Institutionalized Cooperation and Resilience in Transboundary Freshwater Allocation

Abstract

Of all the expected impacts of climate change, the most significant is likely to be the change in the availability of freshwater associated with changing precipitation. The most recent IPCC Report notes that all regions of the world are expected to experience a net negative impact on water resources and freshwater ecosystems. The impact is likely to be highly variable: some regions experiencing declining runoff, others increasing runoff. Many areas are projected to experience increased variability in precipitation and hence in water supply, water quality and flood risks (IPCC 2007). Individual countries are already developing strategies to adapt to or to mitigate the consequences of changes in water availability, including the adoption of water conservation measures, water conservation and adaptive management practices, together with the development of novel institutions — including water markets. Internationally, however, there are fewer options. Transboundary water resources are typically governed by international treaties and by the mechanisms established under those treaties (e.g. transboundary water commissions).

In this chapter we consider the role of transboundary water agreements in the resilience of social-ecological systems to water shocks and stresses, where resilience is taken to mean the capacity of the system to maintain functionality over a particular disturbance regime (Holling 1973, Perrings 1998). Transboundary agreements take many forms, some being more effective than others at adapting to environmental and social change. Two attributes of a social ecological system determine its resilience. One is the adaptive capacity of both components of the system (Carpenter et al. 1999, Elmqvist et al. 2003, Scheffer and Carpenter 2003, Kinzig et al. 2006). For freshwater ecosystems, this depends on the flow regimes, sediment and organic inputs, nutrient flows and biotic assemblages (Baron et al. 2002). For the institutions governing transboundary freshwater systems, it depends on treaty mechanisms that account for fluctuations in the water cycle. A second important attribute of coupled systems is their robustness: the properties of the system that allow it to accommodate perturbations without additional adaptation (Webb and Levin 2005). Using the results of a content analysis we evaluate these attributes in a sample of 73 international water treaties.

Keywords: international water law, resilience, transboundary water resources, water conflict, treaty, climate change, water availability