Nile Basin Initiative

Basin wide initiatives in the Nile Basin have been largely unsuccessful. The recent basinwide initiative to attempt to bring order to the situation around the river Nile's resources and the contested hydrohegemony held by Egypt is the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI). NBI has been widely regarded as the initiative with the strongest potential for establishing basinwide framework for cooperation. A framework for this basin is incredibly important in the context of growing population and climate change stressors, which will exacerbate already tense relations between riparians. Homer-Dixon highlights this importance in a river basin that is one of few that has potential to promote armed conflict. 

"the unilateral, state centric approach that the major riparian countries have been pursuing is untenable in the long run"

The above quote was taken from an article looking at the Nile Basin Initiative, focussing on the different actors and highlighting the state centric and selfish approach by most of the riparian nations within the basin. This is what I believe is the main problem with the situation, and something I feel that initiatives won't do much to deter, its a mentality that needs to be changed before any sort of initiative is going to be affected. Riparian states need to be convinced of the shared economic benefits 

from using the resources of the Nile sustainably present and especially in the future. This emphasises the importance of hydrologists and academics to produce these studies. This has worked in the past for example with the Hadejia Nguru wetlands, and Barbier et al. (1991) producing an analysis of some of the economical benefits of the wetlands and also Thompson and Barbier (1998)'s cost-benefit analysis which emphasised the nonsensical nature of large scale irrigation and infrastructure projects on the basins main rivers, due to the downstream costs.

The Nile basin initiative launched in February 1999 with the foundations being layed in previous years as willingness for basinwide cooperation grew. It comprises of a council of ministers (Nile COM), Technical Advisory Committee (Nile-TAC) and the Secretariat (Nile-SEC). The NBI has involvement from the World Bank which coordinates International Consortium for Cooperation on the Nile (ICCON) and there are two subsidiary action programs for the Eastern and Equatorial Lakes Region. Pressures from involvement of the world bank has led to Egypt shifting its foreign policy over the Nile, threatening a reduction in lending. This for me however, is concerning as it is forced cooperation and not out of true willingness and though it is talking about cooperating, it continues to develop large scale water projects within its borders that threatens the integrity of the Nile its water resources.

In order to develop the full potential of a river it has to be done at the basin scale with consideration of all parties that could be effected. Work by Ashok Swain highlights the need for an Integrated River Basin Management where the whole units can be considered as one economic, ecological and political unit irrespective of state boundaries. However, with the Nile Basin due to its vastness and the differing interests of the riparians a basin wide initiative is likely not to be as effective. The Lower Mekong Basin initiative is another example of a basin which has a lack of basinwide interest in cooperative management. However, in response to this a sub-basin agreement has been made between most of the riparian countries, the Nile could benefit from something like this potentially comprising of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia being the key targets. Swain interestingly brings attention to the fact a basin wide approach could be ineffective due to the varied levels of interest paid by each riparian and that the key riparians should be targeted in order to avoid potential conflict.

"to achieve sustainable socio-economic development through the equitable utilisation of, and benefit from, the common Nile Basin water resources" - aim of Nile Basin Initiative

Despite finding this paper very interesting I would criticise certain aspects such as the perceived fix for countries like Ethiopia and Sudan, lacking infrastructure to begin their own large scale water infrastructure projects. Unless these projects have been agreed to by all parties and assessed on a basin wide level I do not think this is a suitable fix considering how past large scale infrastructural projects have disrupted the flow in this basin and also in other african basins. Further to this, I wouldn't say basin wide initiatives are futile, as they consider the interests of smaller less politically powerful countries that still, regardless of size, rely on the basins resources. 

The take-home message from this article and blog post is that the initiative of NBI attempts to develop a framework for basin wide cooperation, which has worked previously in other basins and is suggested as a potential way to avoid conflict by academics such as Savenije (2008) and van der Zaag (2005). Whether it has been effective remains to be seen as it is a long process, however I do agree about the importance of sub basin level agreements between parties that are most effected or with most potential to engage in conflict. The myriad of complexities that the Nile Basin embodies, is likely to continue to be problematic for many years to come, however insight into new ways to deal with these issues are making paths to cooperation.