Water: Conflict and Cooperation

Water crisis has been the most discussed topic in environmental security literature. There are several strands of water security discourses ranging from water wars or water as a site of interstate / intrastate conflict to water as a human right issue and water as a potential site of collaboration. All these discourses of water security emanate from the increasing concerns over water crisis. Barlow's piece sheds lights on water crisis discussing it along the dimensions of depletion, degradation and drying. Such water crisis, in the presence of existing technological institutional and political arrangement lead to the scarcity and inequality which may result into the injustice and conflict; though his article does not explicitly mention about the conflict dimension of water crisis. However, in such relationship, the intervening institutions seem more important than causal factors of water conflict. Conca's piece reveals more about institutional aspects of water conflict and highlights the contentious politics around institution building.

Conca analyzes four examples of contentious politics on water resource namely trans-boundary rivers, large dams, marketization and privatization of water, and transnational expert networks. Each of these examples result into certain sets of institutions, that can be analyzed through the framework of territoriality, authority, and knowledge. According to him, the first example of sharing of transboundary river follows a particular set of territoriality, authority and knowledge, that is territorially bound state centric and rational modern science based knowledge based approach (the regime approach). In contrast to that, the conflict around large dam gave rise to the institution like World Commission on Dam which incorporates more diverse forms of territoriality, authority and knowledge approach (watershed democracy approach). Interesting fact is that, the regime approach though emanate from relatively collaborative situation, but not producing much positive results where as the large-dam related watershed approach though emanate from conflict is showing some interesting results. The later approach, though not fully embraced by several states, is also getting attention on the issues related to privatization and marketization of water. Therefore, for Conca, the approach that incorporates several positions in the dimensions of territory, authority, and knowledge may result into water cooperation, is such is possible.

Based on Conca's framework, it would be interesting to analyze interaction around a large dam that is to be built on a shared watercourse between two or more states which are already in certain forms of water sharing agreements. Question would be whether the regime approach would actually contribute to the watershed approach positively? It brings both several levels of interactions, one at the state level which is cooperative but at the local and transnational level, it is contentious. In such collaborative-contentious type hydropolitics, several local, national and transnational non-state actors would counter the state-centric approach favoring local livelihoods or local ecosystem, indigenous sovereignty or national interests. Provided with their several interests, institutionalizing of non-state actors would always be challenging for a real collaboration on water issues. However, any sorts of deliberative and participatory approach would be the first condition to reach to such collaboration as hinted by Conca's watershed democracy.