Towards effective cooperation dynamics in transboundary river basins: a case study of the Nile and Orontes rivers

ABSTRACT

Currently the Nile and the Orontes River basins are in the international spotlight as tension escalates between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia in the former and between Syria and Turkey in the latter. In this article we investigate the cooperation dynamics between nation states in the two basins. We analyze the obstacles to cooperation that prevent the improvement of these dynamics through a novel analytical framework that enables researchers and policymakers to understand the cooperation dynamics in these transboundary river basins through a common set of terminologies and definitions.

KEYWORDS:

• Transboundary river basin
• transboundary cooperation
• water management
• Nile river
• Orontes river

Background

Conflict and cooperation are perceived as opposing extremes in the interaction dynamics over transboundary river basins across the world (Mirumachi et al., 2013). The complexity of transboundary settings is associated with the coexistence of both modes where there are cases leaning more towards cooperation rather than conflict and vice versa. This emphasizes the concept of ‘No size fits all’ that determines cooperation dynamics among riparian states in the different river basins (UNEPDHI & UNEP, 2016). However, the asymmetric power relations between upstream and downstream riparian countries are always recognized as the primary drive behind determining the progress of cooperation dynamics at a basin level (Mirumachi & Allan, 2007). Other factors also influence this progress, which can be clustered into: contextual factors (e.g., institutional capacity and socioeconomic conditions) and progress effectiveness (e.g., information sharing and access; Jiménez et al., 2019). Therefore, forging an enabling environment based on the concepts of ‘participation’ and ‘cooperation’ is critical in this progress to ensure the wider representation of all stakeholders to break down the complexity of transboundary water management in these basins.

As the world is working towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there is an increasing momentum to strengthen the transboundary basin cooperation outlined in SDG 6 and measured by the indicator ‘6.5.2’ (Sindico Francesco, 2016). Additionally, the SDGs promote incorporating the participatory approaches as an essential component of decision-making in development (Jiménez et al., 2019). The SDG 6 has the Target 6.b, which stands out as the only SDG target to promote public participation as a Means of Implementation in the management of resources or services. As a result, the adoption of cooperation based on participatory principles associated with the shift of water paradigms towards more sustainable development is becoming critical.

Political fragility and transboundary water conflicts

The Northern Africa and Western Asia region is recognized as one of the most water-scarce regions in the world, where less than 1% of the global available freshwater is distributed among an increasing population (Hosney et al., 2023). Thus, water resources are highly stressed. Transboundary water represents two-thirds of the region’s total fresh water (UNESCWA, 2020; United Nations & UNESCO, 2021).

Additionally, this region is struggling with a ‘chronic’ political fragility and its associated complications in terms of human displacement, armed conflicts, uprisings, food and water insecurity. In this context, transboundary water conflicts are often hidden, where decision-making at river basin level is often practiced unilaterally by upstream riparian countries (Warner et al., 2017). Recently, these hydrohegemonic actions were diffused from their political nature under nationalistic slogans that advocate for state modernization, economic development, stability, self-sufficiency and water rights.

The Nile River and Orontes River are two examples of these transboundary river basins characterized by entirely distinct attributes. However, the shared characteristic between the two is the intricate nature of cooperation at the basin level, which is linked partially to a lack of participatory dynamics. Therefore, there is an increasing demand for a paradigm shift to the existing participatory approaches in the two basins as significant challenges related to water and food securities are arising.

In the next sections, the paper will provide a brief overview on participatory approaches and their application in transboundary water management, then the paper will provide a descriptive account for the Nile and Orontes River basins and the contextual challenges for transboundary water management in the two basins. This will be followed by presenting the analytical framework to assess the participatory – negotiation – dynamics in the Nile and Orontes. Then the paper will conclude with recommendations for the proposed paradigm shift in transboundary water management based on the insights from the analytical framework.

The Nile and Orontes: a case of contested rivers

The Nile River is a transboundary river basin that provides prosperity to 11 riparian countries around its banks. However, it brings a set of challenges between upstream and downstream countries in terms of water allocation, food security and energy generation. For decades, the Nile River transboundary water management has been a subject of various methods of cooperation efforts (Figure 1). However, the current stage of cooperation efforts poses an obstacle for the riparian countries, where researchers and policy-makers cannot find a common language to draw a roadmap for future cooperation mainly between upstream and downstream countries.

Figure 1. Map of the Nile and Orontes river basins.

These challenges have been intensified by the separation of Sudan and the creation of South Sudan, as well as the recent armed conflict that engulfed Sudan (at the time of writing this article; Salman, 2011).

On the other hand, the status quo of cooperation in the Orontes River basin has to be assessed from the political reality that shapes the region and shapes Orontes water management activities. Communication channels between Syria and Turkey have been almost closed since 2011. Since then, Syria has been struggling in an internal armed conflict that expanded for over a decade, while Lebanon – further downstream – suffers from a ‘long-term’ political and economic instability. This surrounding environment runs deep and affects the hydro cooperation as well as the Orontes characteristics.

