Transboundary Water Governance Scholarship: A Critical Review

Abstract

Governing and managing the allocation and use of freshwater has always been a complex and fraught undertaking. The challenges to effective and equitable management have been exacerbated by rising pressures on supplies caused by such drivers as population growth, urbanization and climate change. Moreover, vast quantities of water straddle international and other boundaries—four-fifths of the world’s largest river basins and hundreds of aquifers span such borders. This further complicates management and governance, which is subject to disparate legal, political, administrative, financial, cultural and diplomatic conditions. Recognition in the literature and in practice of ‘transboundariness’ dates to the 1970s and has grown since. The authors trace the evolution of transboundary water scholarship and identify five framings used in transboundary water governance and management: conflict and cooperation; hydropolitics; hydrodiplomacy; scale; and disciplinary approaches. Transboundary water management initiatives can be viewed through three broad strands: interventions, advancements in governance strategies and democratization of data and information for strengthening science–policy interaction. The authors close with a discussion of future directions for transboundary water governance and management, emphasizing the need for additional research on how to deal with climate-related and other mounting challenges.

1. Transboundariness’ and Its Relevance to Water

Freshwater from rivers, lakes and aquifers has always been the lifeblood of human settlements and cultures. Because of its value, managing its allocation and use has been a complex and frequently fraught undertaking. In the past century especially, urban migration has caused overall population to grow while climate change has threatened existing supplies. These and other pressures have exacerbated the challenges to effective and equitable management.

In the postwar, postcolonial period of the mid-to-late 20th century, another force added to the complexity of water management: new state formation. In 1900, the world had 78 independent nations; today there are 195. A single eruption, the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, generated 21 new countries, with each new political entity creating new international borders; between 1991 and 1994 alone, 46 new borders came into being [1].

One important result of this proliferation of new states is the term ‘transboundary’ and its condition, ‘transboundariness’ [2], constructs that were absent from early discourses. As developed by those scholars, “transboundariness measures the environmental, social, political, economic and hydrogeologic conditions of an aquifer (or water resource unit) at a binational/international level” [3]. They highlight that adding the transboundary element into the analysis, redefines its nature and value as a geo-strategic resource [2,3]. While the concept may have existed earlier, the first occurrences of the term in scholarship on resources—concerning air pollution and animal disease—dates from the 1960s. We value transboundariness as an essential (non-elective) way in which to understand shared water resources across national (or other kinds of) boundaries (For example, water resources that cross spatial/geographic boundaries between a sovereign indigenous nation and a state or province within a nation-state could also be examined for their transboundariness).

With regard to environment and natural resources, by the late 19th century international leaders and diplomats had recognized the transboundary nature of these goods. By the turn of the 20th century, professionals had formed the International Navigation Association (1885) to help guide maintenance and operation of inland and maritime waterways, ports and coastal areas, and the International Commission on Glaciers (1894) to study global snow and ice [4,5]. Other professional societies for transboundary resources soon followed [6] and in 1940 the Organization of American States (OAS) adopted one of the first international environmental agreements (IEAs) that are “legally binding intergovernmental efforts directed at reducing human impacts on the environment” [7]. In this instance, the OAS accord was put in place to protect nature and wildlife in the Americas.

However, it was not until the global emergence of environmentalism in the 1970s that transboundary resources were recognized as needing international protection. The 1971 Ramsar Convention, aimed at vulnerable wetlands, was the first major agreement of this sort [8]. From this time to the early 1990s, a broad-ranging suite of global environmental agreements came into existence—many of these under the aegis of various United Nations agencies. These accords have addressed transboundary species, pollution, waste, diversity, air quality, climate and, eventually, inland waterways. A convention specifically focused on protecting international water did not come about until 1992, the Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes.

