The Norms of Water-Sharing:

Cooperation along a Continuum

By Kathleen M. Hogan[1]

Academic work over the last decade on the next flashpoint for international conflicts has focused on the competition for resources. In the absence of the Cold War-era threat of nuclear annihilation, the world should now be viewed as “a geography of conflict,” in which “resource flows…constitute the major fault lines.”[2] Ongoing civil wars over diamonds in Africa, persistent tensions over oil and gas supplies in the Middle East and South Asia, and bloodshed over the use of scarce arable land in Sudan support the view that natural resources are fungible. Moreover, countries harden their positions on rights of possession as they execute “politics of scarcity.” Competition for natural resources will lead to conflict. Environmentalists have warned for decades that critical renewable natural resources are finite and cannot keep up with the demands of an increasing population. Therefore without intervention, an unfavorable outcome is almost certain.

Aaron Wolf, a leading authority on the politics of water, makes a compelling case that unlike diamonds, oil, and land, the demand for water resources does not promote conflict. Historical records and data from over 400 fresh-water agreements decidedly demonstrate more cooperation than conflict.[3] Many scholars share Wolf’s view that water is a resource “whose characteristics tend to induce cooperation and incite violence only in exception,” resulting in water-sharing treaties that are “creative, resilient, and manage to transcend other conflicts.”[4] Those who do not share this optimistic view cite the success and longevity of water-sharing agreements as an anomaly. The most notable of these is the Indus River treaty between India and Pakistan, which has persisted despite the long-standing border dispute over Kashmir. Is this case unique, or do nations generally view water differently than other natural resources, thereby prompting countries to seek solutions that transcend their conflicts?

To determine whether a case is unique requires a comparison between it and others to see if, given commonalities in political environment, the outcomes are the same. Using common elements as “controls,” there is greater potential to isolate causal factors that have led to divergent paths. The disputes over the Indus and Jordan River basins lend themselves to a comparative study because of their common elements: they originated in the post-World War II environment, recent statehood has colored their domestic politics, and powerful individuals strongly influenced negotiations to resolve the disputes over water resources. India and Pakistan agreed to divide the Indus waters without bloodshed. Although the Arab-Israeli conflict escalated to violence, water was not the cause of it. In both cases, parties arguing over water rights managed to avoid armed conflict over the resource itself.

Parties in both the Indus and Jordan River cases cooperated in differing degrees and at a great cost. To ensure its autonomous access to water, Pakistan built an infrastructure parallel to the colonial-era waterworks apportioned to post-partitioned India.[5] The World Bank brokered and financially underwrote this cooperative solution, which cost more than $20 million and took eight years of negotiations, but still did not achieve a basin-wide sharing arrangement.[6] However, it was the only politically acceptable option because it allowed parties to retain sole control over their own shares of the water. Parties in the Jordan case were unable to cooperate to this degree, largely because the Arab nations refused to recognize the state of Israel. Although mediators were able to get technical experts from each side to discuss water control issues at the “picnic table” talks, there was no political opportunity for the sides to reach an accord. Armed conflict only deepened the divisions between the protagonists. Today, parties in both the Indus and Jordan cases maintain the status quo arrangements reached in the 1960s and both cases are hardly moving toward a more comprehensive sharing arrangement.

As a counterpoint to the Indus and Jordan cases, the Senegal River case presents a new paradigm in cooperation over resources. In 1972, Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, and Guinea (as an observer) concluded a basin-wide regional sharing arrangement named Organization pour la Mise en Valeur du Fleuve Senegal (OMVS). Although the four signatory nations were considerably less financially endowed than the parties of the Indus and Jordan cases, they invested their own money in the venture in addition to the funding they received from the World Bank. The apparent ease with which the agreement was concluded should not be viewed as indicative of a perfect accord; rather, parties placed trust in the architecture of a representative council charged with assessing requests for water on their own merits. This methodology was not unique to the Senegal case, so why were these four parties able to conclude a comprehensive agreement while others failed?

A Constructivist Approach to Explaining Water-sharing Relationships

In a relative power framework, the stronger state (strength is defined as a state’s military power, control of headwaters, and position in the international community, or a combination of these attributes) will take the lead in establishing any sharing regime. If the stronger state has no urgent incentive to cooperate, it will abstain from abstain negotiations in an effort to force the “needier” state to capitulate. The weaker state can seek outside assistance to bolster its position or accept the conditions that the stronger state proposes, but these are both sub-optimal choices.