The enabling environment for transboundary cooperation: an analytical framework

Participatory processes are sought by decision-makers, managers, and planners to meet one or more of these three objectives:

1. Increase resources management effectiveness, where all stakeholders are equally recognized as an integral part of the process and their knowledge, needs and expertise cannot be ignored. This includes finding a consensus or building a compromise between the different interest groups, developing context-compatible solutions, or anticipating the blocking points that might face transboundary decision-making.

2. Generate social change; participatory processes benefit participants by creating or strengthening social bonds between them, enabling them to learn while strengthening their ability to deal together with new situations or other problems. These results contribute to creating favourable conditions for development in the longer term.

3. Democratize and legitimize decisions; stakeholders’ participation in decision-making is also sought to legitimize decisions that would be taken by the involved governments/riparian states. Nevertheless, participatory processes are increasingly sought as a means of creating a political and social culture of dialogue.

From a transboundary water management lens, the Aarhus Convention lists four practical benefits of adopting a participatory approach (UNECE, 2013). These tangible benefits can be summarized as follows:

1. Sustainable water management through the identification and adoption of sound practices and necessary actions. Sharing local knowledge and expertise could lead to strengthening the cooperation at a basin level.

2. Increased transparency, accountability and inclusivity through sharing data and making the decision-makers accountable at all levels within the basin. This benefit is critical in the era of climate change as it significantly contributes to facilitate climate adaptation as well as building resilience.

3. Conflict prevention and resolution, as these approaches represent the required platforms to promote dialogue and foster cooperation.

4. Generate social and economic benefits where water is always seen as the main driver for any development or growth.

Emerging from the concept of participation and transboundary water management, this article proposes a novel analytical framework to assess participatory dynamics within transboundary river basins. This framework – titled the Enabling Environment to Participation – can be applied to different contexts at local, national and regional contexts.

The Enabling Environment to Participation starts with identifying the degree of participation in a particular context; this identification takes place by identifying in which arena (or arenas) the existing participatory approach among the riparian countries falls.

Stakeholders’ participation takes place through different arenas, where each arena represents a phase of interaction dynamics and communication between the involved stakeholders. Thus, participation in each arena carries distinguished features, which influence the participatory process and its outcomes. These arenas are interlinked, and stakeholders’ interactions within the participatory process are subject to dynamic ‘up-grading’ and ‘down-grading’ from one arena to another (Figure 2 and Table 1).

Figure 2. Arenas of participation (author’s own elaboration).

Table 1. Characteristics of stakeholders’ interaction at each participatory arena.

Participatory process	Stakeholders’ level of acceptance/confidence	Common ground/common goals	Stakeholders’ interaction	Dominant methodology of change
Arena of cooperation	High	Yes	Collaborative	Proposing ideas/implementation
Arena of negotiation	Medium	Yes	Communicative	Negotiation/choosing from alternative solutions
Arena of struggle	Low	No	Strategic	Coalition building and competition
Arena of contestation	Low	No	Defensive	Legal objections – third-party intervention

Definitions:

1. Arena of cooperation: where stakeholders are working together to achieve/implement common goals (or synergistic set of goals).

2. Arena of negotiation: where stakeholders are communicatively working together to identify/reach agreements or common goals.

3. Arena of struggle: where stakeholders taking strategic actions to change existing restrictions or obstacles of reaching common ground/ common goals.

4. Arena of contestation: where stakeholders defensively protest or argue against specific decisions/restrictions to secure their presumed rights or shares in common pool resources. In this arena, stakeholders are not committed to the final decisions/outcomes of the ‘participatory’ process and they contest these results. Stakeholders might withdraw from some of the participatory processes’ sessions/events as a form of contestation. However, they reftrain from taking unilateral actions. If the contesting stakeholders could not see promising changes in the reasons of their contestation, they might resort to unilateral actions or bilateral agreements outside the decision-making body.

We need to recognize the importance of both ‘strategic’ and ‘communicative’ actions throughout the process of reaching the cooperation arena. Stakeholders will continue to act strategically even when they reach the collaboration stage, although with a higher degree of trust among stakeholders and a clear set of common/integrating/synergistic objectives.

The same applies to ‘communicative action’: stakeholders continue to be communicative throughout the same process. However, in the arena of cooperation, communicative action aims at reaching agreement regarding methods of implementation, financing, or monitoring and evaluation. On the contrary, communicative action in the negotiation arena aims to reach agreement on goals, objectives and vision.

Following the identification of the arena of participation, the second part of the framework focuses on the tools that would promote an upgrade in the participatory dynamic until it reaches the state of ‘cooperation’.

The Enabling Environment to Participatory processes framework consists of four interconnected pillars with varying degrees of significance. These four pillars are the ‘tools’ that would improve transboundary water cooperation if collectively adopted. Hence, the partial adoption of these pillars would not achieve the desired outcomes; on the contrary, it might worsen the transboundary water cooperation between the riparian countries.

These four pillars are: incentive-compatibility, urgency, responsibility delegation and independent facilitation (Figure 3). We refer to the concept of the enabling environment as the set of attributes to promote participation (Jiménez et al., 2019).

Figure 3. The Enabling Environment to Participatory Processes (EEP) framework.

The Enabling Environment to Participatory processes framework is one unit; however, there is a logical way to realize it before or while implementing a participatory process, through lenses of urgency and incentive compatibility. First, urgency is a decisive factor that prompts citizens to seek in the decision-making process. This sense of urgency is a question of who owns the problem? Who defines what the problem is and for whom it is a problem? Accordingly, this must be initiated by raising awareness based on scientific evidence. In practice, urgency might lead to doing things quickly and unsustainably. Therefore, we can distinguish three levels of urgency: low, moderate and high. Participatory processes planners shall seek the moderate urgency level as the optimum moment where citizens start actively looking for solutions and options to deal with the situation/challenge.

Second, incentive-compatibility. This term is derived from the literature on conflict management and negotiations (e.g., Wu & Whittington, 2006), where negotiators try to mend the gap between ‘individual rationality’ and ‘group rationality’ that exists among the involved actors. This is similar to the consensus-building that takes place in participatory processes. In this context, the term ‘incentive’ is not exclusively equal to ‘financial reward’; rather, it refers to what the participants would gain from the participatory process (e.g., political gains, economic gains, environmental, social gains, etc.).

Once a balanced mix of urgency and incentive-compatibility is available, designers of the participatory process must be aware of the degree of responsibility delegation that stakeholders are willing to bear as a result of their participation in the decision-making and implementation processes. This mutual willingness to delegate and bear responsibility must be supported by policy and regulatory tools in the existing laws and constitution to empower stakeholders to carry out their new roles.

Finally, independent facilitation is an essential pillar in the Enabling Environment to Participatory processes framework to mend the prevailing lack of trust between governments/riparian states. Independent facilitation represents the role of independent ‘epistemic communities’ in the participatory development approaches (Stone, 2017). It is thought to be the ‘substitute of trust’ between various stakeholders, which facilitates consensus-building that pushes transboundary water management forward and balances the influence of the different interest groups. Thus, guarantees the independence of the participatory process from being captured by a single interest group.

Based on this framework we have developed various scenarios to investigate the transboundary water management cooperation in the Nile and Orontes basins. This will be elaborated in the next section.

Enabling Environment to Participatory processes scenarios for the Nile and Orontes

In this paper we have identified four scenarios/phases of the Enabling Environment to Participation, based on the degree of realization of its four pillars (Figure 4). The four scenarios are also seen as four maturity phases of the Enabling Environment to Participatory processes’ realization over time.

Figure 4. Enabling Environment to Participatory processes scenario/phases of realization.

Scenario – phase one: The absence of a matching enabling legal and regulatory tools to the high incentive-compatibility of the process might lead to stakeholders’ (i.e., riparian states) disappointment and lack of trust (even with independent facilitation), which will jeopardize their commitment over the long term.

Scenario – phase two: On the contrary, the required legal, technical and regulatory tools as well as the independent facilitation might be in place. However, the participatory process is not incentive-compatible for the stakeholders. This would reduce citizens’ willingness for continuation.

Scenario – phase three: In this scenario, the Enabling Environment to Participatory processes is realized, although with a lower degree of citizens’ involvement. This could be a gradual transition phase from centralized management to a participatory one.

Scenario – phase four: This phase represents the full realization of the EEP framework, and the maturity of citizens led participatory management of the water sector.

Conclusion

Based on the Enabling Environment to Participatory processes framework and the definition mentioned above, it is clear that transboundary water management in the Nile and Orontes features different forms of challenges. The Nile basin riparian countries are struggling to reach a common starting point towards cooperation. Although there are legal/regulatory tools (represented by the role of the Nile Basin Initiative), the participatory process itself is not incentive-compatible to the three countries (Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia), where the current talks would create unfavourable conditions in terms of water allocation among those countries. On the other hand, the Orontes is one step behind in terms of the realization of Enabling Environment to Participatory processes due to the lack of legal/regulatory tools for participation (Table 2). In addition, countries (particularly upstream) are acting unilaterally to secure their needs and interests within the basin.

Table 2. Current status in the Nile and Orontes.

Enabling Environment to Participatory processes analytical framework	Nile	Orontes
Arena of participation	Arena of struggle	Unilateralism
Scenario/phase of Enabling Environment to Participatory processes realization	Scenario/phase two	Scenario/phase one

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).