrates-Tigris

The biblical rivers of the Fertile Crescent, the Euphrates and Tigris, surrounding the Garden of Eden, both have their source in the north-eastern region of Turkey. The Euphrates-Tigris basin is situated primarily in three countries: Turkey, Syria and Iraq, Iran being an upstream riparian of some Tigris tributaries and usually not involved in the multipartite river basin conflicts. The Euphrates-Tigris’ catchment area comprises 35,600 sq km, with the vast majority of the discharge coming from the snow-capped mountains in Turkey’s Anatolia region. The Euphrates on average carries significantly more water than the Tigris. The basin’s water resource development has a millenniaold history manifest in the early irrigator cultures of the Babylonian and Sumerian empires. Both the Tigris and the Euphrates originate in Turkey, which contributes the vast majority of the flow to the Euphrates. The two rivers account for a third of Turkey’s surface water supply. The Euphrates flows into Syria before joining the Tigris in Southern Iraq. The Tigris flows as the natural border between Syria and Turkey and later into Iran before draining into Iraq to form the Shatt-al-Arab, which finally drains into the Arabian Gulf. The Euphrates in Turkey has four major tributaries: the Karasu, the Murat, the Munzur and the Peril. After leaving Turkey, the Euphrates has only one important tributary, the Khabur, which joins the main stream in Syria. Turkey also contributes to a great deal of the waters of the Tigris but in a less important way than to the waters of the Euphrates. The Tigris has four main tributaries: the Great Zab, the Lesser Zab, the Diyala and the Adhaim, all joining the main stream in Iraq. The lengths of the main streams are 2,330 km for the Euphrates, 1,718 km for the Tigris, and 190 km for the Shatt al-Arab. Although Turkey has abundant water resources compared to its Middle Eastern neighbours, they are unevenly distributed (seasonal and geographic variations of precipitations are characteristic of the region), with most of the precipitation falling in the mountainous regions in the north-east of the country. The flows of both rivers are quite variable from one season to another and/or from one year to another. The natural flow of the Euphrates is generally estimated at around 30m. cu m at the Turkish–Syrian border and 31–32m. cu m at the Syrian–Iraqi border. The Tigris river in Turkey has an annual natural average flow of around 20–21m. cu m. In Iraq, where the 335

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Tigris is joined by important tributaries, the annual average flow can amount to a maximum of 70m. cu m. The region has already faced high political tensions over water-related issues—the share of the Tigris and Euphrates and also the question of the use of the Orontes river (shared by Lebanon and Syria, as upstreamers, and Turkey), over land (the province of Hatay annexed by Turkey in 1939 and still claimed by Syria), over border security relating to Kurdish autonomy efforts in both Turkey and Iraq, and over Syria’s support of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). The invasion of Iraq by the USA-led coalition in 2003 and the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime created uncertainty about the future of relations between the states in the region. The three basin states have experienced conflict regarding their use and share of the water resources of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers since the 1960s. The three states rely heavily on the resources of these rivers in order to assure the development of their agriculture, energy production and thus their economy. Turkey’s upstream position on these rivers and its claim to absolute sovereignty over the waters springing within its territory are a source of tensions within the basin. From the 1930s, the Turkish Government felt that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers had great potential for irrigation and energy development. Turkey relies heavily on the waters of these two rivers because it wants to develop its agriculture and its energy production to assure its economic growth. Since 1977 projects relating to these rivers have been gathered in one multisectoral single project. Located on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Turkey, the GAP (Güneydog˘ u Anadolu Projesi, often referred to as the Greater Anatolia Project) is the most important investment and development project undertaken by the Turkish authorities. The GAP area lies in south-eastern Turkey and straddles nine provinces. The GAP is first and foremost seen as a way to exploit the resources of south-east Anatolia and to develop this region, which is characterized by higher population growth rates and lower GDP per capita than other regions in Turkey. The GAP is conceived as a way to eliminate the interregional social and economic disparities within Turkish borders. The optimal use of land and water resources is considered as an important means to achieve this objective. The GAP area represents about 10% of Turkey’s surface area. If the GAP were fully implemented, 21 dams, 19 hydroelectric power plants and two irrigation tunnels would be built on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and their tributaries. The Ataturk Dam and the Sanliurfa Tunnel System (conveying water for agriculture to fertile but dry plains), the centrepieces of the project, are already completed and in operation, whereas another mega-construction in the region—the Ilisu Dam—is presently being questioned by the international community and donors, as well as by local citizens who would be driven off their land (and potentially resettled) if the construction went ahead. The financing of the costly GAP infrastructure has always been an important and difficult issue for Turkey. In 1994, compliance with multilateral liberalization, privatization and structural adjustment policies allowed the

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Euphrates-Tigris country to receive World Bank loans to secure construction activities. In recent years, the funding has again become problematic as international donors and investment companies face strong and co-ordinated protest from internationally operating non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Turkish civil society actors who claim that the social (resettlement), environmental (decrease of downstream flows and diminished water quality caused by agricultural drainage), historical (flooding of archaeological sites of interest in Turkish valleys) and regional (depriving downstreamers of their vital water supply) effects are too severe to be compensated for by the weak and limited improvements in agricultural or energy production. Since Turkey’s GAP project is designed to improve the control and use of the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, it inevitably reduces the quantity and quality of water flowing into Syria and Iraq—and thus adds to the tensions between the river riparians. Syria itself has ambitions to further improve its agricultural productivity and its electricity generation in order to develop its economy. It relies heavily on the waters of the Euphrates and has built dams—the Tabqa being the best known—and power plants in order to secure water supply. As a downstream riparian, Syria continuously voices its fears of becoming completely dependent on Turkey’s use of the waters of the Euphrates and protests in international fora, as the terms of water allocation can be dictated by Turkey (in theory, the storage capacity of Turkish dams is large enough to cut off the river flows for several months!). The tensions between Syria and Iraq reached their peak when Syria filled Lake Assad reservoir and consequently reduced the flow of the Euphrates dramatically. In 1975, Iraq accused Syria of holding back water and asked the Arab League to intervene. Syria, dissatisfied with the negotiation process, pulled out of the Arab League Committee formed to mediate the conflict. By the end of May 1975, the dispute had escalated to a more serious level and threatened to turn violent. Syria closed its borders and airspace to Iraq, and both countries transferred troops to their mutual borders. Saudi Arabia mediated in the conflict, and a deal was reached. Although the agreement was not made public, it is said that Syria agreed to keep 40% of the water from the Euphrates river within its borders and to let the remaining 60% flow into Iraq. In 1990, this agreement was updated, but there is uncertainty about actual compliance with the contracts on account of the unclear political scenario in Iraq. Iraq is in a particular situation as it has been exposed to years of war with Iran and invasions by the multinational coalitions during the Gulf Wars. Its development has been rendered difficult by these events, and much hydraulic infrastructure has been destroyed (dams, water purification and pumping installations, distribution facilities). Iraq, characterized by its oil economy and by its significant food imports, tried during the 1980s to develop its agriculture in order to assure at least modest food security with an important dam construction programme, and thus also relied on the waters of the Tigris

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and Euphrates rivers. The use of these rivers and water allocation by its upstream neighbours is important for Iraq as these water resources will certainly play their role in its reconstruction. In summary, the three basin states rely heavily and increasingly (as a result of demographic growth) on the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to assure their development or to cope with future challenges. It is important to note that water became a regional issue when the three riparians began to initiate major development projects, the downstream riparians being first to realize their projects in the 1970s for fear of upstream appropriation. As water-sharing has already been the source of tensions and conflict, some authors argue that water disputes could lead to more serious situations in the future. Nevertheless, some steps have been taken in favour of co-operation in the form of bilateral agreements relating to other political issues in the region, such as Turkish aspirations to become an EU member, or US interest in secured water supply for Iraq, where global interests are affected. However, a trilateral accord is still lacking (see also Chapter 6 of this book).

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Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna basins The three rivers, although separate hydrologic systems, share a common terminus in the Bay of Bengal and together cover a large part of the Indian subcontinent. The tributaries and main branches of the sacred rivers (the Ganges and the Brahmaputra in the Hindu religion) spring in the Indian, Nepali and Tibetan Autonomous Region of China’s Himalayas; the total drainage area covers parts of China, Myanmar, Nepal, India and Bangladesh, and all of Bhutan, with altogether 1,634,900 sq km of surface area. The flow of the three main rivers is characterized by seasonal floods caused by monsoon rains and snowmelt in the Himalaya. This causes frequent flooding in the deltaic regions of Bangladesh (the majority of the nation lies in the delta) and India, as well as the delivery of fertile silt and pollutants originating from unregulated sewerage use, agricultural runoff and industrial activities. Bangladesh is the downstream nation of this multinational transborder river basin, and is regularly affected by the effects of monsoon floods and dry season droughts (from a water-quantity viewpoint) and severe pollution by all riparian states and sectors. The basins cover approximately 10% of the earth’s surface area, home to 500,000m. people and also two-fifths of the poor of the developing world. However, because of the constant delivery of fertile silt from the geologically active and young Himalayas and the river headwaters, and the abundance of water during the monsoon period (when, during a couple of months, rains accumulate water depths of up to several metres!), since ancient times the basin has been considered the breadbasket of the subcontinent. The expectations, interests and objectives conceived by the riparian states concerning water resources development are a result of the combination of climatic conditions, the topography, the socio-economic situation, riparian position and state of development experienced by the respective co-basin state. Numerous water-related concerns are evident in the basins along the rivers’ flows until they drain into the Bay of Bengal. Interests include navigational uses, irrigation, drinking water, domestic as well as industrial uses and, increasingly in recent decades, the generation of hydropower. The three separate river basins link the basin states hydrologically (especially the Ganges and Brahmaputra between India and Bangladesh), and contested issues are highly related (a problemshed). However, from a river basin management perspective it makes sense to treat the main river basins separately in order to 339