In the context of international transboundary resource accords, protecting Earth’s water has been particularly germane since vast volumes of surface and subsurface water lie astride international and other jurisdictional boundaries. To illustrate, of the world’s 35 largest river basins all but six flow through more than one nation [9,10,11]. Similarly, some 470 aquifers in five continents—some shared by six or more nations—can be considered transboundary [12] (Previous mapping conducted by the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre (IGRAC) included transboundary aquifers and other transboundary groundwater bodies (the EU Water Framework Directive’s management units that typically subdivide larger aquifers) [12]. In 2015, IGRAC mapped 366 such aquifers plus 226 transboundary groundwater bodies [13]. In their 2021 update, IGRAC counted only transboundary aquifers. The updated map shows 468 transboundary groundwater aquifers in 2021—an increase from previous estimates (excluding groundwater bodies that are not aquifers) [12]. Management and, more broadly, governance of these shared waters is subject to disparate legal, political, administrative, financial, cultural and, finally, diplomatic conditions.

Purpose of this Review

We undertook this review to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive understanding of the state of transboundary water governance scholarship at a moment when such research addresses key issues of global consequence and impact, with potential implications for peaceful conflict resolution and more just distribution and management of shared water resources. Although there is an extensive literature on the subject, there are no recent reviews of what has been studied and written (For example, a search of relevant transboundary water listings in Annual Review of Environment and Resources identifies only Wolf’s 2007 comprehensive review titled Shared Waters: Conflict and Cooperation, while Environmental Research Letters does not identify anything under that topic). The topic of transboundary water governance is rapidly growing in significance as water is becoming scarcer due to climate change and other human drivers, making this an important time to take stock of how transboundary waters are governed and to identify future challenges. These findings can guide future transboundary research and practice in transboundary law, policy and governance.

As global tensions rise while water becomes scarcer, potential disagreements over shared waters need to be addressed through diplomacy, which has led to a body of scholarship on how to avert and mitigate transboundary conflict. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the coordinating agency UN-Water, and global water initiatives have increasingly focused on transboundary waters—both above surface and below surface—as environmental and geopolitical hotspots needing further attention. A review of the literature on theories, practices and place-based experiences can shed light on future approaches to collaborative governance and management.

To conduct this review, we consulted the body of literature and relied on our own experience working on this subject to select what we saw as the salient works and persistent themes focusing on the last two decades of scholarship. On a conceptual level, we examined the topic by looking at various prevalent themes, such as hegemonic power relationships; modes of dealing with conflict; application of international law and diplomacy; and use of water regulations. We grounded our review on three broad strands of empirical practice: interventions, advancements in governance strategies and democratization of data and information for strengthening science policy interaction. We strove to be geographically comprehensive by focusing on cases from both regional and global-scale analyses.

In Section 2, we trace the evolution of transboundary water scholarship and identify five framings used in transboundary water governance and management: conflict and cooperation; hydropolitics; hydrodiplomacy; scale; and disciplinary approaches (

Table 1. Framings for transboundary water governance and management prevalent in the literature.

Framing	Description
Conflict and cooperation	Examines: The roots of water conflicts Ways of understanding, coping and resolving them Avenues for cooperation among nations sharing water resources
Hydropolitics	Emphasizes power dynamics and resource interactions between upstream and downstream riparian nations
Hydrodiplomacy	Focuses on the role of transboundary institutions such as: The United Nations and donor agencies River basin commissions International laws, treaties and instruments Nongovernmental organizations
Scale	The river basin is often used as an organizing scale for scientific assessment and transboundary cooperation in order to align governance with hydrologic boundaries; this framing either utilizes or challenges the river basin scale
Disciplinary, Multidisciplinary & Interdisciplinary approaches	Scholars approach transboundary water challenges through a disciplinary lens—e.g., law, resource economics, international relations—or through multi- or interdisciplinary studies that combine disciplines.

).

Then, we provide an overview of how transboundary water is governed and managed in practice by international organizations, riparian nations and NGOs. We conclude with our view of future directions for transboundary water governance.