The relative power argument does not explain why India, by far the larger and stronger of the states, accepted a lesser portion of the Indus River flow and contributed significant financial resources to develop Pakistan’s hydrologic infrastructure. Had India acted in accordance with its strength, it would have used its control of the headwaters to deny flow to Pakistan until leaders capitulated on other issues, including the control of Kashmir. Furthermore, Pakistan, the more vulnerable state, would have been forced to accept sub-optimal terms. Despite a desperate need to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency, however, Pakistan stalled the conclusion of a treaty until it secured specific terms from India, taking risks uncharacteristic of a weaker state. The relative power argument might be more applicable to Israeli-Arab water-sharing issues, but it still does not hold for the Senegal River basin.[7]

A constructivist approach offers an alternate explanation for these counterintuitive actions. In the constructivist paradigm, a shared water “ethos” moves discourse to a common ground of ideas and norms that enables parties to bypass volatile political issues. In this construct, two norms of water-sharing better explain the phenomena that occur in water-sharing relationships.[8] The norm of hydrologic technology is viewed as a constitutive norm because it causes members involved in the technological control of water to recognize and validate a shared scientific identity, which motivates actions to further technological achievement. The norm of appropriate use is viewed as a regulative norm because it operates as a standard for the “proper enactment or deployment of a defined identity.” This norm includes both the value-based expectations of which decision-makers are aware and beliefs about water use that belong to a cultural tradition.[9]

Correlation Between Norm Origin and Degree of Influence

Where do norms of water sharing originate and how do norm influences translate into political action? The origin of a norm determines its strength and longevity. Furthermore, where there is more than one identifiable norm at work, the outcome of a water-sharing agreement (or lack thereof) are influenced by the relative strengths of the norms. The norm of hydrologic technology originates from a desire to harness water and bring it under control for irrigation, flood control, and energy. Ancient civilizations, which developed around water sources, demonstrated that water was not only a requirement for survival, but also a resource with practical uses. The degree of sophistication and development of societies was judged by the complexity and range of utility of the structures they built since they represented physical and cultural symbols of prestige and advancement. The Industrial Revolution accelerated the production and growth of water infrastructures and the development hydrologic technology, as evidenced by the trend toward increasingly more elaborate waterworks and dams that can direct the course of rivers and store and harness water as an energy resource.

The United States followed Great Britain’s lead in establishing a national water philosophy by adopting the concept of centralized control. Beginning with President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, succeeding presidencies sought to establish jurisdiction over all natural resources. To entrepreneurial leaders, construction of large dams suited several purposes. Changing the courses of rivers from their natural, meandering paths to the under-developed western portions of the United States provided jobs and created an inexpensive source of power for citizens. The completion of vast projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was symbolic of technical pre-eminence and the United States was eager to share and export technology to less-developed countries. The apparent successes of the TVA resonated with members of the technical community worldwide and especially appealed to engineers in countries with the technical capability to reproduce TVA principles and an urgent need for agricultural independence and economic solvency.

The seminal authors of the history of the Indus waterworks and treaty negotiations, A.A. Michel and N.D. Gulhati (Chief of the Natural Resources Division of India’s Planning Commission Engineer and subsequent leader of India’s delegation in negotiations), attribute the eventual conclusion of the Indus Basin Treaty to the parties’ ability to frame the issue as a technical problem, which enabled those who “speak the language of river control” to make progress where politicians could not. The authors provide detailed accounts of the Indus basin negotiations, describing how Indian and Pakistani engineers, with World Bank facilitators, developed an enormously complex plan for parallel irrigation and energy production infrastructures. Michel writes that the Indus treaty was concluded and endures because the negotiations were “for water, rather than land or ego” and were conducted in “some secrecy by fair-minded parties with a common vision.”[10] In the Indus and Jordan River cases, scientists and engineers focused on physical challenges in an attempt to distinguish them from emotionally charged political issues. The norm of hydrologic technology was created by the power of shared ideas, underwritten to a large degree by influential emissaries of the TVA ideal, and flourished within its technical epistemic community.[11]

Conversely, the norm of appropriate use originates in a less visible, although equally powerful sphere. Families passed down written and oral histories over generations, which demonstrated the importance of the value of water in their daily lives. Of all natural resources, perhaps water has the greatest symbolism, representing survival, security, and opportunity, as well as aspects of material economic power. Water also symbolizes social values, heritage, and lineage, and in comparison with a physical structure, it is more enduring by the very nature of its ability to influence political affinities and actions.[12]

Resource scarcity increases the influence of the norm of appropriate use. In a zero-sum perspective, increased allocation of fresh water to one user decreases the amount available to another user. Moreover, when parties’ views about the rightful use of water conflict, they quickly reach an impasse since cultural views are intrinsic and therefore less open to negotiation than technical points (e.g., how many cubic feet of water are flowing from which source). The norm is linked to parties’ beliefs about each other’s legitimacy not just as water users but also as suitable neighbors, which makes reaching an agreeable solution difficult. Therefore, the difference in the norm origins is crucial to the outcomes in this hypothesis. A norm based on shared tangible, material, egoistic beliefs may produce results in the short term, but shared cultural beliefs and consonance in practices will have greater reach and longevity in the long term.