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achieve successes stepwise, as the riparians along the transnational watercourses have differing agendas. For the sake of clarity, we will do this in the following section, while acknowledging that, for Bangladesh, as the downstream nation situated at the confluence of all three international rivers, the ‘complete’ river basin approach to co-operation and conflict resolution may still be the most logical way to go. Bangladesh strongly favours basin-wide river management regimes, which is a comprehensible position given the downstream riparian’s weak negotiating position. However, India has opted for the negotiation of bilateral accords to avoid multilateral agreements that would potentially oblige it to make more extensive concessions to its neighbours. India plays a major part in the hydropolitics of the basin, as it does in the case of the Indus basin. This is partially a result of its midstream position along the Ganges (relative to upstream Nepal and downstream Bangladesh), but also of its influential role as a hydro-hegemony in the whole region’s problemshed. Nepal, as another major contributor to the Ganges’ discharge, is in an optimal situation concerning the potential for hydropower generation. However, co-operation between India and Nepal on the mutual development of water resources was difficult for decades until the 1996 signing of the Mahakali Treaty in relation to the transboundary tributary; however, despite the agreement, to date the treaty has not been implemented. Thus, a perceived breaking-of-the-ice and changes of co-operation paradigms between the two neighbours about agreed water resource exploitation and mutual benefitsharing has not been achieved. Although this process was beneficial for both riparians despite their very different objectives, the potential development benefits that could easily be generated by hydropower development (which, in the form of a storage dam, as opposed to run-of-the-river system, would at the same time constitute flood control options and the opportunity for dry season flow augmentation to flush the massive silt deposits delivered from the mountains) are yet to be realized. Co-operation of this kind exists between India and Bhutan, where the small kingdom as an upstream riparian realized the benefits of co-operation on hydropower generation along a Brahmaputra tributary by engaging in joint construction efforts and concluding a contract for the sale of surplus energy to India. China and India, the region’s superpowers in economic as well as in military terms, have had difficult political relations, and the atmosphere between the two remains relatively tense; thus the water resource issue is largely untouched in bilateral talks, which are characterized by rivalry about influence in the region. In light of the gigantic water transfer projects from China’s southern territories to the closed river basins in the north of the country, transfers from the Brahmaputra basin are also envisaged, as well as the construction of gargantuan reservoirs for hydropower generation. The most famous bone of contention is the Farakka barrage situated several kilometres upstream of the Indian–Bangladeshi border. It was unilaterally designed and constructed by India and completed in 1974. The purpose was

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Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna basins to provide low-saline water for the city of Kolkata situated on the southern end of the river known as Bhagirati or Hooghly and, at the same time, to allow flushing of silt out of Kolkata port to avoid increased dredging and to provide continued navigability during the dry season. For downstream riparian Bangladesh, the effect of water diversion during the dry season is decreased water availability and quality on account of a higher level of salinity in the groundwater, caused geologically by arsenic from aquifer sediments. The basins’ water issues can thus be summarized as: a) the utilization of water for power generation; and b) the regulation of flows over time. The two are intrinsically linked by the engineering approach to dam construction. However, the potential benefits of flood management for the flood-prone areas of Bangladesh and the north-western federal states of India, as well as the massive increase in low-cost energy availability for all riparians, come at a certain price. The sites considered as being suitable for dam construction have been identified by all riparians on their respective territories. Besides the considerable risks of construction failures of dam walls in a tectonically active zone such as the Himalayas, there is the major threat of losing a whole range of monsoon mountain ecosystems in the event of all the envisaged dam sites being commissioned in the future. This ecological aspect weighs as heavily as the social questions relating to the inundation of valleys, where the flooding implies resettlement and hence the destruction of community structures. The pressing questions about how to develop the basins’ water resources thus have to be balanced by all stakeholders in the basin, because interventions, as well as the non-intervention (at least not on a large scale) found today, affect both riparian communities and the fate of whole nations, which could, through wise interlinking of flood protection, irrigation and a basin-wide energy grid, take a considerable step forward in ensuring their access to the energy resources necessary for economic development.

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Indus

The Indus river basin on the Indian subcontinent stretches over 1,165,000 sq km. Its riparian states are Afghanistan, the Tibetan regions of China, India and Pakistan. It drains into the Arabian Sea at Karachi, southern Pakistan, after traversing the whole of the Indus plains in Jammu and Kashmir, India and Pakistan (mainly the provinces of Punjab and Sindh) and uniting the flows of its seven main tributaries. Today, tributaries can be distinguished joining the Indus’ main branch from the left (south-eastern) and from the right (north-western) side— a fact that has inspired the sharing agreement between India and Pakistan. Water and its availability have played a crucial role for the civilizations that settled along the banks of the river over several millennia because of the dry conditions prevalent in most of the mid- and downstream areas of the basin. Agriculture traditionally constitutes the main water-consuming sector, and hydropower is a very important non-consumptive use. In the ancient kingdoms of the Indian subcontinent, control over water resources and their distribution was already a key factor in realizing agricultural potential. Simple damming and diversion structures, small storage tanks as well as distribution canals, have existed there since 300 BC. The British East India Company, as the operational branch for colonial production in the British Empire since the mid-18th century, enlarged the pre-existing systems in the eastern part of the subcontinent (what is today Indian territory) with modern-type barrages and irrigation canals. In the 1840s, the British Government took control of the structures and their operation; this development coincided with the conquering and annexation of Punjab and Sindh, making possible the hydrologic control of the population and the new settlers. Before this period, the banks of the Indus were irrigated only through inundation of narrow strips along the banks during the annual peak flows of the Indus. From the 1850s, irrigation development was systematically utilized to fight the frequent famines by spreading the waters over as much area as possible to provide a so-called deficit irrigation. Under this water control regime, maximum productivity was not the objective, rather the avoidance of social unrest and, at a later stage, the enforced colonization of the territory and settlement of veterans. From the late 19th century until the independence of British India and the subsequent partition into India and Pakistan, all rivers were tapped for irrigation; major barrages as intakes for perennial-flow irrigation canals improved the thus-far prevalent inundation canal system and made possible the cultivation of crops during two seasons. 342

Indus The social and hydrological facts (dense settlement as a result of irrigation opportunities, water diversion favouring some regions above others) created during British colonial rule made difficult the process of separation of the two states of India and Pakistan during the 1947–48 period. The newly drawn borders cut through what was interwoven and organized by hydraulic structures and did not take account of questions about water control. To the present day, this creation of hydraulic artefacts during colonial times and the arbitrary creation of a border are the root of many water-related contestations. It is because the two separate states were founded on the basis of differing religious confessions that the Indus basin appears on the map of transboundary water resource conflicts. During the partition process, millions of people had to resettle. Most of the Indus-fed irrigated land went to Pakistan, which found itself to be a downstream riparian with respect to several barrages and dams still situated on Indian territory, or what today is the contested region of Jammu and Kashmir. After partition, standstill agreements provided short-term preservation (until March 1948) of the status quo on water flow diversion and discharges; soon after the expiry of these transitional solutions conflicts arose, driven by Pakistan’s water dependency and India’s need for irrigation development to settle and feed the population on the western frontier. Struggles by Pakistan for secure water delivery and the aggravation of the situation through onesided Indian property claims to the waters flowing through its territory persisted, and the two states entered into what can be called a cold war with each other in the period between 1948 and 1951. By that time, both parties had developed hostility towards each other; in 1951, a former Tennessee Valley Authority (USA) official paid a visit to both countries, suggesting mediation of the case by the World Bank and the depoliticization of the case by adopting an engineering perspective and the geographical partition of the waters in favour of both basin states. In the period until 1960, the preindependence development of water diversion, damming and conveyance infrastructure did not stop on either side of the border. Both states succeeded in establishing further storage capacities, irrigated areas and the hydraulic interconnection of the Indus main branch and its tributaries in response to the demands for food and hydropower. The negotiations on a legal framework to provide reliable agreements about management regimes for all control structures were difficult and lengthy on account of the refusal of both parties to confront the issues because they were not prepared and not willing to do so, despite the obvious fact that finding a solution would reduce tensions. The initial suggestion of 1951—to give the rights over the western rivers (Jhelum, Chenab and Indus) to Pakistan and the rights to tap the eastern tributaries (Ravi, Sutlej and Bias) to India—was guided by massive international funding for the necessary infrastructure. The Indus Water Treaty (IWT) was the result of a decade of efforts by the international community, and at the time was a vanguard of international water-sharing agreements given the conflict context, international interests

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and the role of water resource development for the food security and economic prosperity of the two nations. The World Bank and the USA saw their role in mediating the conflict as a major triumph that was won despite India’s non-alignment doctrine. The key content of the IWT was: a) unimpeded flow of the ‘western’ rivers into Pakistan with a few exceptions clearly detailed; b) a programme to construct dams, link canals, barrages and deep tube wells to be constructed on Pakistani territory; c) a very important transition period of 10 years in which water flows into Pakistan were scheduled to allow for infrastructural supply augmentation and a remuneration paid by India for the loss of water flows; and d) provisions for data exchange and future co-operation. The IWT also initiated the foundation of the Indus River Commission, chaired by two commissioners from each state, responsible for reporting, implementation of co-operative activities and the resolution of questions about the interpretation or implementation of the treaty. In Pakistan, one of the outcomes of the negotiations was the foundation of the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA), responsible for the management of water resources for all sectors, including hydropower in the so-called Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS) that the Pakistani part of the Indus basin had become after decades of infrastructure development. The IWT had a deescalating effect on the tensions between the two riparians and the agreement was abided by even when Pakistan and India went to war in 1965 and 1971; however, there is continued argument over future efforts to make use of the Indus basin waters, most of them touching upon the main bone of contention, the region of Jammu and Kashmir. There, the potential for dam construction and water diversion is still high, although on the other hand all efforts on both sides are seen as an act of territorial claim. So far, disputes under the umbrella of the IWT and agreements derived from it have been settled peacefully through bilateral talks or international mediation by the World Bank.