2. Framings and Approaches to Transboundary Water Management

The world’s earliest states, dating to the 4th to 3rd millennium BCE, almost universally coalesced around rivers: e.g., the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Indus, Yangtze and Yellow Rivers. The spatial extent and boundaries of these entities shifted temporally in keeping with their political power, in a perpetual conflict between center and periphery. Awareness of borders is as old as the states themselves. Already in 2400 BCE, as evidenced by a deciphered stele, Sumerians recognized the ‘Edge of the Plain’, the outer limit of their domain [14]. Ancient Chinese statesmen also were closely familiar with their empire’s boundaries, erecting walls and devising strategies [15]. Accordingly, theories of statesmanship generally reflected geopolitical struggles. Perhaps most well-known is the Indian strategist Kautilya’s 4th century, BCE, ‘Mandala Theory’ of border relations: your neighbor is your enemy and consequently your neighbor’s neighbor is your ally. This construct offers a dynamic, ever-changing and pragmatic perspective on transboundary matters [16].

In the time since, most rules of statesmanship have strongly emphasized the pursuit of national interests at the expense of crossborder cooperation. Over the past few decades, thinking about international boundaries has recognized these demarcations as human-made political constructs. As such, their relationship to crossborder natural resources—including water—and environment became a subject of scholarly inquiry [10,17,18,19]. With new attention to transboundary resource management, it was a short step to recognize the potential for disagreement among states that ‘shared’ these resources.

In the late 1990s, at a time of rising threats to global water supplies, a number of investigators turned their attention to the notion of conflict over the possession of water. Aaron Wolf, reacting to journalists’ expression of fears over potential ‘water wars’, developed a comprehensive database of global water conflicts [20]. While his work showed that no wars had ever been fought over water [21], the topic was rife for further investigation and a number of important international efforts emerged, including UNESCO’s From Potential Conflict to Cooperation Potential, a project begun in 2001 that examined multiple aspects of water conflict [22]. Other studies surveyed the range of issues arising from transboundary water flows—from the roots of water conflicts to ways of understanding, coping and resolving them [23,24,25,26,27].

To those who looked at water conflict, it became evident that a common source of tension and dispute arose when upstream riparian nations act to control or limit flow to downstream states, for example, when upstream nations construct dams to store water for later use or when overuse upstream limits river flows downstream. Such hegemonic issues, following on the heels of general work on conflict, became the centerpiece of a rich suite of studies. These investigations led to such ‘upstream–downstream’ concepts as ‘hydropolitics’, most generally and more specifically, ‘hydrohegemony’, ‘hydrocide’, ‘hydroschizophrenia’, ‘hydrosolidarity’ and ‘ecohydrosolidarity’, each term expressing a facet of international transborder water relations ranging from extreme hostility to conciliation and concern for human rights and for the environment [22,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43].

Key transnational water-related issues include hegemonic water politics (e.g., upstream vs. downstream or wealthy vs. poor riparian states), questions of ownership, control and disputed boundary definitions. In order to cope with such matters, nations have relied on age-old diplomatic approaches, leading to a field sometimes known as ‘hydrodiplomacy’. Early approaches—many aimed at transborder dams, irrigation systems and other large waterworks—commonly featured technical and engineering approaches to problem-solving [44].

By contrast, most recent scholarship has examined the role of transnational institutions such as the United Nations and donor agencies, river-basin commissions, international laws, treaties and instruments, and nongovernmental organizations [45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52]. While the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention provides a basis of legal norms to guide relations over shared waters, implementing these guidelines in practice is an ongoing challenge. River basin organizations (RBOs) and international treaties have been established to promote these international norms through dialogue, information-sharing, stakeholder engagement and coordination among riparian nations [49,51,53].

Approaches to transboundary water management have leveraged the river basin as a unit of analysis for scientific assessment and stakeholder engagement and as a forum for promoting cooperation and dialogue across borders. Cooperation at the transboundary basin scale that includes strategies such as information sharing or joint action may help to enhance water security [54], but there are real political implications of basin-scaling [55]. In practice, conflicts among riparian states may persist despite the existence and efforts of basin-scale institutions, such as river basin organizations [55,56]. River basin organizations face challenges to implementing basin-wide programs due to insufficient institutional capacity and a lack of administrative authority in individual nation states [57,58,59]. Scholars have noted that national and subnational governance levels are key to the implementation of basin-scale programs or agreements [58]. This disconnect between administrative and hydrologic scale is a longstanding challenge for water management and a particular concern in transboundary contexts [57,60]. Similar challenges that afflict international, transboundary basins may exist in subnational transboundary basins that traverse state, province, or territory boundaries, such as federal rivers in Australia, the US, Brazil and India [61,62], and in basins that traverse boundaries of sovereign Indigenous nations [63].

Approaches to reducing crossborder conflict and inducing cooperation have been studied by scholars in the fields of international relations, water law, policy studies, resource economics and other social sciences via disciplinary, multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary studies [19,26,27,37,38,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73]. Some recent scholarship has also delved into realms such as religion and spirituality for potential learning opportunities. Lessons from faith traditions have been explored to potentially transform conflicts [74], as well as the understanding of religious and cultural values enshrined in monotheistic scriptures and their role in building consensus [75]. An ethical approach to shared waters has been promoted by international organizations such as UNESCO [76,77] and scholars alike [78]. Much of this literature was motivated by longstanding geographic disagreements and conflicts in major international river basins, for example, over waters in the Colorado, Danube, Indus, Mekong, Nile, Rhine, Senegal and Tigris-Euphrates Rivers. Transboundary groundwater resources present additional challenges for management due to the difficulty of assessing and monitoring resource sustainability and, consequently, have remained less well-examined than shared surface waters [79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86].

The interstate issues identified above are superimposed on a template of other, multiple sources of prospective tension, all of which are magnified when they exist in a transboundary setting. Among these overarching causative forces are:

(1)

prevailing sociopolitical considerations (such as population density, customs and practices, types of political regimes, legal and administrative traditions, degree of institutional sustainability and cultural ideas and practices);

(2)

the type of water ownership regime (state-owned or privately-owned);

(3)

sectoral competition (e.g., agriculture or industry vs. environment);

(4)

the relative political heft of visible surface water vs. invisible groundwater (a particularly thorny subject in view of greatly increased reliance on aquifers);

(5)

the degree of applicable government regulation;

(6)

the availability of reliable science and technology;

(7)

the existing degree of democratization of transboundary decision making (i.e., do users, local minorities and Indigenous populations and other stakeholders participate?);

(8)

ensuring water justice and equity of water access.

These confounding issues arise especially as transboundary water management is addressed in practice through projects, networks, negotiations and case studies. Section 3 discusses such transboundary water management strategies as applied in practice.

3. Transboundary Water Management in Practice

In practice, transboundary water management initiatives are primarily realized through three broad strands. The first one involves actual interventions—be it via proactively creating formal networks and platforms for dialogues, collaboration and partnerships, or through reactive engagement for dispute resolution through negotiation, mediation and facilitation. The second set involves advancements ushered in through the development of various approaches to governing this nonstationary resource. Finally, efforts to democratize data and information for strengthening science–policy interaction with transboundary water governance constitute the third strand.

The emphasis on proactive interventions enhances water diplomacy. Water-centric, global organizations are playing a lead role: the Global Water Partnership (GWP) through its support to various crossborder institutions, including River Basin Organizations (RBOs); Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), through its Shared Waters Partnership; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), via its International Shared Aquifer Resource Management (ISARM) initiative. Nonprofits and think tanks also act as knowledge producers and consultants for studies and as policy advocates, such as the Pacific Institute, Deltares, CGIAR, Geneva Water Hub and the East-West Center, Stimson Centre and others. Regional organizations have also emerged as centers of research, innovation and investment catalysts for transboundary basins and landscapes. Examples are the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Asia and the Continental Africa Water Investment Programme (AIP) in Africa. Innovative academic networks such as the Universities Partnership for Water Cooperation and Diplomacy (UPWCD) are also seeking to enhance collaborations across institutional and academic boundaries for water cooperation.

Once disputes escalate along a ‘crisis curve’ due to the failure or absence of water diplomacy, Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) mechanisms are tried to avoid litigations in resolving disputes [87,88]. Numerous examples exist from different corners of the world. For example, the United States, European Union, Canada and France acted as sponsors in the early 1990s to create a multilateral working group on water to resolve issues of water supply, demand and institutions in the Middle East. Israel, Jordan and Palestine were the core parties to those talks [89,90,91]. Similarly, almost two decades earlier, the World Bank helped negotiate an equitable allocation of the Indus River’s water and its tributaries between the riparian states of India and Pakistan [92,93,94]. In other cases, such as the Mekong or the Nile where RBOs exist, a range of strategies beyond the usual mechanisms for dispute resolution can be deployed, for example, forums for negotiation, data and information [95,96,97]. Almost all such arrangements globally are tied through a single common thread—which is to realize the financial incentive for water resource development as contingent upon the resolution of the prevailing dispute and to reach a consensus agreement [74].

In terms of approaches to governance, the literature is diverse and reflects many of the challenges that go into the making of ‘wicked problems’ in transboundary waters [98,99,100]. At the turn of the present century, approaches to institutional theory as an alternative to state-centric and market-centric approaches were proposed [101] and have been followed by devising institutional frameworks for governance [45,102,103]. Other approaches have also found a footing, such as global programs for managing transboundary waters through multiagency cooperation [80] and baseline assessments [104]. Principles of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) also critically explored the transboundary space [105,106]. The human right to water (including rivers) and water justice also figure in this analysis, institutionalized in the UN SDG6 and the 2018 Brisbane Declaration [107]. In the context of transboundary rivers (e.g., the Juba-Shabelle basin in Ethiopia and Somalia), the human right to rivers faces unique challenges, as the upstream riparian country generally has the advantage in dictating water use and generally has different policies and priorities than its neighboring country [108]. Singh’s analysis underscores the importance of cooperative agreements between transboundary riparian states to ensure that the human right to rivers is observed and practiced.

Meanwhile, approaches rooted in theories of economics and geography have also been proposed, such as treating water as a public good [109,110], the scarcity value of water [111] and the revolutionary concept of virtual water—referring to the water required for production of a good—by the geographer John Anthony Allan [112]. Power relations, particularly power asymmetries and hegemonic relations among nations in transboundary basins [32,33], were also explored and relevant frameworks proposed. Another approach was adaptive governance, a dynamic approach that responds to uncertainty through learning and experimentation [72,113,114,115].

These approaches to transboundary water governance are typically applied through case studies, which dominate the transboundary water literature due to the site-specific nature of transboundary challenges that are influenced by the physical, socioeconomic, political and institutional context [116]. Case-study analysis is used to build or test theory and assess implementation of governance approaches in practice. Case studies address a range of aspects of transboundary water governance. Some studies examine transboundary institutions [103], science–policy processes [117], or overarching hydropolitics [118]. Others evaluate the risks of climate change [119,120] or assess socioecological or community resilience [121,122]. Still others use case studies to assess conflict and cooperation [25,33,123], dispute resolution [124] and international treaty design [125]. Case studies of major international basins—such as the Nile River Basin [126,127], the Mekong River Basin [128,129], the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna River Basin [123,130], the Jordan River Basin [69,131], the Colorado River Basin [132], the Niger River Basin [133,134] and the Guarani Aquifer System [135]—dominate the literature. These basins have received increased attention either because they have a large geographic extent involving multiple nations, or because they serve large populations, have experienced protracted political conflict, have created international treaties or river basin organizations, or have been the focus of the development agendas of international organizations.

Other case studies present success stories and learnings, with certain observable best practices, that can help to formulate templates for transboundary governance elsewhere. This includes avoiding military conflicts to thwart cooperation in the Indus River Basin through the Permanent Indus Commission [136,137] and the long-standing transboundary cooperation regarding the Great Lakes and other shared waterbodies between USA and Canada through the century-old International Joint Commission [138,139,140]. In Europe, the evolution and growth of multi-faceted cooperation in the Rhine River catchment [141,142] and the Danube [143,144] from a singular concern around water quality through various commissions and policy integration across scales in the Elbe River basin and combined action through International Commission for the Protection of the Elbe River (ICPER) [145] stand out significantly. Elsewhere, in Africa, limited success of transboundary institutions like the Organisation for the Development of River Senegal [146,147] has attracted attention as have the water reforms and creation of the subnational Murray-Darling Basin Authority in Australia [148] and the use of innovative reallocation tools such as water markets [149,150].