It would be a mistake to ignore the role of international law in relation to the importance of norms. Even if international law on the rights of riparians (states with an interest in access or control over water of an international river that traverses its territory) has not bound parties to specific behavior, there is a long history of existing “water laws.” Looking at the basic tenets of Islamic and Talmudic Law, it is difficult to discern operational differences between water doctrines. Agreement on principles, however, does not necessarily translate into agreement concerning the allocation of water resources, as is evident between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Since 1970, international law has progressively increased its level of detail and breadth of coverage, yet it still remains open to interpretation and lacks direction for the use of groundwater, which must be considered part of the Senegal River Basin negotiations. Several conditions are prevalent in the prescriptive international law clauses: equity of the agreement; parties’ control over their own resources; committal of no substantial harm to others’ riparian rights; and cooperative and transparent communications to encourage trust and openness between those who share the water resource. Like other communal resources, “governments are not compelled to act until it becomes clear that a failure to act will produce more problems than acting.”[13]

The Indus, Jordan, and Senegal River Basin Cases

This paper focuses on the roles of the two water-sharing norms in two cases between 1947 and 1961 and then looks at the influence of the same norms in a contemporary case to see how the norms evolved over time. Given the different outcomes of limited cooperation (the dependent variables), the norms are the primary independent variables, although other factors, namely the role of American envoys, the power of the TVA as a “norm model,” international institutions, and the international political environment also contribute to cooperative outcomes.

The degree to which riparians share a sense of water “ethos” is the primary determinant of the level of cooperation they are able to achieve when negotiating water-sharing arrangements for a transnational water source. A shared sense of purpose—translated into a norm—is more powerful than external influences, financing, and even agreement over the optimum technical solution to control the resource flow. Two discernible water-sharing norms influenced the level of cooperation that riparians were able to achieve in the Indus, Jordan, and Senegal River cases, and varying outcomes are directly attributable to the relative strength of the two norms. In the Indus and Jordan River cases, riparians agreed on the need to improve their technical capability to harness water for agricultural independence and the need for an affordable source of power for industry. However, parties’ disagreement over appropriate use limited their ability to conclude regional water-sharing agreements. This was less evident in the Indus case, but Pakistan’s insistence on developing its own infrastructure to ensure independence and pursue its own national economic strategy limited broader cooperation. In the Jordan case, there was appreciably greater dissonance between the Arab and Israeli sense of “appropriate usage.” This disagreement virtually assured that neither side would capitulate on the issue of water-sharing so long as the parties maintained their fundamentally conflicting pastoral and industrial philosophies.

The successful case of the Senegal River Basin initiative indicates more than a simple convergence of norms. Rather, the nature of the negotiations and willingness of the parties to reach a regional solution suggests that a learning process occurred, which resulted in the evolution of norms. Four decades of tension between a norm that glorified technological advance at any expense and a less-articulated but arguably more powerful norm of appropriate use resulted in the desire for a more balanced, less destructive route to achieve sustainable goals. In this analysis, norms are not immutable. They are subject to change as people learn from the consequences of their previous actions and adjust their behavior accordingly. In this manner, parties can transcend material desires to achieve a greater good among the community of users.

The Indus and Jordan River cases occurred in the same time frame and international political climate. In both cases, tensions over water were secondary to other political issues but quickly became an immediate concern because of the drastic position that riparians would have faced without water. When the conflicts over water occurred, leaders were grappling with political, social, and economic dynamics of nascent statehood and decolonization. The United States was acutely interested in the Middle East and Asia and adopted a strategy to solve lesser disputes, theorizing that good would result from those successes and mitigate more worrisome issues. In the Indus and Jordan cases, parties cooperated sufficiently to avoid a war over water although they could only manage to divide the water. This was not the solution the “norm entrepreneurs” sought, but it represented a limited success brought about by a shared norm of hydrologic technology.

The cases diverge, however, on the degree to which the norm of appropriate use influenced cooperation. India and Pakistan shared fairly similar cultural views on the appropriate use of water, and they also inherited an integrated infrastructure from decades of British colonial rule. In the Jordan case, however, Israeli and Arab cultural views on appropriate water use was a point of conflict so intractable that it nearly overshadowed any technological progress scientists made in their informal “picnic table” talks. Despite the influence of norm entrepreneurs who prescribed the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) model, mediation by the World Bank, and significant financing, parties still only managed to reach agreements (albeit informal in the Jordan case) to divide the basin waters.