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Map 4 Jordan Basin

Jordan basin

The basin of the biblical river Jordan is situated in the arid to semi-arid climatic region of the eastern Mediterranean, the so-called Near East. The Jordan’s watershed comprises 42,800 sq km; the upper catchment (where the bulk of the precipitation falls) is in the Golan heights. Its riparians are, from upstream to downstream, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine and Jordan; the Jordan drains into the Dead Sea. The Jordan river basin represents an area of around 18,000 sq km. Although it is quite small, 360 km long, the Jordan river is the centre of relatively important tensions in the region. Because of the general lack of water resources in the region and the acute political tension among the riparian states in the Jordan basin, high stakes surround the sharing of the resources of the Jordan river between its riparians. As a consequence, data concerning the water resources in the Jordan basin are highly politicized. For this reason, any data concerning water resources in this region are presented here as ranges comprising most of the available sources. It should also be underlined that average annual flows are subject to significant variations because of the climatic variations occurring from one year to another. The Jordan river is formed from the confluence of three upstream rivers: 1) The Dan, situated in Israel. Its average annual contribution to the flow of the higher Jordan river is estimated at around 245m. cu m–250m. cu m. Its flow is the most important and stable of the three sources of the Jordan river. 2) The Banias, which has its source in the Syrian Golan area conquered by Israel during the 1967 six-day war and annexed in 1981. 3) The Hasbani, which comes from Lebanon. Its average annual flow varies between 140m. cu m and 155 m. cu m. The Jordan then fills the Huleh Lake, which was a swamp until drained in 1953 by Israel. After taking account of the amounts of water used in the Jordan at this level and adding the amounts of water brought by local streams or rivers, the flow of the Jordan is estimated at more or less 540m. cu m on entry into Lake Tiberius, the principal water reservoir in Israel. Also known as the Sea of Galilee or Lake Kinneret, Lake Tiberius constitutes the principal reservoir of fresh water for Israel. The lake is 20 km long and 8 km wide at its lowest point, which is situated 213 m below sea level. The total content 347

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of the lake is estimated at 4,000m. cu m, and the annual outflow to the lower Jordan and the overall operational capacity at between 400m. cu m and 470m. cu m, although this has fluctuated drastically in the last few years (see below). The lake principally receives its water from the upper Jordan, but there are other tributaries to the lake: local precipitations, underground sources situated below the lake and wadis (temporary water streams that form when rainfall is abundant). The average flow of the Jordan on exiting Lake Tiberius (from here, downstream, it is considered as the lower Jordan) is around 80m. cu m. We underline the fact that this is a natural average annual flow. In other words, it does not take account of upstream withdrawals. The National Water Carrier, the largest water distribution utility in Israel and the centrepiece of the Israeli water distribution network, starts from Lake Tiberius. The National Water Carrier is composed of tunnels, channels and reservoirs that transport an average of 380m. cu m of water per year from Lake Tiberius to the centre and southern parts of Israel. It is primarily an answer to the geographic characteristics of Israel, where the majority of water resources lie in the north and the majority of the population lives in the centre and the south of the country. There is thus an absolute need to transport the water through the country from north to south. The construction of the National Water Carrier has allowed Israel to realize its long-prepared plan to transfer waters from the Jordan to the Negev and the coastal plain. The fact that the National Water Carrier actually allows Israel to transfer water outside the Jordan basin has inevitably irritated the other riparian states in the basin. Given that evapotranspiration is evaluated at 270m. cu m and including the withdrawals taken from Lake Tiberius, some authors affirm that only 70m. cu m actually flows into the lower Jordan river. This number takes into account the amount of water diverted into the National Water Carrier, i.e. around 380m. cu m. In respect of this number, strong variations occur among authors and between respective years. We thus recommend that these data be handled cautiously. The belief that the flow of the lower Jordan is too low is less contested, the most visible consequence being the lowering of the level and the increasing salt content of the Dead Sea. Downstream of Lake Tiberius, the Jordan encounters its principal tributary, the Yarmouk, which has its source in Syria. The contribution of the flow of the Yarmouk to the flow of the Jordan generates a lot of debate, with many conflicting data. We think that evaluating the average annual flow of the Yarmouk at around 400m. cu m–475m. cu m is reasonable and takes into account the majority of available sources. Only some of that water flows into the Jordan. Withdrawals made by Jordan and Syria upstream leave between 25m. cu m–70m. cu m for Israel. Some of the water coming from the Yarmouk is diverted by Israel into Lake Tiberius. The Yarmouk river has been the centre of many negotiations between the riparian states on how to share its waters and how to organize co-operation in order to use its resources appropriately. The so-called Unified Johnston Plan

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Jordan basin was one of the earlier, detailed plans to specify flow rates and allocate shares between riparians; however, it was never politically acknowledged (despite being agreed upon by representatives of all parties during its negotiation) as the official recognition of guaranteed claims would have constituted the acknowledgement of the state of Israel by its Arab neighbours. Jordan and Israel reached a bilateral agreement on the Yarmouk in the 1994 peace treaty, although Syria, the upstream riparian, was absent from this process. The lower Jordan is fed by groundwater, rainwater, the river Zarqa (which has its source in Jordan) and also by wadis. The aquifer system known as the Mountain aquifer is interlinked with the Jordan basin; its recharge area lies entirely on the West Bank. Because of geological differences, water withdrawal is easier on the Israeli side of the border, and Palestinians claim that Israel is depriving them of their right to this precious resource in an arid to semi-arid climate. Data on the contribution of all these sources to the flow of the Jordan are numerous. Nevertheless, in order to give an idea, we can estimate the contribution of all these sources at 539m. cu m. The Jordan finally flows into the Dead Sea at 395 m below sea level. The estimation of the total average annual flow of the Jordan river is subject to large variations ranging from 1,200m. cu m to 1,800m. cu m. The political problems between the riparian states in the Jordan basin lead to unilateral behaviour, among which is the excessive use of the resources of the river. This causes ecological problems, including the salinization of the water of the Jordan. The Jordan river basin provides a good example of the good sense of installing an efficient co-operation system between entities sharing transboundary resources. A conflict situation leads to the misuse of the resource, and the resource itself can be a factor leading to a conflict situation. This was the case in the 1967 six-day war. A major future issue for the region and for the Jordan basin would be the creation of a Palestinian state that could then, as a riparian state directly bordering the river, apply its riparian rights. Other states would thus have to share the resources of the river with one more entity, making it even more difficult if no solid co-operation scheme is put in place by all the states in the Jordan basin. In the highly disputed region, the conflicts over water involve the occupation of the Golan heights by Israel, the development of water control infrastructure by Israel in its upstream region before the river flows into Jordan, and the general over-commitment of water resources in all adjoining states. The scarcity of surface water resources also affects the groundwater bodies that face overdraft; like the lower reaches of the Jordan, the groundwater is characterized by growing salinity. There are bilateral agreements between Israel and Jordan and between Israel and the Palestinian authority, but there is no river basin treaty. It seems important to note that the issue of water struggles is also touched upon in the international efforts to reach lasting peace among the nations in the Near East.

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La Plata

The river basin of the Río de la Plata comprises approximately one-fifth of the South American continent’s surface. The total drainage area is 3,100,000 sq km, with Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina as riparians. The climate of the basin varies from tropical-humid to semi-arid, and water uses are diverse, ranging from irrigation (mainly for Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay), through industrial utilization (in Argentina and Brazil), to the very important navigation and hydropower generation. The sub-basins are the Tieté, Paranapanema, Paraná, Iguazú, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bermejo, Pilcomayo and Salado del Norte. The common terminus, Río de la Plata, springs from the confluence of the rivers Uruguay and Paraná, after 250 km forming a delta at its mouth that is 224 km long. The vast river basin, on account of its diverse ecological zones, is home to many endemic species. The Pantanal wetlands, situated mainly in Brazil (with small parts in Bolivia and Paraguay), are a UNESCO world heritage site and a unique hub of biodiversity. Below ground, the basin is linked with the Guaraní aquifer (underlying large parts of the riparians’ territories in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay), providing recharge for the world’s largest non-fossil groundwater reservoir. Through the aquifer, the Río de la Plata basin is interconnected below ground with another major river basin of Brazil, the Río São Francisco. For the basin states, both the rivers of the La Plata basin and the pure groundwaters of the Guaraní are strategic resources. From a hydrological viewpoint, the sub-basins have differing characteristics. According to the respective prevailing climatic regimes in the relatively vast sub-basins (given that the La Plata basin is the fifth largest basin in the world), periods of high flow occur either during winter or summer time, which at the river mouth creates a rather stable discharge. Floods are a main characteristic in all sub-basins, where long and wide floodplains act as a natural buffer for downstream areas. However, human settlement policies (and their absence in some cases) have neglected the threat since the 1960s. The floods have devastating economic effects, as industries are often situated along the river banks. The other main threat for much of the population is the pollution caused by urban and agricultural drainage. The basin states’ biggest cities are situated along the rivers, and water retention and wastewater treatment are often insufficient; the vital agricultural sector, producing wheat, soy and canola, remains largely unregulated in terms of agro-ecologic considerations 350

La Plata on account of fears that competitiveness would be harmed thereby. This pollution affects both the downstream areas and adjoining rice production zones, as well as the recharge of the Guaraní. Efforts to achieve a legal framework with the ability to combine the differing interests and priorities among the riparian states date back to the 1930s, when conflicts about navigation caused a war between Bolivia and Paraguay. This ended in 1935, when the two states signed a peace agreement that contained specifications about the establishment of a traffic and commerce regime mutually fostering the development of both countries. This treaty can be seen as a precedent for the legally binding framework currently in place, the 1969 Río de la Plata Basin Treaty. The La Plata treaty was facilitated by political developments in the region, such as the foundation of the Organization of American States, the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations for Latin America and the Inter-American Development Bank. Increased interest among the basin states in expanding infrastructure along the watercourses of the La Plata basin for more intensive development, and contestations during the 1960s—foremost between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay—raised consciousness among the riparian states that, in order peacefully and mutually to come to integrated solutions in the basin, a river basin organization was needed. As a result of the basin framework, bi-national sub-basin authorities have been founded to intensify and improve bilateral and tripartite hydro-co-operation. The multilateral La Plata treaty made way for common development efforts between Paraguay and Brazil on the Paraná. These joint efforts put an end to conflict over the Guaira waterfalls to which both countries claimed territorial rights; the decision to construct what is today one of the world’s biggest hydropower stations, the Itaipú dam, led to an immense increase in renewable energy resources for both riparians, and the contested region was thus submerged. Environmental degradation was planned to be limited through wildlife evacuation projects carried out by both states. During the 1970s, security concerns by the downstream riparian Argentina about a dam failure and subsequent potential flooding of its capital Buenos Aires marked the persisting but non-violent frictions between it and Brazil— the two major players in this part of the basin. (The Itaipú construction was pushed by Brazilian authorities more than by the junior partner in the project.) A second hydropower station further downstream, initiated by Argentina and Paraguay, the Yacyreta dam, introduced a safety net for the aforementioned case. The umbrella-type La Plata treaty takes into account the different national legal and administrative systems (two of which are federal). Under the auspices of the treaty, numerous bilateral agreements have been concluded between riparian states, enabling the identification of, and priorities for, potential co-operative projects and subsequently paving the way for the technical and legal provisions necessary to implement and manage projects according to joint interests.

