Introduction to section 1

KEYWORDS:

• Governance
• transboundary and domestic basins
• rivers
• lakes
• aquifers
• scale
• federal and unitary systems
• civil society
• shared benefits

The articles and cases in this section, and some elsewhere in this issue, explore governance aspects of river, lake and aquifer basin management, sometimes involving a formal organization, and sometimes proceeding through other mechanisms. Effectiveness of governance depends on many factors.

Transboundary river and lake basins are commonly governed by agreements which often create basin organizations for their implementation. Transboundary basin organizations facilitate ‘negotiation and dialogue among riparian states on the various aspects of water resources use and management’ in addition to playing ‘important roles in gathering, analyzing, and sharing data and information on the … basin and its various ecological and socioeconomic features’ (Gerlack & Schmeier, 2018, p. 536), as is also the case at the domestic level. Basin organizations represent the framework which keeps stakeholders and decision makers involved and well informed. They can play different roles ranging from advisory, statutory decision-making, management and regulatory bodies to development entities. They vary considerably in scale and scope, reflecting local conditions and the variety of water-related issues that they cover, with single purpose, and more multipurpose among the more recent ones, reflecting the influence of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) thinking.

Some basin organizations have a long history, such as the International Boundary Waters Commission between the United States and Mexico, established in 1889. The necessity for integrated basin management was recognized before the 1990s (e.g., Easter et al., 1986), however it is only in the period after the Rio Conference in 1992 and the adoption of Integrated Water Resources Management that there was an upsurge in the formation of basin organizations and supporting legal frameworks.

Transboundary basins

Agreements and organizations

In their overview paper, Turgul et al. (2024, this issue) draw on the Transboundary Freshwater Diplomacy Database to find that there are agreements for 209 international transboundary basins, and that there are over 100 basin organizations, often mandated by the agreements. Most of these agreements and organizations have taken form over the past 30 years, especially around the turn of the century, and are most common in Europe and Africa. This reflects the provisions under the two global water conventions (the Convention on the Law of Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses (1997) and the Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes (1992)) as well as in the Draft Articles on the Law of Transboundary Aquifers¹ which mention ‘joint mechanisms’ or ‘joint bodies’.

The first transboundary river basin organizations tended to be single purpose, focused on transportation or water allocation, but have since aimed at achieving IWRM. Turgul et al. point to a number of challenges to international basin organizations in attaining IWRM principles and meeting UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These include adaptation to climate change and other stressors, power asymmetries, inclusion of non-state actors, nexus factors, recognition of marginalized peoples and women, and the impact of new technologies. Many of these challenges arise from the nature of international basin organizations, as intergovernmental bodies grounded in the nation-state system. Hence they are likely to reflect hydropolitics, the relative distribution of power of states, where in some cases a basin hegemon can skew apparently cooperative arrangements in its own favour. At another level, states are themselves not monolithic or autonomous, and are involved in multi-level and cross-sectional games. In Europe and Africa, regional frameworks impinge upon national autonomy in very complex ways, as demonstrated by the involvement of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and others in Eastern Partner countries, described by Belokurov et al. (2024, this issue).

The problem of scale

A particular challenge to the nation state-centred order are the scale implications of transboundary agreements, establishing the level or levels, and sectors, in which decision-making is made, as well as the principles upon which those decisions are made. Dang (2024, this issue) elaborates on this ‘scalar politics’ dimension, from an international water law perspective. In particular, the shift in international law to a focus on hydrological units and principles such as equity and no harm rather than nation states has implied scalar reconfigurations, but these rescaling processes are far from uniform.

In a sobering examination of 130 bilateral, multinational and regional water treaties dating from 1990, Dang finds wide variation by geographical region (continent) and by reference to principles of international water law. Africa has the largest number of treaties, with the strongest, albeit still limited, alignment with the tenets of international water law. Europe, with the Water Framework Directive (WFD), and Africa have the strongest emphasis on extraterritorial responsibilities, while Asian countries, including those along the Lancang-Mekong, rarely cite United Nations water conventions, and ‘invoke abstract principles of international water law in a fragmented manner’. The Americas have few water treaties, and even less reference to principles of international water law that would rescale the focus on the nation-state. While Dang does not directly address basin organizations, he notes that the Mekong River Commission, perhaps the most significant and long-standing river basin organization (RBO) in Asia, while intended to foster governance at the basin level, has witnessed ‘re-territorialization’, with individual countries, the Lao PDR (Laos) in particular, asserting their national sovereignty in developing hydropower despite concerns expressed by others on the possible effects in downstream countries.

