Conflict, Cooperation, and Complexity: Understanding Transboundary Water Interactions

Paula Hanasz is completing a Ph.D. at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. Her thesis concerns hydro-hegemony and the securitisation of water in South Asia.

Panic over imminent water wars has been gaining currency since the notorious claim in 1995 of Ismail Serageldin, then vice-president of the World Bank, that “the wars of the next century will be about water.” More recently, water has been called the next battleground of Asia,¹ and such fears prevail in the public imagination despite a long-standing academic consensus that outright wars over water resources are a highly unlikely proposition. Indeed, it has been shown that water is more often than not a nexus of cooperation.

What, then, is water conflict? And what exactly is its elusive twin, cooperation? This paper explores these concepts in relation to the management of transboundary water resources, with South Asia serving as a case study of the complexities and ambiguities involved. It stresses the importance of a nuanced understanding of water interactions (those relations in which both conflict and cooperation coexist) in the analysis of water security in an increasingly complex world facing non-traditional security threats and collective-action problems.

This paper argues that conflict is not always counterproductive to the long-term resolution of issues, and conversely, that ostensible cooperation (such as the signing of treaties) does not necessarily allay discontent between riparians. Even with a clear power asymmetry in transboundary basin management, the outcome is not inevitable, and most water interactions are neutral in character. One illustration of this lies in the water interactions of South Asia, where the hydro-hegemon, India, has established a status quo of bilateral arrangements rather than taking a more inclusive multilateral approach, but does not use coercive tactics to gain the compliance of co-riparians.

Conflict: What Is It?

To understand cooperation, we must first understand conflict. In the world of water, conflicts occur in three spheres: the hydrosphere, and the economic, and political spheres. Problems in one may lead to conflict in another. In a large river basin, water may be managed for multiple uses such as power generation, food production, industrial development, municipal water supply, recreation, or a combination of these. Different user-groups with different objectives will have difficulty in arriving at a common schedule of quantity and time of water distribution, thus leading to conflict.²

Yet the conflict-management aspects of transboundary water management must not be taken as indicative of the inevitability of “water wars”. Many scholars, foremost among them Aaron Wolf, have convincingly refuted the water wars thesis.³ Their persuasiveness, however, has led to an arguably over-optimistic mood that sees cooperation as the inevitable march of history. More recently, Naho Mirumachi’s Transboundary Water Interaction NexuS (TWINS) model,⁴ and Mark Zeitoun and Jeroen Warner’s work on hydro-hegemony, serve as cautionary tales against the prevalent optimism, without reverting to the water wars scenario.⁵ 

Security, Securitisation and Transboundary Waters

The notion of conflict is intimately linked to that of security, and the fear of water wars illustrates that the idea of security is an emotional and an inherently subjective one. If we take a constructivist approach, which stresses the relative nature of phenomena in international relations, security cannot be objectively measured. There is no way of determining how insecure actors “really” are, and inferences must be made based on their statements and actions. Those statements and actions can “securitise” an issue—bring it into the realm of issues that require (or are perceived to require) emergency actions beyond the state’s standard political procedures.⁶ Water issues can thus become securitised in a polity though they may not necessarily constitute an existential threat to the state. The difficulty with securitisation is the same as with security in general, namely, that it is subjective. One often cannot tell whether securitisation is a genuine cry of despair or a cunning strategy. This ambiguity certainly applies to the fear of water wars in Asia.

On an international scale, ensuring water security is problematic because the reasonable, equitable and sustainable utilisation of transboundary water courses is constrained by national sovereignty and security priorities. Transboundary water management is a fiendish problem, with competing interests of irrigation, industrial development, environmental sustainability, water sanitation, hydroelectric energy production, etc. These uses vie for priority at the national level, and are sometimes irreconcilable with the same competing priorities of neighbouring littoral states. That is to say, the pursuit of one nation’s water-use priorities may be seen as a security threat by another. For example, if an upstream nation retains water during summer months for hydro-electricity production during winter, its downstream neighbour may be left with an inadequate water supply for its agricultural production during the peak growing season.

Moreover, most of the world’s freshwater basins lie in the jurisdiction of more than one nation. Indeed, there are more than two hundred river basins shared by two or more countries, and this accounts for more than 50 per cent of the land areas of the earth.⁷ Because political boundaries rarely coincide with watershed boundaries, politics more often than not encroaches on water policy. This is of particular concern given that two-thirds of the world’s water basins do not have treaties guiding the sharing of their waters. 

Water Scarcity and Water Conflict

A further factor that is commonly understood to generate water conflict is water scarcity. Growing populations impose ever-greater demands for water supplies, often leading to unsustainable withdrawals. Rising demand has been accompanied by increasing concern that unfettered consumption of natural resources such as food, water, land and oil may trigger zero-sum competition or violent conflict. But that is not to say such competition and conflict will be Machiavellian. Water-governance experts such as Ramaswamy Iyer argue that water conflicts are not necessarily about ill will and malevolence, but rather about (mis-)management of water. Management of shared water resources should be seen as a cooperative activity, but tensions arise—and coexist with this cooperation—out of water greed, which occurs when nobody seems to have enough water for their growing demand.

This concern is compounded by the projected impacts of climate