Water Diplomacy

A Negotiated Approach to Managing Complex Water Networks

Shafiqul Islam, Lawrence E. Susskind

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781617261022
• eBook ISBN: 9781136186561
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Water is the resource that will determine the wealth, welfare, and stability of many countries in the twenty-first century. This book offers a new approach to managing water that will overcome the conflicts that emerge when the interactions among natural, societal, and political forces are overlooked. At the heart of these conflicts are complex water networks. In managing them, science alone is insufficient and so is policy-making that doesn't take science into account. Solutions will only emerge if a negotiated or diplomatic approach that blends science, policy, and politics is used to manage water networks.

The authors show how open and constantly changing water networks can be managed successfully using collaborative adaptive techniques to build informed agreements among disciplinary experts, water users with conflicting interests, and governmental bodies with countervailing claims.

Shafiqul Islam is an engineer with over twenty-five years of practical experience in addressing water issues. Lawrence Susskind is founder of MIT's Environmental Policy and Planning Program and a leader of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Together they have developed a text that is relevant for students and experienced professionals working in a variety of engineering, science, and applied social science fields. They show how new thinking about water conflict can replace the zero-sum battles that pit experts, politicians, and stakeholders against each other in counter-productive ways. Their volume not only presents the key elements of a theory of water diplomacy; it includes excerpts and commentary from more than two dozen seminal readings as well as practice exercises that challenge readers to apply what they have learned.

1

A WATER MANAGEMENT FABLE FOR ALL TIME

Maia Majumder

Once upon a time, many millennia ago, three hunter-gatherer tribes settled in different parts of a river water basin known as Indopotamia. People were few and resources were plenty. As the population grew, the tribes realized that they could no longer depend entirely on wild foods. Slowly, they learned to cultivate rice. The best land for agriculture, however, became increasingly scarce. Land was transformed into a symbol of power. To protect themselves, and to assert their authority, the tribes established geographic boundaries and organized governments. These eventually became the modern day states of Alpha, Beta, and Gamma.

Flash forward to the present. For centuries, there have been tensions among the three countries. Alpha is the largest of the three, and is economically and politically dominant. It has long monopolized access to the river, insisting that only after its water needs have been met will Beta and Gamma be allowed more water. Continued population growth and increasing crop productivity in Alpha, however, seem never to leave enough water for the smaller upstream countries. As it has continued to devote all of its resources to its own political and economic development, Alpha has earned a reputation as self-serving, cruel, and uncompromising.

Periodic droughts and forest fires plague Gamma. Lack of stored water undermines its ability to deal with these problems, and has slowed its economic development. Also, much of Gamma’s groundwater is contaminated with arsenic, forcing it to rely almost entirely on the river for its drinking water. Beta, on the other hand, has lots of farmable land, but it does not have adequate labor supplies. In recent years, it has tried to shift to less labor-intensive energy-powered agriculture. This move has been difficult because Beta can’t afford the required gasoline or coal. Unless Beta can import cheap labor or generate hydropower from the river, its crop development and economic growth will continue to suffer.

In desperation, Beta and Gamma have decided to join forces and build a dam. They are seeking funding from the Regional Lending Agency (RLA). They won’t qualify for loans and grants, though, unless they can reach a water usage agreement with Alpha.

Alpha is quite unhappy about the idea of the dam. But because the RLA will only give money to countries that have good relations with their neighbors—and because Alpha wants money from the RLA for its own purposes—Alpha has signed a statement saying it supports the dam. Simultaneously, Alpha has threatened Beta and Gamma through indirect channels, indicating that it won’t be able to control local insurgents who may destroy the dam if it is built. This action has only increased the strain on Alpha’s already poor relationships with Beta and Gamma.

Alpha has reason for alarm. If the dam is built, it won’t have the water it needs to grow enough rice—the staple food of its population and economy. This concern has become increasingly acute in recent decades, as glacial melting and associated sea-level rise have caused saltwater intrusion in the Indopotamia basin. As a result, Alpha’s coastal rice paddies are too salty to produce rice. Alpha used to be able to grow whatever it needed. It didn’t have to rely on any of its neighbors, so friendly relationships with Beta or Gamma were not important. With the loss of coastal farmland, Alpha now needs help.

Alpha has such strained relationships with Beta and Gamma that it cannot ask for assistance. Instead, over the past few decades, Alpha has pumped more and more water from the basin to expand rice production. Beta and Gamma have not had the economic or military clout to stop this.

Alpha uses the additional water to irrigate dry land in Mu, its most populous state. Mu sits north of the coast at a relatively high elevation. It is one of the few parts of the country that has not been affected by saltwater intrusion. Its soil, though dry, is nutritious and can be made fertile for rice growing. But, as Alpha’s population has continued to expand, irrigation of Mu’s rice paddies has required many millions of gallons of water every season. Over the past few decades, Alpha’s active pumping has resulted in the draining of lakes, ponds and streams in Beta and Gamma.

The residents of Mu feel that they have been robbed of their rights by the central government of Alpha. Wages have been cut drastically to pay for the ever-increasing energy costs associated with the active pumping scheme. Residential areas have been cleared to create more farmland. The central government has made it clear to the citizens of Mu that their purpose is to feed the country.

One faction in Mu has had enough. It is planning a rebellion, intending to cut off the nation’s rice supply. Plans are afoot for organized military resistance. Mu is on the border with Beta, and has opened covert lines of communication with Beta’s national government. Mu has offered to trade subsidized labor for arms and military support.

During diplomatic discussions about the dam, the relationship between Beta and Mu was revealed. The discovery undermined trust between Beta and Gamma. Gamma worries that Alpha’s attempts to settle its dispute with Mu will make Beta’s need for additional workers clear. Gamma believes that when Alpha realizes this, it will offer Beta the subsidized labor it needs in exchange for discontinuing its support for the dam project. Because the RLA intends to split the money for the dam between the two countries, Gamma won’t be able to finish construction of the dam if Beta abandons the project.

Beta could, in fact, get by without the dam. It wants the dam primarily to support water-powered energy production as it attempts to convert its rice paddy fields to machine-operated farms. In the long term, these will be much more economically efficient. If, however, Beta can find additional workers whose wages are paid by Alpha, the conversion to energy-powered farming will not be necessary. By contrast, the only way for Gamma to deal with its recurring droughts, forest fires, and widespread dehydration is to increase its access to the river. Otherwise, Gamma will remain agriculturally and socioeconomically backward, falling further behind its neighbors.

In an ideal world, Alpha would allow Beta and Gamma to build the dam—free of insurgent attacks—in exchange for rice. This would allow Gamma to deal with dehydration, drought and wildfires. It would also allow Beta to pursue its conversion to machine-operated farming. By exporting rice to Alpha, Beta and Gamma would gain diplomatic clout, creating a stronger web of interdependencies among the three countries that would be more durable in the face of external adversity. Alpha’s relationship with Mu, which would no longer be responsible for producing food for the entire country, could heal. Finally, with peace in the region, the RLA and other international players would be more inclined to increase their investments.

Is Alpha too proud to agree to this solution? Can Gamma trust Beta to follow through on the dam construction? Or, will Beta turn on Gamma if Alpha offers subsidized labor? Will Mu be able to reconcile with Alpha’s central government, or will there be civil war?

The answers to these questions are contingent upon the three countries being able to turn an age-old conflict into a problem-solving opportunity.

Welcome to our world of water diplomacy!

2

CHALLENGING THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ABOUT WATER MANAGEMENT

The Evolution of Water Resources Management

In our fictional world of Indopotamia, water was not a scarce resource during the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Early civilization started near water and thrived along rivers. For thousands of years—from Mesopotamian cities, to Mayan civilization, to modern day Boston in the United States—we have figured out ways to move water around to facilitate development and enhance the quality of life. It is common knowledge that fresh water is a finite resource and that the overall supply of fresh water has not changed since the time of the dinosaurs.