Telle (2024, this issue), focusing on RBOs, reverses the perspective on scale and sees an opportunity for countries of the global South to make use of integrated strategies to address their own sustainable development agendas. She finds that the Mekong River Commission has played a significant role in promoting regional interests while addressing members’ agendas, with hydropower in the Lao PDR a principal focus.

Participation of civil society

An important component of IWRM is the participation of civil society. Haefner (2024, this issue) provides a complementary study of how civil society, in the form of international NGOs working with basin governments, made use of the Procedures for Notification, Prior Consultation and Agreement of the Mekong River Commission to pressure the government of Laos to reconsider the Xayaburi and Pak Lay dams on the Mekong. In neither case were they successful in stopping the construction of the dam. In the former case, the design of the Xayaburi Dam was modified to address some of the concerns raised. In the case of the Pak Lay Dam, the relevant NGOs boycotted the consultation process as they did not see prospects for their being anything other than a rubber stamp.

Finding shared benefits

Effective transboundary governance rests on the mobilization and maintenance of shared benefits. The Building River Dialogue and Governance programme of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is working to promote transboundary water governance and cooperation in over 20 basins worldwide. One of these, described by Owino (2024, this issue, Strategy and Actions section) is evolving in the Sio-Malaba-Malakisi sub-basins of the Nile River shared by Kenya and Uganda. Positive factors include a 2015 Memorandum of Understanding between the two countries, regional water policies of two Regional Economic Commissions (the East African Community and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development [IGAD]), the previous work of the Nile Equatorial Lakes Subsidiary Action Program, the identification of key stakeholders, the mobilization of those stakeholders in workshops to identify benefits from cooperation and identify prioritized investment projects and a financial sustainability strategy, and the establishment of a Joint Working Group. Kenya and Tanzania have the advantage of a common language and a history of cooperation in other venues. Against these are vested national interests and priorities for water resource development which are inadequate to address deteriorating water quality.

Not all efforts at establishing international RBOs have been successful, however, at least to date. Elias (2024, this issue) provides the example of the binational commission established in 1995 by the governments of Argentina and Bolivia to manage the Bermejo and Grande de Tarija river basins that they share. Physical characteristics of the basin and the intractability of social factors, notably the poverty of native peoples, inhibited effective development of the commission, which did not even meet for a number of years before cooperation was restored to the agendas of the two countries’ foreign ministers in 2019. There were serious institutional and participation problems, but perhaps most fundamental was the absence of a projected source of revenue from hydroelectric power dams that were never built.

Domestic basins

At the domestic level (as is the case for nearly half of the contributions of this issue), governance problems can also be complex, mainly in terms of the ‘scale’ problems of balancing interests of a variety of stakeholders, including the national and second-tier governments (states, in federal systems). Some RBOs, such as the French water agencies and basin committees, established in 1964, are notably successful. In other cases, problems of basin-level governance have been more intractable.

Federal systems

Grigg (2024, this issue) provides an account of three important and disparate river basins in the United States – the Colorado, Missouri and the linked Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint and Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa (ACF-ACT) basins. None of these have an RBO, although the Colorado is governed under an interstate equivalent of a treaty, the Colorado River Compact of 1922, implemented by a collection of institutional instruments called the ‘Law of the River’, and there is a subbasin RBO, the Upper Colorado River Basin Commission established with the Upper Colorado River Compact of 1948, involving four upstream states.

A Missouri River Basin Commission was established in 1972 by President Richard Nixon and terminated in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan, ending basin-wide comprehensive planning and priority setting for projects (Missouri River Basin Commission, 1981). Water compacts were established in the ACF and ACT basins in 1997, but terminated in 2004 due to a failure of negotiations on allocation formulas. By default, the Missouri and ACF-ACT basins are managed centrally, by the US Army Corps of Engineers, through its Master Manuals, and disputes are resolved by federal courts and interest group politics, According to Grigg, the GWP IWRM Toolbox is useful in assessing many issues confronting federal systems, but does not appear to provide necessary guidance for federal-state intergovernmental roles. All three basins are being stressed by climate change, especially the Colorado, which has faced a decades-long drought, and the increase in powerful stakeholders, such as growing urban areas.

One of the problems with the US cases examined by Grigg, especially the Colorado, is that of fixed legacy allocations of water use rights. Freak and Miller (2024, this issue, Strategy and Actions section) bring us up to date on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in Australia, another federal system, but one with an RBO, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, an independent statutory agency, which has been involved in transferring a significant amount of water from existing water rights to the environment since 2008. The authors make a case for changing the focus of the basin’s management from a volumetric water sharing approach to one that better addresses the integrated side of IWRM in order to address the drivers of the continuing degradation of the river’s ecology, focusing on preventing the loss of native fish species.