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A continuous bone of contention in the basin is the destruction of unique ecosystems, a fact that is partially explainable by the absence of civil society actors such as environmental NGOs in the administrative structures of the institutionalized basin authority in Buenos Aires. The Intergovernmental Coordination Committee, headed by the riparian states’ ministers responsible for foreign affairs gathered in a council (defining policy directions), is responsible for co-ordination of concrete co-operation. The compromise between wetland ecosystem services and navigation was often decided in the past in favour of the latter. A major infrastructure project that would affect for the first time the hydrologic fate of all the La Plata river systems is the Paraná-Paraguay Hídrovia. The envisaged project would, in order to facilitate inland waters navigation, with ocean-going vessels connecting landlocked parts of the basin with Atlantic ports, lead to major dredging and straightening activities. Planning and information gathering activities have been taking place since 1988, but there is to date insufficient knowledge on both the feasibility and the socioeconomic and environmental effects. The Pantanal, as a major focus of global environmental conservation and protection, would most probably suffer deterioration of its hydrologic environmental services, jeopardizing the fate of thousands of species and the riparian communities relying on functions such as fishing, or simply be deteriorated as a consequence of the flood regulation effects on the ecosystem. Therefore, the fact that the project is still far from being realized can be seen as a victory for the civil society actors concerned about the sustainability of such large-scale hydro-projects despite important considerations about the transport infrastructure necessary to sustain the agricultural exports for the La Plata nations’ economic development.

352

Mekong

The Mekong river is located in the sub-tropical and tropical regions of SouthEast Asia; its riparians are China, Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. The Mekong catchment covers 810,000 sq km and drains into the South China Sea from the deltaic plains of Cambodia and Vietnam. Being a river with a naturally high variation in flow discharges and many rapids, as well as the Khone waterfalls, it has never been fully navigable. Development indices for the basin states show a wide variety, with Thailand by far leading the per capita income statistics and the two downstream states Cambodia and Vietnam having annual incomes at a level 10 times inferior to Thailand. The basin can be divided into an upper and a lower catchment according to different criteria: geologic, hydrologic or socio-economic. From its source in the Tibetan mountains at over 5,000 m above sea level, the river’s main branch descends to an elevation of approximately 500 m above sea level in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), marking the steeper part of the catchment with gorges and numerous rapids. In contrast to this, the deltaic regions of Cambodia and Vietnam are characterized by vast and flat floodplains made up of the alluvial loads that the river delivers every year. The extreme seasonality of water levels adds to the unique hydrologic characteristics of the lower basin: during the wet season large areas of the plains in Cambodia and Vietnam are inundated and traditionally cultivated with so-called flood rice varieties adapted to fluctuations in the water level. For Vietnam’s coastal plains, sea water intrusion during the dry season in combination with the natural drainage of acid sulphate soils constitutes a unique case of land and water interactions. In the dry season, sea water intrudes from the South China Sea into the delta’s estuaries, posing immense problems (of salt water intrusion) for rice production. After the intensive construction of canals and dikes in recent decades, much of the area is separated from the seasonal floods, being highly productive through the cultivation of three crops per year. The basin is also home to a large variety of aquatic species, on which the delta’s people rely heavily for protein supply; these fish and other aquatic species are adapted to the varying river levels and salt seasonality (in the lower reaches). The freshwater lake of Tonle Sap is considered the world’s most productive inland fishery; in Vietnam aquaculture already plays a significant role. Increasing population pressure both in terms of settlement area and land productivity has resulted in the construction of sluices to keep sea water from 353

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flowing upstream along several deltaic estuaries in Vietnam. However, this intervention in the natural hydrologic regime is criticized by environmental NGOs and fisher folk as it also interferes in the brackish water cycle vital for the lower delta’s aquatic species. In the river basin literature, the Mekong is characterized as one of the last large river systems of the world that remains largely undeveloped in terms of dams and regulation structures along its main branch that would alter the natural flow regime. The basin’s riparian interests and objectives concerning water resource development are as different as the combination of geo-hydrology with the livelihood patterns present in the traditional riparian people’s communities. In the upstream area, China’s foremost interest is the development of hydropower dams to provide continuous and comparatively cheap energy for its vibrant east coast; during the last decades, three big dam projects have been realized on Chinese territory, with more in the planning or construction stage, which will result in a cascade of eight hydropower dams. The further the Mekong advances towards its mouth, the more important traditional fishing practices become for the protein intake and livelihoods of the people living on its banks. This fact is only partially acknowledged by the ruling powers of the riparian states, as in the example of Lao PDR. Although, for the whole country, the construction of hydropower infrastructure and its impact on development both in the country and in the region (through sharing energy by means of a regional power grid) are important objectives of Mekong basin management, the fishing communities along the river see unimpeded flows and sustained seasonality as important. Thailand is another important country because it is economically successful, and as an influential actor in the basin it has different interests from downstream riparians. As the potential for irrigation system development is comparatively small (on account of former infrastructure developments in the country) and as the more developed tertiary sector is energy hungry, Thailand’s focus in respect of basin development lies increasingly on hydropower generation. Cambodia is situated in the northern part of the Mekong’s deltaic estuaries. A special hydrologic feature of the landscape is the Tonle Sap lake. Its coastline contracts and expands dramatically with the varying discharge of the Mekong, acting like a buffer: during the wet season, water flows into the lake and revitalizes the biologic cycle of the aquatic ecosystem, whereas during the dry season the lake drains into the lower lying southern delta area of Vietnam. As in the latter country, people living in the area have adapted their lifestyles and economic activities (fishing, wet season flood rice cropping) to the hydrologic variations. Both countries are also frequently affected by high floods that cause damage to settlements and infrastructure. Satisfying all the different interests of riparian communities and countries (interests that are not necessarily the same even on the national scale) proves difficult in multi-stakeholder negotiations on the basin scale. The present organization responsible for basin-wide co-ordination is the Mekong River

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Mekong Commission (MBC), joined by Lao PDR, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam; Burma (Myanmar) and China did not join the platform formally. The MBC is the follow-up organization resulting from international efforts to achieve basin-wide concerted water management and has its legal foundations in a 1995 draft agreement initiated by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and other international organizations. However, the fact that the two upstream riparian states have only observatory status and are not willing to make concessions during multipartite negotiations makes any comprehensive basin management impossible. Thus, the river basin organization has only limited responsibility and deals mainly with information gathering, exchange and related forecasting activities, and the formulation of development objectives for the downstream riparians. These objectives include freedom of navigation, the maintenance of the dry season flow regime and its pulses feeding and emptying lake Tonle Sap, and the improvement of the situation of acid sulphate soils and their adverse effects on surrounding ecosystems and people’s livelihoods. Further integration of the two upstream riparians in co-operative efforts is envisaged by some writers who point to the influential position of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN, with regional integration as the stated objective)—which has a broader focus than ‘just’ on water and thus provides an enabling environment—and the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) programme initiated by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the UNDP. However, whether the comparatively weak economic and political influence of downstream riparians in these fora can play an important role in achieving (or rather safeguarding) their interests is a matter of conjecture.

355

Murray-Darling

The river basin of the Darling and Murray rivers is situated in south-western Australia. The main agricultural production zone as well as the main settlements of the earth’s driest continent (in terms of the ratio between dry, arid landscapes and relatively well water-endowed areas) are situated there. The surface area of 1,061,469 sq km is shared by the federal states of Queensland, New South Wales, the Capital Territory, Victoria and South Australia. The fact that the basin constitutes Australia’s largest river system in terms of runoff and surface area is not an indication of the availability of water, which, with an annual runoff of 24,000m. cu m, is only a small fraction of what other rivers discharge into the sea (e.g., the Mekong: 500,000m. cu m from a catchment that is 0.8 times smaller); this is a strong indication of the water-scarce environment of the basin. In the course of settlement by, first, the British and then colonizers from other parts of the world, the basin’s tree and shrub vegetation was cut to make way for agricultural production, primarily based on grazing and cereals, which traditionally depend on rainfall—a fact that makes productivity per hectare comparatively low, but highly productive in terms of the few labour inputs required. With increasing technical capabilities and population growth, abstractions for irrigated agriculture increased; hence, today more than 90% of water diverted for human use goes to the agricultural sector. This irrigated agriculture has to be broken down to illustrate the issues at hand. Generally, there are corporate-type farms producing cotton and rice, which from an agronomical perspective add only little economic value per unit of irrigation water. On the other hand, so-called small settlements equipped with smaller landholdings produce horticultural crops, such as fruit and vegetables, where the productivity of water as a vital production input is considerably higher. These products are mainly sold on the domestic market, as opposed to rice and cotton, which are export crops. Over the years, several problems have evolved as a result of human intervention in the geo-hydrological cycle of the ancient continent. First, salinity problems developed in areas where the cleared natural vegetation prevented solute salts from ascending to the soil surface by bio-drainage. Later on, irrigation-induced salinity caused by bad drainage and higher groundwater tables added to the problem. These have been addressed by reclamation and drainage schemes since the 1950s, and the introduction of trickle and drip irrigation since the 1970s. Also, some dry land areas have been reforested to re-establish 356

