The WPF Seminar Series Water and Security in the 21st Century Seminar Note 5 -­‐ 6 March, 2015 The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy Tufts University OVERVIEW: Beyond Conflict or Cooperation World Peace Foundation, an The operating foundation affiliated solely with The Fletcher School, aims to provide intellectual leadership on issues of peace, justice and security. It believes that innovative research and teaching are critical to the challenges of making peace around the world, and should go hand-­‐in-­‐hand with advocacy and practical engagement with the toughest issues. It regularly convenes expert seminars to address today’s most pressing issues. The seminar, “Water and Security in the 21st Century” was held March 5 & 6, 2015. This seminar note is organized around prominent themes that emerged throughout the seminar. Recent analyses of water and security have focused on the question of how water stresses could lead to conflicts between and within states. Water is a finite, scarce resource, essential to human life and well-­‐being. With population growth, expanding economies, groundwater depletion and climate change, and the need to protect water ecologies, water is under stress—and it is feared, conflict may follow. The solution to this threat is envisaged as sub-­‐national, national and international cooperation in the form of treaties and agreements for more equitable and efficient water management. An international group of experts on water and security assembled for a seminar at the World Peace Foundation—and found that what they held in common was a perspective that went beyond the binary of conflict versus cooperation. First, conflict and cooperation should not be seen as opposites: typically parties—such as states sharing a transboundary river basin—are conflictual and cooperative at the same time. Second, we need to ask, whose conflict and cooperation? The technocrats who handle water matters in governments—“hydrocrats”—
typically think that they are best placed to manage water matters according to their “scientific” criteria. For them, water that is not controlled, measured and channeled is wasted, and the best form of water agreement is a pact among the hydrocrats of different countries jointly to manage water according to their shared criteria. Yet people who regularly use and depend on water—which (see below) we could term “waterists” will invariably have a different perspective– and often something to contribute to how water might be seen and managed. Third, much water conflict and cooperation isn’t primarily about water at all: it’s about other political issues that concern governments, of which water is just one. st
“Water and Security in the 21 Century” Seminar Note 2 This perspective does not deny that water can be an element in political conflict or even war. Since time immemorial, armies have used water deprivation, or breaching dams to cause floods, as weapons of war. Saddam Hussein’s draining of the marshes is but a recent example of this. Dams and their impacts—
displacement of communities flooded out, development of irrigation schemes—can also cause conflict. But in all cases water and security intersect through questions of governance: the issue is not scarcity of water as such, but the politics of its control and distribution. This perspective doesn’t diminish the importance of cooperation. But it asks, what kind of cooperation is required? Therefore, a formulation that observes increased stress and links it to traditional forms of inter-­‐ or intra-­‐
state conflict over-­‐simplifies, and thereby distorts, the picture. An entirely different set of questions is required, which can be summarized as: •
•
Whom is affected by water stresses and how? Another way of asking this: who ‘is at the table’ now and who needs to be there? What levels of society do round-­‐table dialogues represent? Whose cooperation and involvement are needed? How can innovative responses produce new ways of thinking about and responding to water stresses? Re-­‐thinking Water (In)Security Water is not easily “saved”— not least because the quantity of water on the planet is fixed, it just moves and changes. What then is the nature of water security and insecurity? Ken Conca noted the need to change mindsets from optimizing water use to managing uncertainty. Naho Mirumachi—who used the term “hydrocracy” to refer to the powerful technocrats who dominate water issues in most countries—reframed the question as: water security for whom? Highlighting the case of dam development in the Mekong, Mirumachi stressed that different stakeholders and actors within basins have contrasting perspectives on water security. Bruce Lankford underscored the critical water security issue as the nexus of water, food and energy. He called for engaging “waterists,” (for example irrigators at the water-­‐short tail ends of irrigation systems) who are careful negotiators and understand how to productively use very small quantities of water. Lawrence Susskind noted that water security is most often a function of others’ broader political security or insecurity, which includes secure access to sufficient water. Water security therefore requires enforceable agreements between those who control access to water, and which benefit from trust that they will be honored and observed. Given the fluctuations in water supplies—which are becoming less predictable with climate change—a key challenge for the future will be to create adaptable agreements that maintain trust and compliance as circumstances change. Ken Conca called for the Sustainable Development Goals to take a rights-­‐based-­‐approach, emphasizing that while the SDGs can provide a useful symbolic frame, they will not be useful unless they result in action July 2015 st
“Water and Security in the 21 Century” Seminar Note 3 on the ground. On embedding a right-­‐based approach into water agreements, Mirumachi emphasized that governments often do not prioritize water, especially in post-­‐conflict zones, resulting in ad hoc economic development that frequently increases water stress. Water availability is far more uncertain than in the recent past. Demand is changing, and growing, with urbanization and economic development. Global climate change will impact water availability and variability. The intensity of precipitation has increased: compared to thirty years ago, there is now 71% more precipitation in extreme events. These rapidly arriving volumes of water are difficult to capture. Many of those places in which water stresses are increasing are those in which there is already political violence. Water stresses are rarely confined within a single country. Unlike almost all other natural resources, water is predominantly international: about 60% of river flow crosses international boundaries. The Intersection with Conflict Water stress alone, however, is not cause for conflict. Indeed, there has never been a major water war between nations, and transboundary water resources are characterized far more by cooperation than by conflict. Experts cautioned against inferring a causal relationship between water stress and war, nonetheless, there are important intersections between water management and armed conflict. The politics of resource management is the point at which stress can either increase tensions or encourage cooperation. Conflict-­‐
afflicted countries are poorly situated to effectively engage in international water management. Conflict-­‐afflicted countries are poorly situated to effectively engage in international water management. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers provide an example. These two rivers, whose headwaters are in Turkey, flow through Syria and Iraq, and their waters have been the focus of various types of conflict. The Turkish government is building huge dams to generate hydroelectricity and irrigate the Turkish highlands. As a result, much less water is coming down the rivers to Syria and Iraq. The scale of violence and political challenges that Iraq has faced since 2003 and the war in Syria mean that there is no capacity in these downstream countries to engage with the Turkish plans. As Turkey develops its plans, there is no international agreement governing water rights. Both Syria and Iraq suffer, and the Mesopotamian marshes are deprived of their water. Iraq provides further example of another problem at the intersection of conflict and water management: using water as a weapon. This purpose is at least as old as the first siege that sought to reduce nourishment as a means of prompting surrender, and in recent history was innovated by both Saddam Hussein and ISIS. In 1992, following the first Gulf War with the US, the Marsh Arabs, also called the Madan, rebelled against Hussein’s government. He drove them out with a massive engineering program – to dry out the marshes by diverting the waters of the two rivers, raising huge embankments and digging drains. His works drained 90 per cent of the marshes. The Madan fled to Iran until Saddam’s downfall in the July 2015 st
“Water and Security in the 21 Century” Seminar Note 4 second Gulf War. While activists have since 2003 begun to revive the marshes, another water weapon appeared when ISIS gained control over significant portions of Syria and Iraq. One of ISIS’s first big military actions, in 2013, was to capture the Tabqa dam in northern Syria, the world’s largest earthen dam, which barricades the Euphrates as it flows out of Turkey. It supplies water to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and irrigates huge areas of desert land. At one point, say engineers at the dam, ISIS ordered the reservoir behind the dam to be emptied to generate electricity through its turbines. But they emptied it so much that massive blackouts have followed. When they briefly captured the Fallujah dam, they cut off water for cities downstream. But then the reservoir overflowed, flooding some 500 square kilometres and thousands of homes right up to the outskirts of Baghdad. Then they reopened the dam and caused new flooding. The general conclusion was they didn’t know what they were doing. But their ineptitude did not calm any fears when they gained control of Mosul, including its dam, already a perilously decrepit installation. A failure of the Mosul dam would flood that city in three hours and send a 13-­‐foot wall of water as far as Baghdad, destroying many settlements along its way. Sudan and South Sudan provide an example of where water was a component of cross-­‐border tensions, but which was not framed as a “water” conflict. The major water issue linking Sudan and South Sudan is the Nile River—but during the negotiations around the secession of South Sudan, the question of South Sudan and the Nile Waters was not even raised. The issue of water became a point of contestation elsewhere—one of the tributaries to the Nile, a river known to the northerners as the Bahr al Arab and the southerners as the River Kiir runs along key sections of the border and provides essential dry season water to the cattle of both northern and southern communities. The location of the boundary along an important section of the river became a key focus of dispute between Sudan and South Sudan after independence. Like many boundary disputes, this was based on divergent readings of legal and historical documents and maps, … water can be a factor in with each side having what it sees as the better claim. There was armed conflict over this border in 2012, the year following South conflicts that are principally Sudanese independence. The conflict was reduced, though not over other issues. entirely settled, by an African Union-­‐mediated agreement in September 2012, which involved demilitarizing the border zone—
and the South Sudanese withdrawing their troops from the Bahr al Arab/Kiir River. The President of South Sudan signed this agreement but could not convince the governor of the area to implement it, leading to a protracted standoff. The result was not fighting in this area, but instead a long delay in resuming normal economic relations between Sudan and South Sudan, including—critically—a six month delay in restarting oil production and export. That delay in turn contributed to a financial crisis in South Sudan and the resulting civil war. This is a complicated story of political and armed conflict over many issues, with access to a key water resource being one of several factors that precipitated war. It shows how water can be a factor in conflicts that are principally over other issues. July 2015 st
“Water and Security in the 21 Century” Seminar Note 5 This case also points us to other instances in which weak or corrupt governance allows for a water dispute to escalate to an armed conflict—or might simply mean that there is insufficient political will to take courageous steps and compromise, rather than engaging in cooperative solutions built on mutual concessions. Putting it on Paper: Water Treaties Continuing the research on water treaties established by the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (TFDD), Anna Schulz discussed her work assembling an enormous compendium of historical treaties that address water: over 2,000 with nearly 1,500 for which water is the primary subject. Treaties address navigation, boundaries, allocation, infrastructure and the environment, with global historical variation in the emphasis on one issue or another. Treaties and inter-­‐state river basin committees have a long pedigree of enabling cross-­‐state cooperation and defusing tensions. Researchers pointed to examples from the Mekong River Basin, where cooperation has given rise to the idea of a “Mekong Spirit”, a notion commonly used to describe the long history of cooperation between six countries of the Mekong River basin and their inherent goodwill. This narrative of cooperation overlooks some political rivalries and the regional instability in the past, it has nonetheless addressed one potential source of dispute by enabling the development of projects to use the Mekong and tributary water resources. Another case discussed, the Nile River Basin, has been the subject of heated international arguments for decades, which intensified in 2011 when Ethiopia began construction on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which is projected to become the eighth largest reservoir on Earth, joining Egypt’s High Aswan Dam (third largest dam). With the GERD joining the Aswan High Dam and the recently-­‐completed Merowe Dam in Sudan, the Nile threatened to become home to the unprecedented combination of several major, multipurpose Treaties require a reserve of dams operating on the same river system with no agreement cooperation and goodwill, for coordination in place. Yet, this seemingly intractable which, if depleted, render the dispute over Nile water rights, was partially resolved in March 2015, with a declaration of principles signed by Ethiopia, Sudan treaty meaningless. and Egypt that promised to balance the energy, agricultural and public needs for water. But the mere fact of having a treaty in place does not guarantee that it will foster cooperation, adequately manage water resources, or account for changing global conditions. Treaties require a reserve of cooperation and goodwill, which, if depleted, render the treaty meaningless. The process of negotiating a treaty, the relationships, concessions, practices discussed and engagement entailed, are often more important than the treaty itself. Treaties negotiated when one actor is significantly more powerful than another, as is the case in Asia with China, or where fundamental mistrust is at play, as between India and July 2015 st
