Water Insecurity: A Change Agent for International Water Law Reform

Bjørn-Oliver Magsig is a research fellow at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany.

Even though water is now high on the international political agenda, billions of people are still denied access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation. While this seldom poses an immediate inter-state military threat, the consequent increase in local and regional tensions over access to the world’s freshwater resources is nevertheless jeopardising global stability and international security.

Although other levels of water management should not be neglected (national, local, and individual), this paper will focus on the international dimension. Not only do transboundary freshwater resources constitute an important source for the world’s population, they also add an element of complexity in the form of geopolitical risk—making international water security even more multifaceted. All over the world, co-riparian relations are being tested by the widening gap between the surging increase in demand for fresh water of sufficient quality and its declining availability, as well as by the unilateral development of (often large-scale) water projects.

Water scarcity, droughts, and floods are affecting communities in developed and developing countries alike. While in some cases the impacts are quite obvious, more often the linkages are hidden. For instance, the fact that the United Kingdom heavily relies on “virtual water” (imported in goods) from drought-prone countries means that water should be put at the centre of its international development policy if it is to avoid water insecurity at home.¹ Another area which is only slowly attracting attention is the water–energy–food nexus. This requires a holistic approach in order to develop sustainable solutions, as the demand for all three is surging and policies addressing one of the resources often have an impact on the others. In a couple of decades, two-thirds of the world’s population might suffer directly from a lack of fresh water.² Furthermore, the added variability and uncertainty caused by climate change exacerbate the risk of conflicts over shared freshwater resources. Considering that global demand for safe fresh water already exceeds supply, the growing “water gap” is painting a dark picture of the future.

While this gap, logically, will be closed, the crucial questions are: Who will suffer most during this process? How can the pie of freshwater resources be divided among the world’s growing population in the most equitable way? Is there a way to level the playing field between powerful states and less fortunate riparians? It is evident that international water insecurity calls for a new approach to transboundary freshwater management. The reasons for this and potential pathways for international water law are explored in the following sections.

The Concept of Water Security

When analysing the emerging global water crisis, one quickly realises that the past is not an adequate basis from which to make predictions about the possibility of future conflicts over water. Based on a pessimistic outlook, neo-Malthusians link the notion of “water wars” to the idea of violent conflicts caused by the over-exploitation of a specific resource that is often driven by rapid population growth, economic development, and the inequitable distribution of resources. Cornucopians, in contrast, draw a rather optimistic picture of the future while arguing that the water crisis is one of management rather than of absolute scarcity. In their view, it will be resolved through international trade (“virtual water”), economic development and investment in new infrastructure. The literature is rich in studies on the topic, with several moving away from a rather simplistic and bipolar discussion into new fields of research. While some scholars suggest that sharing international rivers is associated with militarised disputes between states (as well as with conflict-prevention activities), others argue that conflicts over scarce resources become violent only when certain socio-political factors allow it. These opposing views have discredited the whole branch of empirical conflict-research in some eyes. One group of scholars attempts to avoid the issue of generalisation, and instead focuses on the concept of “hydro-hegemony” to explain how the most powerful actor can impose its own policies on other states; this school analyses various forms of power and their respective asymmetries.³ Despite making an important contribution to the scholarship of hydro-diplomacy, it nevertheless fails to propose a novel normative framework that is capable of levelling the playing field.

The passionate “water wars” versus “water for peace” debate often misses a crucial point: even if future conflicts over water are unlikely to lead to fully fledged wars, early interaction between the riparian states will help alleviate the water crisis. The indisputable potential of water to drive cooperation and dialogue has to be harnessed. A discourse revolving around the question of whether the future will see “water wars” can never do justice to the complexity of the global water crisis since conflicts and cooperation always coexist—in the form of water interaction.⁴

Acknowledging this already limits the danger of alarmism—without denying or playing down the various relations between water resources and “conflict”. Even if dissent between riparian states regarding the allocation of their transboundary freshwater resources may not always pose a direct military threat, it nevertheless has the potential to destabilise societies in a world which—in some regions—is already highly unstable. That there is a threat of “water wars” is a political claim, mainly driven by the media, which completely ignores the complexity of the issues involved in transboundary water interaction; a different conceptual framework is needed to comprehend the global water crisis. Here, the notion of water security might be better suited to addressing the crux of the challenge.

The process of securitisation is a deliberate strategy for managing the risk perceptions of stakeholders. It aims to move an issue to the top of the agenda in order to generate the political will needed to address it.⁵ In this way, an issue becomes a security issue when the securitising actor convinces the relevant public that it poses an existential threat and can be dealt with only through extraordinary measures. However, while this process would definitely confirm the political importance of transboundary water issues, would it also secure peaceful management of the shared resource?