Murray-Darling the natural hydrology. Another factor adding to the water problems in the basin is the development and commitment of water resources to domestic uses in the new metropolitan zones, while the overall water scarcity was not factored into the delivery regime. On the other hand, practices such as rainwater harvesting have been common in Australia for a long time, highlighting the general water consciousness of the population. In recent decades, climate change has become a major issue on the Australian environmental agenda, with serious water restrictions (caused by scant rainfalls far below the average) affecting everyday urban life and, more drastically, causing the ruin of many farms, both irrigated and rain-fed. On the management side of the Murray-Darling’s water resources, there have been important changes in the sector since its large-scale development from the 1900s. Before the 1970s, each state had water management agencies with responsibility for supplying bulk water allocated according to the water rights (land-related, thus considered as absolute property) granted to the basin’s riparians (thus managed centrally per state), but separately from water-related services such as wastewater treatment or drinking water supply. From the 1970s onwards, all states and their agencies adopted basinmanagement approaches. This organizational reform aimed to bring about accountability and efficacy, integrating the complex organizational landscape and centralizing responsibilities in regional, sub-basin agencies with a political mandate from the respective state. Today, Australia’s water sector is characterized by reforms carried through after 1995. These were the result not only of water scarcity concerns but also of the severe economic constraints faced by the nation. Hence, the reforms resulted in the wide-scale privatization of water services and the transformation of state agencies into private suppliers. Water management was delegated to the lowest appropriate levels, and water rights from then on had to be specified in a detailed way in terms of their reliability, tradability, quality, volumes and transferability. The detailed specification of water rights was intended to promote economic incentives for efficient water use—a mechanism only viable under conditions where rights are clearly established and enforceable, with a transparent market. On the national scale, the issue of managing water at the appropriate level gave birth in 1985 to the MurrayDarling Basin Commission, politically headed by the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council. It was at this point that the states agreed to hand over some of their constitutional power to the federal Government, from then on acting as the co-ordinating body balancing the states’ differing interests. Similar processes had already been going on since 1915, when the federal Government generally used its fiscal power to urge basin riparians to cooperate, albeit in the absence of a general legal framework. The reforms are seen as radical, as the Council decided to cap water abstraction as a response to continued over-commitment—a process that some states had already initiated, whereas in other states still more water rights were issued. This stringency in combination with a regulated and safe basin-wide water market

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significantly added to the water use and allocation dynamics initiated by erratic, perennial drought events. Despite the large success that managers and scholars assign to the MurrayDarling’s institutional development, the reform was largely based on the establishment of a water market that allowed traditional rights-holders to sell off the water they did not need. As an effect of the generous transfer of traditional rights into tradable volumes, formerly unutilized quantities of waters were now fully exploited by the new owners, drastically increasing water abstractions, and the historic (but until then non-apparent) over-allocation resulted in comparatively low prices for buyers. The resulting exploitation (up to legally acquired levels) made the agricultural sector and other water users susceptible to the drought that became manifest in subsequent years. The political response to water scarcity is the reduction of water rights (as there are no prior rights, every right is treated equally) to levels as low as 5% in some years. Agricultural policies since World War II favoured the small settlements considered as vital for the supply of food for the surrounding communities. With economic reforms and the market-based water transfers, corporate landholdings based on production for the world market have gained considerably in export volumes as well as in water consumption, whereas the horticultural sector often sees itself as being deprived of water to irrigate food crops for domestic consumption. This sector blames the states and the basin commissions for not having controlled the transfers of water rights from the small-scale horticultural sector to the large-scale corporations producing wine, cotton and rice. Another politically contentious issue is the planned development by the State of Victoria to provide water via a pipeline to a new urban expansion. In order to provide water to this area, the Government would have to buy back water rights—at a high price (it increased after the 1995 introduction of the water market)—that were given away without charge some 15 years ago. On the other hand, it would mean that settlement farmers (who hold a lot of water rights) would have to go out of production as the urban water sector economically out-competes agricultural uses. Hence, what was ‘sold’ as an effective mechanism to reallocate scarce water resources to more productive uses was not achieved in a socially sound manner: Corporate agricultural water users keep irrigating rice and cotton while orange trees (considered to have higher added value per unit of water input) are desiccating, and domestic water users (tax payers) criticize the naive policies of transferring traditional rights into tradable rights without considering actual use levels and the effects of climatic variations on the resilience of both the ecosystems and the population.

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Map 5 Nile

Nile basin

The river Nile is the world’s longest river system. Its upper catchment is situated in tropical Africa, and the total watershed area comprises 3,349m. sq km, with an estimated length of over 6,800 km. Its basin comprises ten countries, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda; some of them are already facing situations of water scarcity. The Nile has three main tributaries: the White Nile, the Blue Nile and the Tekezze-Atbara. The White Nile has its headwaters in Burundi, and the Blue Nile originates in Ethiopia, the latter being the major contributor to the flow of the Nile. The Blue Nile and the White Nile converge at Khartoum, Sudan. The Tekezze-Atbara also has its source in Ethiopia and joins the Nile in northern Sudan, contributing around 13% to the Nile’s total flows. The river then flows through Egypt before draining into the Mediterranean Sea. It is important to note that most of the Nile’s discharge is contributed by the eastern Nile basin: 86% on average coming from precipitation in the Ethiopian highlands. The much longer White Nile, the catchment of which reaches as far as the equatorial lakes feeding into Victoria Lake is thus a less important, but continuous, resource in terms of discharge contribution (but not in its hydrological and environmental functions), whereas the Blue Nile’s discharge varies considerably over the seasons and years. The average annual flow of the Nile is generally agreed by Egypt to be 84,000m. cu m at Aswan dam. This gives only an indication of the size of the river. Egypt has been granted a volumetric allocation, according to the 1959 Full Utilization of the Nile Waters treaty, of a fixed (minimum) share of 55,500m. cu m annually, and any surpluses automatically also belong to Egypt by dint of the agreement. The rest of the fixed amount (18,500m. cu m) is legally allocated to Sudan. The 1959 Agreement also included an allocation for evapotranspiration losses (10,000m. cu m annually). Egypt’s water situation is unique in the world because of its high dependency ratio on external water resources and the socioeconomic structure relating to the Nile water utilization, which is characterized by a high population and agricultural productivity pressure in the ancient floodplains of the river. Most of the water is allocated to Egypt’s vital agricultural sector, with only small fractions for services and industries. The water resources are already over-committed to the different irrigation commands and industrial and domestic uses. This means that drainage return flows are mixed with 361

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freshwater in the downstream deltaic regions of the country and provide water of a minimum quality level that is also subject to numerous pollution sources, both point sources, such as industrial discharge, and diffuse pollution by agrochemicals. The historic development of Egypt’s irrigation sector has led to an immense and complex water management regime with conjunctive uses of both surface water conveyed through canals and groundwater originating from percolation of irrigation water from the vast conveyance system. On the organizational side, there is a massive water bureaucracy that operates, manages and controls water allocations and system maintenance tasks; the powerful role and far-reaching responsibilities of the water bureaucracy situated in different ministries and agencies show the vital political role that the Nile’s water plays for the country. Today, two main issues, relating to both historic and recent developments, dominate the discussions about the Nile basin’s water resources. On the one hand, there is the issue of the two downstream riparians Sudan and Egypt having, between them, control over the lion’s share of the Nile’s flow as a consequence of the 1959 Agreement on the Full Utilization of the Nile Waters. The treaty stands in a ‘tradition’ of colonial power imposition by the British, as the 1959 agreement is seen (by upstream riparians) as a renegotiation of an existing treaty of 1929, when the British colonial administration negotiated on behalf of its Sudanese colonies. The upstream riparians were not included or consulted and today claim that the treaty enforced during colonial times should be declared void. On the other hand, there is increasing demographic, economic and political pressure on the African continent, where in all of the basin’s riparian states population growth rates outpace agricultural productivity increases, which again are subject to climatic variations justifying the development of water control infrastructure, both for irrigation and hydropower purposes in the upstream states. Egypt holds a hydro-hegemonic position in the basin (sustained by stronger material, bargaining and ideational power) where, until the 1950s, water resource development took place only in the arid downstream regions of Egypt and Sudan; disputes arise today because the central and eastern African states sharing the river are in dire need of intensified resource utilization for their own national economic development, whereas the traditional downstream users claim the right to ‘full utilization of the Nile waters’, on the basis of a colonial treaty forbidding the upstream arrest of Nile waters without Egypt’s consent. Upstream countries have repeatedly declared these treaties null and void because of their political exclusion from the 1929 and 1959 negotiations. Hence, any water resource development by these upstream countries does not infringe any treaty, a factor that might in the future convince Egypt to agree to multilateral, basin-wide agreements. The power of the Egyptian authorities to avoid upstream water withdrawal is based on Egyptian unilateralism introduced by President Nasser (whereas the British colonial rulers had basin-wide plans) and an extensive effort to lobby against water-related developments in the problemshed.