“Water and Security in the 21 Century” Seminar Note 6 Pakistan, can either capture these challenges or help manage them. Indeed, national projects using the tributaries of the Mekong were promoted under the umbrella of the “Mekong Spirit” of cooperation between six countries of the basin, but binding allocation agreements and consideration of mainstream dams and engagement of upstream China were postponed. In terms of deep mistrust, relations between India and Pakistan are paradigmatic. The two countries have fought three wars and recurrently threaten a fourth. Nonetheless, they have managed successfully to cooperate over the waters of the Indus River—a notable example of mutually-­‐beneficial cooperation in the context of conflict and stalled negotiations over other issues. Treaties often have their starting point in traditional relationships between states concerned primarily with mediation between already empowered interests, rather than enabling sustainable management of water resources. Global climate change, which will impact flow variability, suggests two challenges to treaties: first, sustainable management, which may require the involvement of a different set of actors (see below), will likely become of greater concern. Second, new treaties may need to develop flexible mechanisms and may require reconsideration of old agreements. In both cases, if treaties are to reduce international tensions, they must simultaneously do two difficult things: be both specific and flexible. Who is in the room and at the table? Treaties are generally negotiated between states and involve various members of what Naho Mirumachi describes as national “hydrocracies.” The hydrocracy is made of up of ministries engaged in river basin planning—agriculture, irrigation, energy, or foreign policy—
most of whom are devoted to technocratic approaches to Hydrocracy creates a top-­‐down harnessing the economic potential of the river. Hydrocracy decision-­‐making process with creates a top-­‐down decision-­‐making process with an inherent an inherent belief that large-­‐
belief that large-­‐scale engineering solutions such as dams or major irrigation schemes are the path to economic scale engineering solutions development. Their goal is often to maximize use—through such as dams or major large scale engineering interventions—which may not be irrigation schemes are the path sustainable or advantageous to water users, especially those to economic development. who are poor and powerless. States are not monolithic, these multiple agencies and interests within a state can function at cross-­‐
purposes. It is therefore not helpful to homogenize international relations into exclusive categories of cooperation or contention. One can often find cooperation between actors with comparable profiles across states, even while tensions remain at higher levels. The Indus River Basin—whose key members are India and Pakistan—is a good example of this. Nonetheless, despite sometimes very significant internal variation, hydrocrats protect a state-­‐centric, technologically-­‐driven and bureaucratic approach to water. The hydrocracy operates on a very large scale July 2015 st
“Water and Security in the 21 Century” Seminar Note 7 and routinely ignores the interests of community-­‐level water needs: for instance, in the Mekong River basin, institutions are not reaching down to level of communities and livelihood. Hydrocratic institutions have very strong memories and are prone to revive old plans even when new science is pointing in different directions. The gaps in countries’ knowledge of their own economies can also be an obstacle to appropriate action. In Cambodia, no fishery studies had been launched before 2013, and once factored into the equation, significantly altered the cost-­‐benefit ratio of water development projects. Hydocracies share a rationality and set of preferences that are increasingly questionable in an era of unpredictability, new vulnerabilities, and sensitivity to the requirements of entire ecosystems. Thus, water insecurity may not lie in changes in water systems per se, but rather within the entrenched modes of decision-­‐making. Impacting and possibly changing these institutional and state-­‐centric models of water cooperation will require new coalitions, including hydrocrats, but also engineers, consumers, local communities, and insights into the broader political economy of the basins. How to Encourage Innovation? While increasing water stress has no direct linkage to increased risk of armed conflict, it does require a reconsideration of social and political responses. Thinking differently: paracommons Lankford introduced the