Meredith A. Giordano

Sharing waters: Post-Rio international water management

Transcending human-defined political and administrative boundaries, the world’s transboundary freshwater resources pose particularly challenging management problems. Water resource users at all scales frequently find themselves in direct competition for this economic and life-sustaining resource, in turn creating tensions, and indeed conflict, over water supply, allocation, and quality. At the international scale, where the potential for conflict is of particular concern, significant efforts are underway to promote greater cooperation in the world’s international river basins, with notable achievements in the past decade following the Dublin and Rio conferences. 1 Over the past ten years, the international community has adopted conventions, declarations, and legal statements concerning the management of international waters, while basin communities have established numerous new basin institutions. Despite these developments, significant vulnerabilities remain. Many international basins still lack any type of joint management structure, and certain fundamental management components are noticeably absent from those that do. An understanding of these weaknesses, however, offers an opportunity for both the international and basin communities to better respond to the specific institution-building needs of basin communities and thereby foster broader cooperation over the world’s international water resources.

International resource conflict and mitigation

Resource availability is frequently linked with historic and potential international conflict. Conventional wisdom holds that international resource conflict occurs in locations where growing resource demand and declining supplies are greatest. While relative scarcity is undoubtedly an element driving international resource dispute, a focus on supply and demand measures alone is insufficient to understand international conflict potential, because of the pervasive willingness of nations to construct regimes, structures, and frameworks – that is, institutions – for dispute mitigation. However, institutions for regulating the use of internationally scarce resources sometimes fail to develop, and when they do, they are not always sufficiently resilient to deal with changing political and resource environments. Thus, international resource conflict is most likely to occur where there exist both resource scarcity and insufficient institutional capacity to deal with it. In particular, conflict is most likely to emerge in those areas where (1) resource sovereignty is ill defined or non-existent, (2) existing institutional regimes are destroyed by political change, and/or (3) rapid changes in resource environments outpace the capacity of institutions to deal with the change. A mitigation strategy for potential international resource conflict is the construction of resilient resource management institutions, along with the improvement of existing institutions. To be most effective, these institutions should be clear in terms of resource allocation and quality control; be constructed with an intrinsic ability to adjust to changing political and environmental conditions; promote positive-sum solutions to resource problems; and incorporate structured conflict resolution mechanisms.

Incorporating Equity into International Water Agreements

River basins have provided resources for the advancement of human civilization from the earliest historic times. With river basin development has also come conflict, particularly in the past century. In response, the international community has developed generalized, global principles for the equitable allocation of water resources between nation-states, most notably through the 1997 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses. These principles, however, have rarely been explicitly put into practice. To resolve or avert conflict in the worlds 261 international river basins, riparian nations have instead relied upon treaties that incorporate basin-specific needs and conditions and define equity at the most local level. An examination of the progression of geographic thought on river basin development reveals a spatial focus that has not evolved beyond the basin and landscape scales. The absence of theoretical underpinnings for global frameworks may explain why riparian nations have not widely adopted general principles for the equitable allocation of water resources in actual treaty practice.

Assessing the outcomes of IWMI’s research and interventions on irrigation management transfer

In Waibel, H.; Zilberman, D.EC (Eds.). International research on natural resource management: Advances in impact assessment. Rome, Italy: FAO; Wallingford, UK: CABI

Small pumps and poor farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa: an assessment of current extent of use and poverty outreach

The expansion of irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa has been slow. In Asia, the rapid expansion of smallholder irrigation systems was attributed in part to the availability and affordability of motorized pumps. This paper appraises the current extent of pump-based irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa; profiles the socio-economic and demographic attributes of current pump adopters; and assesses the poverty outreach of small-pump technology. It shows that private smallholder irrigation is practised mainly by the wealthier farmers. The development of groundwater irrigation requires targeted and deliberate public-policy interventions and institutional support focusing on the more marginal farmers.