Unitary systems

The United States and Australia are federal systems that in some ways are similar to the international community, but with a central government that can adjudicate and provide some elements of basin management by default. Establishing basin organizations and agreements that reflect IWRM at a subnational level in unitary political systems presents its own dynamics, especially with the trend in recent decades towards decentralization. In particular, problems of integration tend to be administrative, between ‘siloed’ government agencies, rather than geographical.

Two contributions to this issue illustrate the difficulties of reform in such systems. Lee (2024, this issue) traces the problems of establishing effective basin-based management in the Republic of Korea since its need was recognized at the turn of the century, due to the siloed nature of different ministries operating in water management – separately overseeing infrastructure development, agriculture, and the environment. In 2018 a Basic Water Law was enacted and basin committees for the four major rivers were established the following year, under a National Water Council at the centre. In practice, however, authority was placed in the hands of the Ministry of the Environment, which has shown little interest in or incentive to accommodate relevant stakeholders, while the basin committees remain underfunded. In practice, there is ‘a Korean-style river basin management mode [with an] opaque and top-down nature … that does not represent diverse stakeholders’.

In Poland, according to Walczykiewicz et al. (2024, this issue), there was a conscientious effort to implement decentralized IWRM principles along the lines of the French model by establishing catchment-based Regional Water Management Boards in the initial days of reform 30 years ago, and of the EU Water Framework Directive² in the subsequent reform. Over time, however, there has since been a steady reversion to centralized management. Water-related functions were assembled in 2017 into one large central body, the State Water Holding Polish Waters, with 5600 employees and authority to collect fees for water services. This type of integrated bureaucratic water resources management, as in Korea, actually leads to subordination of other competencies under one silo. In Korea, it is the Environmental Ministry; in Poland, the ministry overseeing infrastructure development. In addition, centralized coordination tends to sideline non-governmental and basin-based organizations. In Poland, the Regional Water Management Boards were abolished. As in the Republic of Korea, the concentration of functions reduces accountability either to society at large or even to other ministries, and has a net adverse impact on IWRM.

Groundwater

In all this, groundwater has too often remained the forgotten piece of the puzzle. As appears from the above, basin organizations, whether transboundary or domestic, are organized for surface waters (rivers and lakes). There are 468 transboundary aquifers worldwide (excluding the territory of the European Union; IGRAC, 2021), only five of them fall under an inter-state agreement, and four have an established commission. Sterckx et al. (2024, this issue) analyse the new tendency in Sub-Saharan Africa to integrate an institution for transboundary aquifers within existing river basin organizations by establishing a commission or an experts working group for the aquifer. This is the case for the Stampriet Transboundary Aquifer System, whose cooperation mechanism is nested within the Orange Senqu River Commission. It is to be noted that the Stampriet Transboundary Aquifer System is entirely comprised within the Orange-Senqu River basin. Elsewhere, aquifers commonly extend outside the boundaries of surface basins.

This initiative has also benefited from the support of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). One challenge of such institutional settings is that the boundaries of the aquifer do not necessarily coincide with those of the surface water body. This challenge is the same at the domestic level.

A case of an institutional setting for groundwater at the domestic level is presented by Fuster et al. (2024, this issue). In Chile, in a specific basin where water is scarce and groundwater exploited, Groundwater Communities have progressively emerged in various parts of the aquifer as informal mechanisms and have managed to mitigate the effects of overexploitation by introducing technological and institutional innovations. Its success is due to the presence of trained experts highlighting the importance of the adequate technical capacity to address groundwater issues, also mentioned by Sterckx and al. Examples such as this of groundwater organization can be of inspiration in other regions in Chile and beyond.

Final thoughts: 30 years of progress on a long road

To be effective, a basin organization needs adequate staffing, information systems and sustainable finance. With few exceptions, staffing and finance are not addressed in the papers received for this issue – perhaps they can be a focus in future thematic issues. Information systems are growing in importance with new technologies (ter Horst et al., 2023), and have their own section in this issue.

Clearly, water management has come a long way in the past 30 years in terms of basin management and adoption of IWRM principles, thanks to the efforts of INBO and others. As many of the contributions to this section and the special issue show, however, there is still a long way to go in establishing adequate institutions for the needs of our water future. These remain to be developed for groundwater management. Improved data gathering and analysis may help generate increased transboundary cooperation (ter Horst et al., 2023), but collective action problems such as divergent upstream-downstream interests, departmental silos and the politics of the nation state often remain far from adequately addressed. There is much work left to do!

Notes

1. Topic of six UN General Assembly resolutions (63/124, 66/104, 68/118, 71/150, 74/193, & 77/112) and annexed to two (68/124 & 68/118).

2. The EU Water Framework Directive (2000) prescribes the establishment by Member States of ‘the appropriate administrative arrangements’, within each river basin district for the application of the rules of the Directive.