idea of the ‘paracommons’ which is a parallel commons, a resource that becomes more valuable the more it is shared (in contrast to a normal commons that is depleted by shared use). For water, there is a potential paracommons of resources freed up by making efficiency gains. For example a 10% relative efficiency gain in global irrigation would ‘free up’ about 70 litres for each of the world’s 7.3 billion people, thus demonstrating the volumes of water in irrigation and the idea that effort is needed to create the commons of salvaged water. However the problem is that having saved a resource, it is likely the proprietor (the user making the saving) will appropriate the saving, or that other parties will grab it before it is made available to nature. The four parties are: 1) you, the proprietor; 2) neighbor (somebody close to you); 3) wider economy; or 4) Nature. An example was introduced; how much water is in the Colorado River is a traditional zero-­‐sum commons type question. Yet how much water can be salvaged within the inefficient part of water use in the Colorado Basin (e.g. supposedly in Mexican irrigated agriculture) and who gets this gain is a paracommons type question. In principle this can be a positive-­‐sum game with winners all round. However, The likely scenario in a basin such as the Colorado, is that it will be very difficult to trace the gains and to distribute them transparently to deserving users. July 2015 st
“Water and Security in the 21 Century” Seminar Note 8 New technical yet democratic solutions Imaginative solutions are required in terms of supply-­‐ and demand-­‐side knowledge gaps and for engaging people that Lankford identifies as “waterists,” those at the tail ends of water systems who are careful negotiators and understand how to productively use very small quantities of water. These lessons may challenge the underlying assumption of consumer-­‐based lifestyles which drive increasing water demand. Responses may entail new technical solutions, but they will be wise to learn from established practices that within communities that live with water scarcity. Adaptable policies Given the uncertainties of how global climate change will impact local ecosystems, a significant mindset change is also required, from optimization to managing uncertainty. These kinds of innovations also task the process of devising solutions, lending weight to informal problem-­‐solving approaches before formal conflict resolution becomes necessary. A key challenge for the future will be to create adaptable agreements that generate trust and compliance. The democratization of science The efforts for younger generation to build cooperation over ecological matters have been highlighted through the cooperation between schools in Israel and other Middle Eastern countries to track hawks along migration routes. The question of whether such cooperation along rivers could be considered was raised. Democratization of science is underway, but to may not be enough to change the way policy making processes work. Democratization of science, also goes through companies like HSBS that organizes water forums and then use the feedback to make sure that the bank itself does not make bad decisions. Anthropology of Water Most of the conversation today is undertaken by engineers, water conservation specialists, political scientist, sociologists, etc., but water impacts every aspect of human life and has to be considered in a local context. The discipline of social anthropology, by addressing issues from the perspective of the affected people and by transcending disciplinary boundaries, can produce new insights into the challenges of water management, especially through network analysis. Moreover, as we are trying to rethink the concept of water, anthropology could help to a more radical rethinking of science beyond the parameters of engineering science. Last, but not least, the anthropological reconceptualization of the opposition of Nature/Culture in western thought, entails a reflection on the nature of agents, questioning if only human individuals can be considered as agents. We can consider agency elsewhere in an eco-­‐system, in non-­‐
humans and indeed in entire life-­‐systems. Hence, the question arises: should we think of rivers and other bodies of water as having an agency? July 2015 st
“Water and Security in the 21 Century” Seminar Note 9 Conclusions The message from the water security meeting was one of optimism. Participants at the meeting at Tufts could see that bringing different types of expertise and knowledges within one room revealed much about the scope and opportunities for water management and governance. In other words, an abundance of understanding substantially counters the positivist idea that increasing water stress will invariably lead to water conflicts. Perhaps it is not the scarcity of water that the globe needs to be concerned with but the scarcity of water knowledges and ‘round tables’ for water dialogue that bridges across the different and valuable (but naturally incomplete) water perspectives we all hold. July 2015