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It has become commonplace to say that benefit sharing from transboundary water cooperation should replace allocation simply based on water volumes. Some of the presentations at this year’s World Water Week, however, refreshingly moved beyond this common notion to discuss the challenges and limits of this approach. "Transboundary Waters" was the special focus of the 2009 Stockholm World Water Week (WWW); the agenda included a high level panel on the opening day, a workshop and a number of seminars and side events that examined the transboundary concept from a variety of angles.



Benefit sharing was at the top of issues discussed. While there is much international support for the benefit sharing concept, its implementation has been hampered by a lack of structured approaches to identify and evaluate development options that generate mutual benefits. The recently published Transboundary Waters Opportunity analysis addresses this issue. It provides a systematic framework to evaluate different options through stakeholder interaction. The framework, as well as its application in the Nile and other basins, was presented at several of the WWW events.



Other presentations and events pointed to the limits of benefit sharing approaches, among others that joint development priorities and sharing agreements are quite difficult to negotiate. Moreover, the most powerful riparian can often determine the outcome of negotiations and thus prevent opportunities being taken that benefit all riparians. While the mere existence of riparian interaction is often labelled as cooperation, some of the resultant forms of such asymmetric "cooperation" are in fact quite unfair and ultimately perpetuate - not resolve - conflict. A seminar organised by the London Water Research Group and the Universities Partnership on Transboundary Waters challenged the general understanding of conflict and cooperation and pointed out that most often both actually co-exist. The seminar concluded that analysis and policy design should therefore consider existing power asymmetries, the hidden agendas of the different riparian states, as well as the power of domestic players. (Annika Kramer)



The complete programme of the WWW, most of the presentations as well as some background information on the transboundary water events are available at http://www.worldwaterweek.org/programme%202009



The Transboundary Waters Opportunity analysis can be downloaded here http://www.siwi.org/sa/node.asp?node=423



The London Water Research Group provides a range of publications on power asymmetries and hydro-hegemons in transboundary water interactions http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/geography/research/epd/londonwater/

Published in: ECC-Newsletter, October 2009