In recent times, science-policy processes have emerged as an important theme for transboundary water governance research and action [52,117,151], as also the exploration of the interface shared between it and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 [152,153,154]. In the case of the former theme, data repositories such as the magnum opus Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, begun in the late 1990s and continuously updated since, hold great promise [20]. Further efforts to democratize data, evidence and state-of-the-art geospatial tools include the Transboundary Water Assessment Programme (TWAP) by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), Global Groundwater Information System (GGIS) through the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre (IGRAC) and the Water, Peace and Security (WPS) partnership spearheaded by IHE Delft Institute for Water Education for increasing awareness and understanding. The Water Diplomat, housed at the Geneva Water Hub, has also emerged as a reliable one-stop resource for news and updates on hydropolitics from all parts of the world. While much has been learned through examination and implementation of governance strategies in practice, challenges remain that demand continued attention, as discussed in Section 4.

4. Future Directions for Transboundary Water Governance and Management

Transboundary water governance and management are becoming more significant due to anthropogenic changes including climate change, economic development, population growth and water infrastructure development [155,156]. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal for Water—SDG 6—emphasizes the importance of transboundary cooperation and associated formal water management arrangements (SDG 6.5.2). A 2018 analysis of ‘future worlds’ [157] and a 2018 essay by Colglazier [158] suggest that, among the various kinds of diplomacy, transboundary water diplomacy may be the most consequential form of international scientific and political collaboration and may represent the single steepest future challenge. In accordance with this view, [159] Busby describes a ‘warming-world’ scenario and suggests that climate change “matters more than anything else and will test the international system in new and unpredictable ways”. Climate change is acknowledged to exhibit non-stationarity—meaning that the past climate is no longer a sufficient guide for the possibilities of the future—and at the same time, new ‘tipping points’ may be reached in the coming decades that ‘bake in’ new earth-system feedback loops with implications for water supply and availability and water-related hazards such as drought and floods [160]. Climate non-stationarity and the potential for reaching earth-system tipping points together create an epistemological challenge as science, society and water governance decisionmakers seek to grasp the evolving new realities. This scenario portends greater international conflicts over water, especially in developing countries.

Similar to climate change as a driver of transboundary water conflict, dam development is recognized as a major factor leading to transboundary water conflict between upstream and downstream countries. Nevertheless, thousands of new dams are under consideration or in progress in developing regions in Asia (e.g., Ganges-Brahmaputra basin), Latin America (e.g., Amazon and Orinoco basins) and Africa (Nile basin), all global South countries where institutional capacity and formal transboundary agreements are relatively limited [62]. Basin development in the absence of transboundary agreements (e.g., treaties, river basin organizations, formal networks) is one of the best predictors of future hydropolitical tensions [62]. Overall, De Stefano and team identified nearly 40 basins in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central America, northern South America, the southern Balkans and different parts of the African continent that are at high risk of hydropolitical conflict coupled with inadequate institutional agreements and institutional capacity.

At present transboundary water conflicts have largely remained subject to peaceful resolution at the institutional and/or diplomatic level. Yet the challenges of the future may require new approaches to ensure water security across transboundary settings. Recent research on transboundary water governance suggests that new approaches are needed to deal with these emerging and pressing challenges. While the river basin evolved as the major organizing construct for most transboundary water governance over the last three decades, there are pressing needs for multi-scalar approaches ‘beyond the basin’ and for incorporation of other actors beyond the nation-state [161]. These may include capacity at national and subnational levels to enhance implementation of transboundary agreements and attention to cross-sector linkages that may extend beyond basin boundaries [161].

Building adaptive capacity among governance actors and networks in transboundary contexts continues to be of the utmost importance. Research has confirmed the value of flexible governance processes and mechanisms coupled with robust transboundary institutions, such as agreements, treaties and accords [72,162]. In the face of mounting challenges such as climate change and growing demand for scarce water, scientific innovation is likely to play an enhanced role in future transboundary water governance. New approaches and tools will allow more precise data acquisition, generation and analysis at multiple scales [163,164]. These developments can be expected in turn to help fill extant knowledge gaps to support enhanced transboundary governance [52].