Supplying enough water has been the focus of water management for centuries. Boston was founded in 1620 (although there are indications that Native Americans inhabited the area as long ago as 2500 BC). Like many other places, people relied on cisterns, wells, and a spring on Boston Common for their water in those early days. As the city grew, this supply was inadequate and the quality was often poor. In 1848, Boston drew its municipal water supply from Lake Cochituate. Water flowed from there into the Frog Pond on Boston Common. On October 25, 1848, there was a famous water celebration to acknowledge the opening of the Frog Pond. It began with the roar of 100 cannons and that drew over 100,000 people. In 1848, Boston’s population was only 127,000. By 1900, it had tripled to over 550,000. To facilitate continued growth over the next 100 years, engineers had to dramatically enhance water availability. Today, the Metropolitan Water Resources Authority provides water to 2.5 million users in 46 cities and towns around Boston.

Despite this long experience in water resources management—from the water works of Mesopotamian cities, to the marvelous water technologies of the Romans, to the optimism of modern engineering, including dam building, waste water treatment and irrigation—the history of supply-focused water management has not always gone smoothly. The development of Boston’s water supply is also a story of how natural and societal systems became entangled, and how this interaction created conflict and confusion. The sources Boston tapped in 1848 moved progressively west, from urban areas to the sparsely populated western portion of the state where the water was as yet untainted. Twentieth-century water supply projects, in contrast to earlier water projects, involved the creation of massive storage reservoirs like the Quabbin reservoir, in the middle of Massachusetts, which necessitated the inundation of several communities. To this day, residents in that area resent the fact that their communities were sacrificed to satisfy Boston’s growing need for drinking water.

In 1848, it was a remarkable engineering success to bring ten million gallons per day of water from 19 miles west of Boston via the Cochituate aqueduct. At that time, issues of environmental or societal impact were not explicitly considered or discussed. Over the years, multiple water projects were initiated to meet the city’s growing demand. Finally, in 1946 construction of the Quabbin Reservoir, about 50 miles west of Boston, was completed. At that time, the 412 billion gallon reservoir was the largest man-made reservoir in the world devoted solely to water supply. In creating the Quabbin Reservoir, four towns—Greenwich, Enfield, Dana, and Prescott—were inundated. Natural and societal systems became intricately coupled when water management focused primarily on supply-side strategies to meet competing and growing needs.

To identify the most appropriate water policies, programs or projects, analysts usually think in terms of the supply-side and the demand-side. The supply-side is structure-oriented, requiring investments in things that need to be built with the help of engineers and technical experts. Supply-side investments typically hinge on cost–benefit analysis (CBA), a key purpose of which is to quantify the advantages and disadvantages of one project or another in terms of dollar costs.

This focus on a predominantly techno-centered search for additional sources of water to meet growing demand—from the remarkable engineering success story of the 1840s that provided Boston with a piped and clean water supply to the complex stories of tradeoff between the destruction and displacement of marginalized communities—is not unique to Boston. Similar supply-focused and engineering-centered water projects have been embraced and celebrated in many cities and communities around the world, from Bombay to Buenos Aires.

Time and situations, however, have changed. Now, there are over six billion humans competing for roughly the same amount of water that was available eons ago. Now we are concerned about an array of demand-side considerations: Is water a property right or a human right? Do fish have more rights to water than corn? Is maximization of economic utility more important than environmental sustainability? How can we reconcile competing cultural and religious values associated with water? How much water do people actually need, and should we adjust our ways of living to reduce overall demand?

There is an increasing realization that the supply-side focus that has dominated the water agenda throughout human history is insufficient to meet the complex challenges of our time. An earlier generation of water development, typified by the construction of large dams, centralized wastewater treatment plants, and irrigation projects, benefited a large share of the Earth’s people by helping to reduce starvation and water-related illness and protecting against devastating floods. With continuing economic development, however, this centralized construction-oriented approach has hit its limits. These constraints are exacerbated by the scarcity of new water sources, the costs of developing them, and the pressures of population growth, rapid urbanization, poverty, ecosystem degradation, biodiversity losses, and global climate change.