In the third case, the contemporary case of the Senegal River basin, four countries initiated and concluded the negotiations in the last decade. Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, and Guinea (an observer) overcame resource-sharing issues with minimal external financing and intervention and produced a regional basin-wide arrangement to share basin waters rather than divide them. The Sahelian drought of the 1970s brought the four nations together to create the Organization pour la Mise en Valeur du Fleuve Senegal (OMVS) and parties contributed their own funds to build two dams to improve irrigation and develop hydroelectric power. When it became clear that the sectored management approach did not meet the needs of the region, the countries engaged the World Bank to contribute via its Global Economic Fund. The total cost of the project is $21.2 million and the primary contributors to the projects are the four riparian countries, France, the Netherlands, and the World Bank.

This project represents a trajectory quite unlike earlier construction projects, taking into account the perceptions of people in the basin, environmental impact, and sustainability. The top objectives are to maintain an integrated management committee that will work on the goals to ratify a formal Water Charter, encourage Guinean participation, and maintain active coordination and cooperation between the four countries to protect sensitive areas and limit ecological damage. This pact, executed in 2003, overcomes old sovereignty issues and has produced solidarity and a sense of ownership by the parties. So far, this agreement has increased food and energy production and managed to achieve a more efficient and equitable distribution system based on specific needs, rather than dividing the water to prevent “bad actors” from reneging on the agreement.[14]

Conclusion

Examining the Indus, Jordan, and Senegal River basin cases leads to an important hypothesis. Although the norm of hydrologic technology produces gains and cooperative agreements, it does not guarantee any increase in trust among riparians and instead may actually increase misgivings about the costs and benefits of technology over time. While parties in all three cases shared the basic instinct to preserve water as a key to survival, cultural differences regarding the role of water created norm dissonance, decreasing parties’ ability to reap the optimum gains of cooperation. When parties shared only the norm of hydrologic technology, they were able to reach an agreement, but only to divide the water flow. However, when the norm of appropriate use was shared, it facilitated unity, trust, and a sense of empathy among the parties.

To be useful, the hypotheses about norms and their influence on political action between riparians should be tested on other models, both dated and current, to see if the norms of hydrologic technology and appropriate use apply to other cases as well. If the pattern holds true, the norm of appropriate use will continue to be the more enduring and constructive norm, as it provides the underpinnings of empathetic, cooperative relations between parties, even when they do not share the same religion or ethnicity. If these hypotheses can be generalized across other cases, mediators can be more confident of a successful outcome. Within the support of a legal framework, a modernized norm of hydrologic technology that capitalizes on countries’ will to address a legitimate challenge to provide water for all citizens will converge in purpose with the norm of appropriate use. This convergence seems to have occurred in the Senegal River basin, in which parties focused less on material incentives as preventative measures and more on the shared value of water.

Until the advent of the barrages, canals, gates, and dams, early societies adopted a sense of fatalism with regard to harnessing the power of water due to the unreliability of irrigation systems. These technological advances allowed man to apportion and channel water at will. Still, the very structures that enabled control over flow stifled the natural cleansing of the water, resulting in plant over-bloom and a buildup of hydrogen sulfide and anaerobic bacteria that threatened the habitat of native fish and plants. Today, despite the longevity of the Indus Treaty, citizens of Pakistan and India blame their respective governments for the bitter side effects of technology such as salt-water intrusion, endangered lakes and wetlands, and the continued displacement of whole villages to maintain irrigation waterworks. Similarly, the methods to ensure Israel’s viability as a state carried a high price on natural supplies of non-recharging groundwater, leading to an impasse that persists today between the Israelis and other Arab riparians.

The success of the Senegal River basin cooperative, OMVS, is most likely attributable to the parties’ willingness to shift from a system that yielded unequal benefits to one that empowered a greater range of stakeholders. The African states of the OMVS do not have the financial resources of India, Pakistan, or Israel, but they have invested in cooperation as a more critical means to survival than the possession of water itself. More than ethnic or religious similarities, the Senegal River basin parties experienced solidarity in their mutual need to fulfill their economic aspirations and avoid conflict over a resource that is just as deeply imbedded in their cultural identities.

In a global context, the issue of resource management will continue to be pertinent as borders are increasingly more fluid and issue affiliations describe national identities. Adding the continuing boom in population and a finite supply of critical natural resources to the mix, the hope for peaceful resolution of sharing issues is dependent on collaboration, pooling of resources, broad and inclusive management goals, and the ability of cooperative organizations to engage the community and respond to a range of needs. These persistent demands of cooperation far exceed the technological challenges of decades past.