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Nile basin The second largest user of Nile waters, Sudan, developed several structures to divert water and to generate hydropower, both activities in compliance with the 1959 bilateral treaty. The domestic political and civil wars in Sudan did not affect the country’s water allocation, despite the relative weakness of the state. Ethiopia is making repeated claims to develop domestic water resources and to bring its potential irrigated area into actual production, with increasing support from the international community, questioning the power base of the two nations allied by the treaty. Ethiopia does not have a large amount of hydraulic infrastructure, on account of both its less powerful role than the two downstream hydro-hegemonic riparians, and its financial constraints and scant support from international institutions. This fact is gradually changing, and recent droughts have opened up a window of opportunity to underline the necessity and rightness of water resource development, at least among the international community. An all-inclusive multilateral agreement is not in place; however, the World Bank initiated the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) as a multi-stakeholder platform to intensify co-operation and information exchange for river basin planning. Later, this goal was expanded to include the objectives of equitable utilization and the development of water-related benefits to promote sustainable socioeconomic development. The establishment of a body to govern water management and to adjudicate on water issues in the region has been the aim of international co-operation for several decades. For the White Nile, co-operation facilitated by the international community has existed since 1967, with the launch of the Hydromet survey project to regulate the water level of Lake Victoria. The survey’s finalization stage gave birth to a new organization in 1992, the Technical Committee for the Promotion of the Development and Environmental Protection of the Nile Basin (TECCONILE), with Egypt, Sudan, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo as member states. In 1999, the Nile Basin Initiative replaced the TECCONILE. The NBI Secretariat is based in Kampala, Uganda; all riparians have joined this body, except Eritrea, which is only an observer. From its inception, the NBI was designed to be a transitional mechanism until all member states managed to come to an agreement on the establishment of a legally binding and accountable river basin governance body, the Nile Basin Commission. Facilitated by the World Bank-initiated International Consortium for Co-operation on the Nile (ICCON) (which constitutes the funding side of the international efforts, channelling money to the NBI through the Nile Basin Trust Fund that groups together other international donors), the NBI is now working under the Council of Ministers of Water Affairs of the Nile Basin Countries, the Nile-COM. The NBI’s tasks all focus on the development of a joint vision and concrete projects on the ground in relation to the equitable and sustainable utilization of Nile water resources. Despite the success in establishing an atmosphere of confidence and mutual trust among the riparians that reflects less hostility than that prevailing in the

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early 1990s and the positive effects of this multinational multi-stakeholder platform in terms of exchange of information and regular high-level meetings, the NBI so far has not made any progress in practical terms—despite 10 years of legal negotiations about a binding treaty. Out of the 10 member states, none ratified the 1997 UN Convention on the Non-Navigational Use of International Water Courses; this shows that the positions of the NBI’s members are not really focused on consent. Obviously, and visible in the NBI’s focus on the sharing of economic benefits of resource exploitation, the envisaged co-operation is based on large investment expectations; water resource development efforts whether based on multilateral agreements or only on domestic interests always involves high infrastructure costs. Critics also argue that the integrated water resource management (IWRM) approach, taking into consideration the whole basin instead of the core problem zone comprising Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt, is a failure. As these three countries are the ones among whom water resources are mainly contested, and the other, upstream riparians profit from more reliable precipitation, progress is far from being reached. A particularity of the NBI’s setup is the fact that the member states are exclusively represented by water technocrats and government officials; the oftenpraised participation of all stakeholders, notably the civil society representatives, is non-existent. In this contested and complex problemshed, the management of water resources according to the IWRM river basin approach still needs to prove its potential added value. Problems like the general water stress and dependency in the downstream regions of the two quite different sub-basins, the upstreamers’ weak economic status, justifying stronger water resource development, and the NBI’s setup (comparatively democratic, politically dependent and without a strong and clear role for non-governmental, civil-society actors) will most probably persist, and hence mutual developments agreed upon by all basin riparians will remain out of reach.

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Okavango

From a geo-hydrological perspective, the Okavango basin is part of the bigger Makgadikgadi basin situated in arid to semi-arid south-western Africa, with Angola, Botswana and Namibia as riparians of the whole basin. As a result of climatic variations (some ephemeral rivers do not carry water throughout the whole year) and changing interconnectedness (or rather discontinuous outflow of water from the delta to downstream rivers such as the Boteti) of the bigger system, the Okavango basin is treated as its own system with perennial flowing rivers. In most years, the system is endoreic (it has terminal lakes and an interior drainage basin). Zambia’s hydrologic connection to the basin is based on backwards flooding in exceptionally wet years only, when Okavango waters enter the Chobe, a Zambezi tributary. Of the four aforementioned states, only Angola, Botswana and Zambia share the Okavango river basin. A massive 95% of the runoff contributing to the water flows of the basin and the inland delta originates from the Angolan mountainous regions, feeding the headwaters of the main tributaries, Cuito and Cubango. The contribution of both Namibia and Botswana to the basin’s runoff is only minor. The basin’s world-famous inland delta, situated in northern Botswana, is the world’s largest Ramsar site since accession in 1996. It is home to a rich and unique range of wildlife and endemic species and constitutes a refuge for mammals in search of drinking water in an otherwise dry and arid environment. Because of its unique and impressive biodiversity, the site is a major attraction for wildlife-spotting and other tourism activities, an opportunity taken advantage of largely by Botswana. From a water resources and hydropolitics perspective, the basin is characterized as one of the world’s last pristine river ecosystems, with only minor water diversion and withdrawal for human purposes (and if this is done, only as point offtakes, not impeding the flow), allowing the periodic drying and flooding of the delta. The upstream riparian Angola, after decades of civil war, is trying to make progress on its socioeconomic development in a country that is marked by large-scale destruction and lack of infrastructure. Despite the absence of any major water control and diversion infrastructure in this important upstream part of the basin (which would in fact be a threat to the integrity of the basin’s ecosystem), concern about the area is increasing. With a growing population and increased need for, and interest in, water resource development as a mechanism to promote economic development, the fate of the delta consequent 365

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to unilateral interventions in the basin’s hydrology is at stake. Both the transportation of sediments to the delta and the volumetric flows are important for the dynamics of the Okavango’s ecosystem. Namibia, one of the most arid and hottest countries in the world, has an interest in withdrawing water for supply to its populated region of Windhoek (thus, out of the basin), in developing small hydropower plants, and also in developing irrigation. Its land access to the basin is a narrow strip of land called the Caprivi strip, where the Kavango (Cubango, in Portuguese) river marks the northern border with Angola. As Namibia’s other water resources are already under full exploitation, a pipeline abstracting water in the Caprivi strip of the Kavango river would be a logical and necessary next step to safeguard the supply of drinking water for the capital. This development is high on the Namibian agenda, as water demand management and reuse of water resources have for a long time been taken seriously by decision-makers. Abstraction by Namibia at present accounts for approximately 24 m. cu m annually, and is the only considerable offtake compared to the other two basin states. This fact and the planning of other hydro-projects (hydropower) are criticized by Botswana and the international community as they would constitute severe interference in the basin and destroy not only the basin’s delicate balance of high and low flow regimes but also Botswana’s economic opportunities. The other basin states criticize the plans as they fear that they could constitute a precedent case for future developments, despite the fact that this specific intervention has been classified as a negligible withdrawal. The consideration of environmental impact assessments as an integral part of the planning process indicates that there is awareness (promoted also by the international community) about adverse effects. This said, it can be summarized that, so far, Botswana, as the downstream riparian, is the state drawing most benefits for its national economy from the river’s ecosystem services in the form of tourism related to the delta (adopting a ‘high cost, low volume’ policy, achieving the highest possible economic benefits with as little human impact as possible), while Namibia has developed a strong tourism sector in the Caprivi strip. The platform concerned with management of the Okavango basin, the Permanent Okavango River Basin Water Commission (OKACOM), took up its work in 1994. The creation of this body is seen as a response to unilateral or bilateral development plans causing disputes among the basin’s riparians. It has an advisory capacity with no direct administrative influence, albeit lobbying and influencing the political sphere in many cases. With assistance from Green Cross International (the first organization promoting a multilateral approach), USAID and the African Water Issues Research Unit (regional office in Maun, Botswana), progress was made concerning the flow of information between the riparians, both in terms of information generated through research and of adding to the understanding of the basin’s complex hydrology, and concerning plans and projects envisaged by the individual member states. A project called ‘Every River has its People’ set up a basin-wide 366

Okavango forum for active stakeholder participation in basin management, having an observer status in the OKACOM; common data collection and conclusions drawn from these data have been contributed to mutual planning efforts at the highest political levels by the Global Environmental Facility. The case of the Okavango is thus not only unique on account of its hydroecological characteristics and ecosystem services. The efforts by the international community to bring the riparian states together have yielded noteworthy results, despite initial problems caused by lack of capacity by the states (and OKACOM) to co-ordinate all the external attention. The case can also be seen as a role model for extensive stakeholder involvement (including civil actors’ organizations, not only governmental agencies)—a dimension that many other international river basin initiatives lack and that is believed to have the potential to yield more sustainable consensus among all stakeholders’ varying interests.

367

Rhine

The river Rhine is situated in the temperate climatic region of central Europe. It originates in the Alps of Switzerland and Italy, being adjoined by Liechtenstein and Austria on its way towards Germany, where it constitutes first the German– Swiss and later the Franco–German border. The other lower Rhine riparians are Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. Altogether, the catchment covers 198,735 sq km. The Rhine Falls near Schaffhausen and Lake Constance mark a border between upstream and downstream navigational transport uses. The Rhine constitutes a water-lifeline for all riparians downstream of the lake, notably for transport purposes, freshwater supply for drinking water companies as well as the industries situated on the shores of the river. This role evolved over millennia during which the river always had a strategic significance, being a major pathway for ships southbound and marking the border as well as the formerly disputed territories between France and Germany (thus even playing a role in the advent of World Wars I and II). Under the temperate climatic conditions of central Europe, water concerns are centred on quality issues and rarely on quantity for irrigation purposes; however, for the Netherlands and the German state of Nordrhine-Westphalia, flood threats after strong precipitation events are a serious issue concerning water quantity. The first attempts at international co-operation were made as far back as the 19th century, when upstream states urged the Netherlands to adjust the already widely mechanized salmon fishing practices threatening the stocks in the whole basin. Despite the successful co-operation founded on an agreement dating back to 1869, by 1940, salmon had almost completely disappeared from the Rhine and Moselle (a branch on the left-hand side of the river, springing in France). This was caused by the increased focus of Rhine riparian states on the development of navigation, flow regulation and hydropower generation; as a result of the infrastructural interventions, the migration of salmon to their spawning grounds was seriously impeded. A new era of basin-wide co-operation began in 1950. In the post-war ambience of economic growth, the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine against Pollution (ICPR)—founded by all riparians with the exception of Italy, Austria, Liechtenstein and Belgium—came into being, constituting the first institutionalized transboundary watercourse co-operation platform in Europe. The driving force behind the foundation of the ICPR was serious quality concerns: during the low-flow situations in the summer months, downstream Dutch farmers, drinking water suppliers, cities and ports 368

Rhine suffered from severe pollution from chlorine, heavy metals and only partly treated wastewater discharged into the river in the densely populated and highly industrialized (chemical, mining, brewing) upper catchment. Although in the initial stages of co-operation the ICPR’s mandate was vague concerning responsibilities, dispute settlement or quality standards (largely set by the Dutch who where the most affected), the legal foundation of the ICPR was improved in 1963. The co-basin states, by signing the Convention of Berne, agreed on the establishment of basin-wide quality standards and the establishment of organizational co-operation. However, the agreement formulated only general quality guidelines without specifically mentioning concrete threshold values for certain periods and/or locations. In 1971, the Rhine water quality was at an all-time low. It was at this point that, in addition to the already involved upstream actors—the Dutch, major dischargers of the French and German chemical industries, and water utilities—the Rhine basin scene was joined by environmentalist movements, voicing a general public concern about pollution and the management of natural resources. The increased interest on the part of the public and the emblematic, shocking events (dead fish floating in the river and reports about the hazardous character of the water for human consumption) triggered political impetus, resulting in the 1976 convention on the reduction of Rhine pollution. ICPR members, represented by their respective responsible ministers, decided specifically to blacklist substances and to agree upon detailed actions to reduce pollution and eliminate threats to water quality. The increased attention reshaped the ICPR’s role and responsibilities from a mutual information-gathering and exchange platform to a body formulating concrete, agreed-upon measures for all states. Another major event was a chemical spill at a Sandoz-site near Basel, Switzerland. The discharge of large quantities of chemicals after a fire at the production site caused the biological collapse of the river downstream, and drinking water supply was endangered. Today, the Rhine basin states can celebrate transboundary co-operation efforts as a success, proven by ecological improvements like the reintroduction of salmon and related investments in water treatment plants. The ICPR has a co-operating body dealing with the hydrologic aspects of the basin and generating data for planning and decision-making. In 1999, a treaty between the five major riparians Germany, France, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands replaced the 1963 Berne Convention and the 1976 Convention concerning chemical pollution. This convention is synchronized with the Water Framework Directive issued by the European Commission, obliging all EU member states to establish river basin authorities, provide detailed inventories of basin characteristics and ‘democratize’ water management. During the formulation of the EU Water Framework Directive, the Rhine constituted a model basin, providing long-term experience about transnational co-operation in water management and the administrative conditions that evolved over decades in the Rhine basin and today constitute a role model for other national and transboundary basins of the EU.

369

Maps

Map 6 Renewable Water Resources Source: FAO, Land and Water Development Division (2007)

Map 7 Deserts and Desertification Source: FAO, Land and Water Development Division (2003 and 2009)

Map 8 Water Use Source: FAO, Land and Water Development Division (2009)

Map 9 Access to Drinking Water Sources: World Bank, World Development Indicators Database (2006)

Statistics

Statistics Table S.1 Actual Renewable Water Resources, per capita, cubic metres per person per year 2006

2007

Region Asia (excl. Middle East) Central America & Caribbean Europe Middle East & North Africa North America Oceania South America Sub-Saharan Africa

3,989.5 6,739.7 10,679.5 1,394.4 19,649.2 53,290.4 45,399.7 7,208.7

947.6 6,653.3 10,685.7 1,397.5 16,557.8 52,673.8 44,816.4 6,956.6

Classification Developed Countries Developing Countries High Income Countries Low Income Countries Middle Income Countries

11,391.8 7,698.7 10,290.7 5,239.4 10,441.9

10,637.2 7,579.5 9,244.7 5,101.8 10,351.2

2,091.2 13,250.7 349.8

2,015.3 13,183.7 422.9

9,024.4 634.1 20,800.3 3,501.5 24,157.9 9,469.8 3,574.0 61.2 157.0 8,381.8 296.3 5,979.4 1,753.4 67,472.7 3,032.6 42,967.0 66,552.4 9,585.9 6,954.5 43,587.8 22,251.3 2,776.7 916.8 1,600.2 33,176.1 17,197.8 89,111.3

10,908.9 619.0 20,591.4 3,510.8 23,911.4 9,454.9 3,546.7 60.2 154.5 8,232.3 295.2 6,013.5 1,750.7 66,267.9 2,764.5 42,035.4 65,357.6 9,566.3 8,214.5 43,027.9 21,794.9 2,796.7 890.2 442.2 32,525.6 16,919.5 88,335.6

Country Afghanistan Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada

(continued on the next page) 379

STATISTICS

Table S.1 (continued)

Cape Verde Central African Rep. Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Congo Congo, Dem. Rep. Costa Rica Côte d’Ivoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Rep. Denmark Djibouti Dominican Rep. Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Fiji Finland France French Guiana Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Greenland Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Honduras Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel

2006

2007

578.0 35,279.7 4,286.3 55,997.6 2,137.3 46,068.4 1,465.2 221,034.7 21,628.5 25,551.3 4,396.9 23,156.3 3,375.2 923.1 1,288.1 1,101.7 371.7 2,327.3 1,626.8 772.8 3,604.8 50,485.4 1,381.6 9,666.4 1,538.7 33,430.9 20,904.6 3,354.6 701,570.7 116,643.0 5,141.4 14,282.8 1,861.8 2,358.6 6,665.2 10,578,947.4 8,618.2 23,534.3 18,971.8 320,478.7 1,621.4 13,030.3 10,326.7 572,390.6 1,694.1 12,587.3 1,955.4 2,552.2 12,351.5 243.9

566.0 34,786.8 4,173.5 55,425.3 2,125.0 45,408.1 1,426.9 196,319.0 20,973.0 25,156.7 4,315.4 23,161.4 3,368.4 913.3 1,289.5 1,098.7 365.9 2,295.0 31,739.0 758.6 3,545.5 49,335.9 1,338.1 9,695.7 1,355.1 33,159.1 20,857.0 3,342.6 683,673.5 114,765.6 5,018.8 14,406.3 1,861.5 2,313.5 6,653.2 10,578,947.4 8,410.4 23,042.4 18,430.4 320,478.7 1,598.7 12,754.8 10,353.4 566,666.7 1,670.2 12,440.8 1,930.8 2,489.8 12,186.5 239.7

(continued on the next page) 380

Statistics Table S.1 (continued) 2006 Italy Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Korea, Dem. People’s Rep. Korea, Rep. Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Lithuania Luxembourg Macedonia, FYR Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Moldova Mongolia Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria Norway Oman Pakistan Palestinian Territories Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland

3,290.3 3,532.7 3,353.6 150.8 7,400.1 874.5 3,415.6 1,452.6 7.2 3,864.8 55,059.4 15,446.2 1,219.4 1,687.3 69,129.9 100.5 7,287.1 6,581.7 3,141.9 17,639.4 1,312.5 22,484.1 89.0 7,184.9 125.3 3,609.9 2,190.3 4,220.8 2,777.1 12,989.9 907.9 10,770.4 20,498.4 8,633.0 7,594.5 5,560.0 80,482.4 35,123.2 2,332.6 2,129.9 82,274.4 377.1 1,381.3 45,006.1 133,477.8 53,324.9 67,406.6 5,670.2 1,600.0

2007 3,288.5 3,519.5 3,350.9 147.5 7,405.1 838.6 3,402.5 1,447.8 7.0 3,821.0 53,859.2 15,520.6 1,206.4 1,693.0 67,207.4 98.6 7,317.1 6,499.0 3,137.3 17,186.0 1,284.6 22,103.7 86.7 6,980.8 123.5 3,510.9 1,744.3 4,172.0 2,783.1 12,836.6 894.7 10,530.7 20,312.8 8,658.3 7,447.0 5,539.0 79,892.5 34,416.4 2,257.3 2,085.4 81,886.4 369.2 1,352.8 202.8 44,265.6 131,010.8 52,133.4 66,430.5 5,577.3 1,601.4

(continued on the next page) 381

STATISTICS

Table S.1 (continued) 2006 Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Réunion Romania Russian Federation Rwanda Saint Christopher and Nevis Sao Tomé and Príncipe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia and Montenegro Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Swaziland Sweden Switzerland Syria Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Togo Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom USA Uruguay Uzbekistan Venezuela Vietnam Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe World (average)

2007

6,514.9 1,785.3 63.2 6,281.4 9,798.4 31,621.6 1,029.3 558.1 13,625.0 95.3 3,250.7 19,862.8 28,174.0 137.0 9,276.1 16,210.6 91,224.5 1,730.2 1,050.6 2,570.4 2,391.0 1,743.6 269,911.5 4,382.9 19,184.1 7,365.1 1,345.8 2,424.5 2,466.9 6,330.0 2,331.1 2,933.5 450.0 2,879.0 5,045.9 2,210.5 3,034.6 32.2 2,456.3 10,135.2 39,862.3 1,868.4 45,310.5 10,442.6 189.5 8,869.4 1,528.5

6,485.4 1,775.9 61.8 6,195.8 9,837.1 31,763.6 550.7 545.5 13,292.7 93.0 3,224.8 19,870.4 27,576.7 135.3 9,276.1 16,218.8 89,043.8 1,619.9 1,048.2 2,557.1 2,372.1 1,706.7 268,131.9 4,400.0 19,131.4 7,354.0 1,313.8 2,391.5 2,291.2 6,279.5 2,272.0 2,924.6 441.9 3,050.8 4,978.9 2,132.8 3,066.4 31.4 2,449.3 6,815.8 39,612.4 1,841.7 44,544.5 10,309.6 183.7 8,725.9 1,519.5

8,467.0

8,209.9

(continued on the next page) 382

Statistics Source: EarthTrends (http://earthtrends.wri.org) Searchable Database. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Land and Water Development Division, 2007, AQUASTAT Information System on Water and Agriculture (www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/data/query/index.html). Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, 2005, World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision (www.un. org/esa/population/ordering.htm). Technical Notes: Per Capita Actual Renewable Water Resources gives the maximum theoretical amount of water actually available, on a per person basis, for each country. In reality, a portion of this water may be inaccessible to humans. Actual renewable water resources are defined as the sum of internal renewable resources (IRWR) and external renewable resources (ERWR), taking into consideration the quantity of flow reserved to upstream and downstream countries through formal or informal agreements or treaties and possible reduction of external flow due to upstream water abstraction. Data Reliability: While AQUASTAT represents the most complete and careful compilation of water resources statistics to date, freshwater data are generally of poor quality. Information sources are various but rarely complete. Access to information on water resources is still sometimes restricted for reasons related to sensitivity at the regional level. The accuracy and reliability of the information vary greatly among regions, countries, and categories of information, as does the year in which the information was gathered. As a result, no consistency can be ensured at the regional level on the duration and dates of the period of reference.

