Water conflict and cooperation literature: A review

An interesting journal article published just recently has scrutinised literature from the past 25 years on water conflict and cooperation highlighting areas that require future investigation and calling for an adjustment to the approaches to studies on water resource conflict. I will discuss a few interesting points it stresses in this blog post.

The article highlights 2 significant waves of literature, while it isnt ideal to categorize the author does actually encapsulate the changing literature on water conflict. Wave 1 starts in the 1990s with the neomalthusian rhetoric of concerns relating water conflict to population, poverty and environmental degredation. Wave 2 begins in the early 2000s initiated this time by questions of climate change and adaptive capacity. Though this is a good way to view the changing paradigms in water resource literature over the past 20 years on Africa, it ignores that there is a significant quantity of literature published before 1980 on water resource conflict.

A second claim made by the article is that the idea of 'basins at risk' is not a fixed but fluid concept. This is a just idea when one considers that Wolf et al. 2003 highlighted that the Okavango basin is likely to see an 'escalation in conflict' in the next 5-10 years. This has yet to materialise and emphasises the dynamic constantly changing and unpredictable nature of basin status.

Another interesting aspect is the common conception in literature that conflict is bad and to be avoided and that cooperation is good. A good example used in the article is the Orange-Senqu cooperation that occured only after conflict via a coop d'etat. This links to the idea that conflict and cooperation occur simultaneously and in a variety of forms, Furlong et al emphasised the contradictory nature of cooperation between states whereby regional peace obscures the subnational violence that could be occuring. Other academics such as Mirumachi and Homer-Dixon also share these beliefs.

This is part of a wider absense of studies on subnational scale conflict or cooperation, obscurred by the focus on interstate relations and general basinwide categorization as being in conflict or cooperative. The article alludes to a need to find a way to intergrate the fascination of potential for interstate conflict with real time numerous and persistent conflcits that exist within states - this is what he suggests as a third wave of more nuanced and sophisticated studies.

As I read this article, I found the critiques outlined to be rather sobering when I consider how I have looked at the Okavango and Nile basins. The extensive one dimensional literature on these transboundary basins have encouraged me to categorize the basin as either in cooperation or in conflict, ignoring both subnational and further aggregate dynamics. Overall, the article makes an interesting read and in my opinion is thought provoking critical synthesis of literature over the past 20 years on transboundary water conflict.