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM)

Until the 1970s, most water managers sought to solve specific localized water problems without worrying about the impacts that water management decisions might have on other components of natural (water quantity, water quality, ecological functions, and services) and societal (economic, cultural, institutional) systems. The United Nations-sponsored 1977 water conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina is viewed by many (Lee 1992; Biswas 2004; Heathcote 2009) as a landmark event in water management. The occasion gave global recognition to the shortcomings of supply-side focused water management.

There was agreement that water managers could not afford to focus on a single sector or a single commodity-oriented approach. Instead, they needed to take a more balanced, people-oriented approach. This shift acknowledged that water bodies are multiple user systems, and that more equitable and sustainable management can only occur when the needs and goals of multiple users are considered in a multidimensional, multisectoral context. Thus, the era of integrated water resources management (IWRM) was born. Over the past four decades, IWRM has been strongly endorsed at other international events in Rio de Janeiro, Dublin, The Hague, Johannesburg, and Kyoto. Most international organizations, including the United Nations and the World Bank, have adopted IWRM as a guiding principle.

It was not until 2000 that IWRM was defined clearly as “a process which promotes the coordinated development and management of water, land and related resources in order to maximize economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems and the environment” (Global Water Partnership 2000). In addition, five principles to guide water management emerged: (1) water is a finite and vulnerable resource; (2) a participatory approach is necessary; (3) the role of women should be emphasized; (4) the social and economic value of water must be acknowledged; and (5) the three Es of sustainability (economic efficiency, social equity and ecosystem sustainability) must be given priority.

The Global Water Partnership (GWP) that enunciated these principles, presented IWRM as a way to integrate a range of connotations (Saravanan et al 2009), various definitions (Braga 2001; Jonker 2007 Thomas and Durham 2003) and different approaches (Mitchell 1990). In a critical assessment of the GWP definition of IWRM, however, Biswas argued that this approach cannot be implemented because of unresolved operational questions and related difficulties of specifying assessment criteria and metrics. Biswas argues for a focus on operational (“what will be”) concerns and suggests disregarding normative (“what ought to be”) and strategic (“what can be”) concerns (Mitchell 2008).

A key assumption in the GWP definition of IWRM is the idea that actors in any society can and will seek to reach common understandings and coordinate their actions through reasoned argument, consensus, and cooperation (Habermas 1984). Critics argue, however, and illustrate with actual case studies “why and how [such] integration cannot be achieved” (Saravanan et al 2009). Integration is a political process (Allan 2006; Ingram 2011) that requires “realistic analyses” of existing situations (Mollinga et al 2007), as well as the “pooling of explicit and tacit information to create actionable knowledge” (Islam et al 2009; Islam and Susskind 2011).

Many water-related conflicts are, in fact, framed in terms of actors (individuals, communities, businesses, NGOs, states, and countries) competing to protect their own, often conflicting, economic and political interests. Such competition occurs at various scales and often results in gridlock. Water management is further complicated by the existence of natur...

Table of contents

• COVER
• HALFTITLE
• TITLE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• LIST OF ACRONYMS
• 1. A WATER MANAGEMENT FABLE FOR ALL TIME
• 2. CHALLENGING THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ABOUT WATER MANAGEMENT
• 3. UNDERSTANDING AND CHARACTERIZING COMPLEX WATER MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS
• 4. ADDRESSING COMPLEX WATER MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS
• 5. A NON-ZERO-SUM APPROACH TO WATER NEGOTIATIONS
• 6. THE PRACTICE OF WATER DIPLOMACY IN A NUTSHELL
• 7. THE INDOPOTAMIA ROLE-PLAY SIMULATION
• Glossary
• INDEX