383

STATISTICS

Table S.2 Access to Improved Sanitation Facilities, percentage of total population

Afghanistan Aland Islands Albania Algeria American Samoa Andorra Angola Anguilla Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Aruba Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bermuda Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil British Virgin Islands Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Cape Verde Cayman Islands Central African Rep. Ceuta Chad Chile China, People’s Rep.1 China Taiwan Christmas Island Cocos Keeling Islands Colombia Comoros Congo Dem. Rep.

1995

2006

32 – 86 90 – – 30 – 95 85 89 – 100 100 80 100

30 – 97 94 – 100 50 – – 91 91 – 100 100 80 100

28 100 93 – 47 19 – – 36 96 42 73 – – 99 7 43 8 43 100 40 – 15 – 6 88 53 – – – 71 23 17

36 99 93 – – 30 – 52 43 95 47 77 – – 99 13 41 28 51 100 – – 31 – 9 94 65 – – – 78 35 31

(continued on the next page) 384

Statistics Table S.2 (continued)

Congo Republic Cook Islands Costa Rica Côte d’Ivoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Rep. Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Rep. Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Falkland Islands Faroe Islands Fiji Finland2 France French Guiana French Polynesia Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Gibraltar Greece Greenland Grenada Guadeloupe Guam Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq

1995

2006

– – 95 21 99 98 100 99 100 – 83 71 75 55 77 51 3 95 5 – – 70 100 – – 98 35 47 94 100 7 – 97 – 97 – 99 75 14 29 82 27 51 – 100 100 18 51 83 71

20 – 96 24 99 98 100 99 100 67 – 79 84 66 86 51 5 95 11 – – 71 100 – – 98 36 52 93 100 10 – 98 – 97 – 99 84 19 33 81 19 66 – 100 100 28 52 – 76

(continued on the next page) 385

STATISTICS

Table S.2 (continued)

Ireland Isle of Man Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Korea Dem. People’s Rep. Korea Rep. Kosovo3 Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macao Macedonia FYR Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania Mauritius Mayotte Melilla Mexico Micronesia Federated States Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Montserrat Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nauru

1995

2006

– – – – 82 100 95 97 40 25 59 – – – 92 13

– – – – 83 100 85 97 42 33 – – – – 93 48 78

98 33 36 97 – – 100 – – 10 51 57 39 – 77 – 20 94 – – 66 28 78 – 47 – – 59 22 34 29 –

36 32 97 – – 100 – 89 12 60 94 59 45 – – – 24 94 – – 81 25 79 – 50 91 – 72 31 82 35 –

(continued on the next page) 386

Statistics Table S.2 (continued)

Nepal Netherlands Netherlands Antilles New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria Niue Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands Norway Oman Pakistan Palau Palestinian Autonomous Areas Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Pitcairn Islands Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Réunion Romania Russian Federation Rwanda Saint Christopher and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Pierre and Miquelon Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tomé and Príncipe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia4 Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa Spain5 Sri Lanka

1995

2006

15 100 – – – 44 5 27 – – 89 – 87 40 61 80 63 44 64 60 66 – – 95 – 100 – 72 87 26 96 89 – – 99 – 21 – 27 – – 12 100 100 – 30 21 56 100 76

27 100 – – – 48 7 30 – – 94 – – 58 67 80 74 45 70 72 78 – – 99 – 100 – 72 87 23 96 – – 100 – 24 – 28 92 – 11 100 100 – 32 23 59 100 86

(continued on the next page) 387

STATISTICS

Table S.2 (continued)

Sudan Suriname Svalbard Swaziland Sweden Switzerland Syria Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tokelau Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom6 United States Virgin Islands USA Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Vatican City Venezuela Vietnam Wallis and Futuna Islands Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe World (average) 1

1995

2006

33 83 – 50 100 100 83 83 35 85 – 12 – 96 93 78 86 – – – 31 96 97 – – 100 100 94 49 – 86 40 – 34 45 45 54

35 82 – 50 100 100 92 92 33 96 41 12 – 96 92 85 88 – – – 33 93 97 – – 100 100 96 – – – 65 – 46 52 46 60

Including Hong Kong and Macao, listed separately. Including the Aland Islands, listed separately. 3 Declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. 4 Including Kosovo until February 2008. 5 Including Ceuta and Melilla, listed separately. 6 Including Northern Ireland. Source: This data table was downloaded from Europa World Online (http://www. europaworld.com/). Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators database. Copyright (c) Europa Publications 2009. For more information please go to Europa World Online. 2

388

Statistics Table S.3 Access to Improved Water Sources, percentage of total population

Afghanistan Aland Islands Albania Algeria American Samoa Andorra Angola Anguilla Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Aruba Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bermuda Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil British Virgin Islands Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Cape Verde Cayman Islands Central African Republic Ceuta Chad Chile China, People’s Republic1 China Taiwan Christmas Island Cocos Keeling Islands Colombia Comoros Congo Dem. Rep.

1995

2006

21 – 96 93 – 100 40 – 91 95 91 100 100 100 70 96 – 78 100 100 – 91 63 – – 78 97 94 86 – – 99 44 70 19 56 100 79 – 59 – 24 92 74 – – – 90 90 44

22 – 97 85 – 100 51 – – 96 98 100 100 100 78 – – 80 100 100 – – 65 – 81 86 99 96 91 – – 99 72 71 65 70 100 – – 66 – 48 95 88 – – – 93 85 46

(continued on the next page) 389

STATISTICS

Table S.3 (continued)

Congo Rep. Cook Islands Costa Rica Côte d’Ivoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Rep. Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Rep. Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Falkland Islands Faroe Islands Fiji Finland2 France French Guiana French Polynesia Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Gibraltar Greece Greenland Grenada Guadeloupe Guam Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq

1995

2006

– – 96 71 99 91 100 100 100 78 97 88 80 96 74 43 46 100 20 – – 47 100 100 – 100 83 85 78 100 64 – 98 – 94 – 100 85 53 58 88 54 77 – 97 100 77 74 93 82

71 – 98 81 99 91 100 100 100 92 – 95 95 98 84 43 60 100 42 – – 47 100 100 – 100 87 86 99 100 80 – 100 – – – 100 96 70 57 93 58 84 – 100 100 89 80 – 77

(continued on the next page) 390

Statistics Table S.3 (continued)

Ireland Isle of Man Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Korea Dem. People’s Rep. Korea Rep. Kosovo3 Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macao Macedonia FYR Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania Mauritius Mayotte Melilla Mexico Micronesia Federated States Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Montserrat Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nauru

1995

2006

– – 100 – 93 100 97 95 46 54 100 91 – – 77 41 99 100 77 61 71 – – 100 – – 42 52 98 95 42 100 92 – 40 100 – – 90 90 93 – 65 – – 78 39 61 70 –

– – 100 – 93 100 98 96 57 65 100 – – – 89 60 99 100 78 64 – – – 100 – 100 47 76 99 83 60 100 – – 60 100 – – 95 94 90 – 72 98 – 83 42 80 93 –

(continued on the next page) 391

STATISTICS

Table S.3 (continued)

Nepal Netherlands Netherlands Antilles New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria Niue Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands Norway Oman Pakistan Palau Palestinian Autonomous Areas Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Pitcairn Islands Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Réunion Romania Russian Federation Rwanda Saint Christopher and Nevis Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha Saint Lucia Saint Pierre and Miquelon Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tomé and Príncipe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia4 Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa Spain6

1995

2006

78 100 – – 97 74 41 50 – – 98 100 82 87 90 96 92 39 61 79 87 – – 97 – 100 – 80 95 64 99

89 100 – – – 79 42 47 – – 98 100 – 90 89 89 92 40 77 84 93 – – 99 – 100 – 88 97 65 99

98

98 – – 88 – 86 – 77 99 – 53 100 100 – 70 29 93 100

90 – 79 90 69 – 88 57 100 100 – 69 21 83 100

(continued on the next page) 392

Statistics Table S.3 (continued)

Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Svalbard Swaziland Sweden Switzerland Syria Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tokelau Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom7 United States Virgin Islands USA Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Vatican City Venezuela Viet Nam Wallis and Futuna Islands Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe World

1995

2006

71 67 91 – 59 100 100 83 56 50 96 – 52 – 100 90 86 89 – – – 49 97 100 100

82 70 92 – 60 100 100 89 67 55 98 62 59 – 100 94 94 97 – – – 64 97 100 100 – 99 100 88 – – – 92 – 66 58 81 86

99 100 90 61 – 90 64 72 53 79 79

Footnotes 1 Including Hong Kong and Macao, listed separately. 2 Including the Aland Islands 3 Declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. 4 Including Kosovo until February 2008. 6 Including Ceuta and Melilla, listed separately. 7 Including Northern Ireland. Source: This data table was downloaded from Europa World Online (http://www. europaworld.com/). Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators database. Copyright © Europa Publications 2009. For more information please go to Europa World Online. 393