How to Incorporate System Archetypes into Water Conflicts Analysis: Application in Euphrates, Nile, Zambezi, and Lake Kivu Transboundary Basins

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a very well written, referenced, and structured paper discussing hydropolitical dynamics in different transboundary basins.

My suggestions are as follow:

- explain and justify the choice of case studies. Why these basins and not others?

- Concerning the Nile, please read and discuss also the work of Kevin Wheeler. For instance:

Wheeler, K. G., Jeuland, M., Hall, J. W., Zagona, E., & Whittington, D. (2020). Understanding and managing new risks on the Nile with the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Nature communications, 11(1), 5222.

Wheeler, K. G., Hall, J. W., Abdo, G. M., Dadson, S. J., Kasprzyk, J. R., Smith, R., & Zagona, E. A. (2018). Exploring cooperative transboundary river management strategies for the Eastern Nile Basin. Water Resources Research, 54(11), 9224-9254.

In addition, also water and nationalism would be useful, see again the work of Kevin Wheeler on the topic:

Wheeler, Kevin G., et al. "Water research and nationalism in the post-truth era." Water International 46.7-8 (2021): 1216-1223.

Also the work of Muhammad Basheer on the Nile is worth inclusion and discussion.

Apart from this, well done on a nice paper.

Author Response

Many thanks for your opinion and the precious time you dedicated for reviewing the manuscript. The following comments have been taken seriously by authors and addressed as follow. Please see the enclosed. You may follow whole of the interventions through the track change file in the supplementary material. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The first author has done interesting and potentially groundbreaking work in the past on conflict archetypes (Success to the successful, Escalation, Shifting the burden,Tragedy of the commons). and self-organisation from a systems perspective, as published in e.g Shahbazbegian, Turton and Mousavi Shafaee 2018., so I am following the author with interest. I have some fundamental doubts about the quantification method used here (and there), but given this published work maybe that’s neither here nor there. It is not so clear to me however what’s new about the present manuscript compared to earlier publications by the author (hence some doubts in my assessment), and I would encourage the authors to make this more explicit. I am especially interested in their new ideas on self-organisation. If it's the application to Lake Kivu, this should be made clear from the start. Unfortunately I am not very familiar with the Lake Kivu case so cannot speak much to the treatment of the case study.

Some linguistic details:

I do not know if ‘Kivue’ as spelled throughout the document is a local spelling variant, but the commonly used name internationally is Lake Kivu, as Kivue. Please correct it or eplain the alternative spelling.

Shifting the Burdon: shifting the burden.

Hydropilitical: hydropolitical

Looser -> loser

‘Since then, other researchers expand the TFDD … or in some cases, they start to create new databases’ is grammatically incorrect, the forms should be ‘have expanded’ and ‘they have started to create’

This is not an exhaustive check so a thorough spelling and grammar check will be in order.

System dynamics = CDs and archetypes

Reinforcing and balancing loops =-

Hydropolitical conflict archetype.

Escalation archetype   W&Z

Author Response

Many thanks for your nice opinion and I proud of that I am hearing you follow my previous work, indeed! We took this important comments seriously and added a text in the introduction section to more clarify expectations from this work. Please see the lines 79-92. In fact, quantifying hydropolitical self-organization theory in the Helmand transboundary river needs for huge amount of data as well as cooperation of scientists from both riparian states. On the other hand, in contrast to the HSO mapped for a transboundary basin through time, in recent work, we tried to map system archetypes in different transboundary basins considering diversity in their morphology. However, the previous work has been done for hypothetical transboundary basins which is in dire needs for examining real case studies. That is why we conducted current study. In overall, your generous suggestion encouraged us to keep working on representing the HSO in a quantity model in our future effort. 

All the following comments have been addressed in the revised version as well as double checking the English spell through the text.

You may follow the whole interventions through the track change file enclosed to the supplementary material. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Recommendation:

- improvement of figure quality

- unification of text format used for figure description

Notes:

-row 45: Wolf instead wolf

- row 600: Figure 5.c - y axis unit  is missing

Author Response

Thanks for taking the time to review the manuscript. All the following comments have been addressed by authors in the revised version of the paper.

The quality of all figures has been increased significantly. 

You may follow the whole interventions through the track change file in the supplementary material. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

This a very interesting paper on important question.  Water management talks systems, such as Integrated Water Resource Management, but seldom thinks systemically or analyses issues in systems terms.  It is an important question because all water management is a transboundary problem, only the nature of the boundaries vary.  For example, look at the problems in water sharing between the individual regions that make up the Murray-Darling Basin or the Colorado river. This paper examines the application of a systems approach to this question of hydropolitics.

The authors adopt the concept of systems archetypes from Forrester’s book on industrial dynamics involving both feedforward and feedback loops.  This is one of the pioneering texts on systems theory.  The examples they use are of closed systems although external influences are described as driving the closed systems they describe. So, they focus on parts of an open system.  Implicit in those models are time lags; B cannot respond simultaneously to a change in A’s response and vice versa. 

A potential caveat here is the later developments in systems theory have found that life is much more messy than the early control system models; notably Complex Systems (Grisogono and Radenovic 2011).

Reading this paper, I wondered whether the problem was primarily one of the allocation of the water resource or one of the weaknesses of the stakeholders at strategies for conflict resolution, notably in inventing or discovering better options to resolve or mitigate the inherent conflicts.  The authors discuss the use of participation in their limitations section.  Thus, whether Checkland’s ‘rich picture’ approach might not be helpful (eg Checkland and Poulter 2006).

A bonus is the enormous reference list.

Some suggested changes:

287 ‘downstream’ intended?

456 The development history of the Kariba dam is rather different than that described by the authors.  It was initiated in 1959 at time when what became Zambia gained independence in 1964 was with, what is now Zimbabwe, a federal colony of the UK.  The dam site itself was a cause of conflict between the two parts of the federal colony.  Mozambique was a Portuguese colony until 1975 following the war for independence starting in 1964.  Hence, I doubt whether the concept of building a dam in Mozambique to supply electricity to Zambia and Zimbabwe was at the time an option that could have been considered.

502 the discussion on Lake Kivu is probably unrealistic in that it ignores the continuing high level of tension between DRC and Rwanda.

656 the term ‘wicked problem’ is introduced.  Suggest referencing Rittel and Weber’s (1973) classic paper.

• Checkland, P., & Poulter, J. (2006). Learning for action: a short definitive account of soft systems methodology and its use, for practitioners, teachers and students. John Wiley.

·       Grisogono, Anne-Marie and Vanja Radenovic, 2011 The Adaptive Stance –Steps towards Teaching more Effective Complex Decision-Making, International Conference on Complex Systems, June 2011.

·       Rittel, H. W., & Webber, M. M. (1973). "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning." Policy sciences, 4(2), 155-169.

Overall. Worthy of publication

Author Response

We appreciate these very important notes and use the (Checkland and Poulter 2006) as a reference to address the ‘rich picture’ in the discussion. Please see the lines 580-583 in the revised version of the paper. Please see the enclosed to follow our interventions on the comments.

You may follow the whole interventions through the track change file in the supplementary material. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf