Resilience in Transboundary Water Governance: the Okavango River Basin
نویسندگان
چکیده
When the availability of a vital resource varies between times of overabundance and extreme scarcity, management regimes must manifest flexibility and authority to adapt while maintaining legitimacy. Unfortunately, the need for adaptability often conflicts with the desire for certainty in legal and regulatory regimes, and laws that fail to account for variability often result in conflict when the inevitable disturbance occurs. Additional keys to resilience are collaboration among physical scientists, political actors, local leaders, and other stakeholders, and, when the commons is shared among sovereign states, collaboration between and among institutions with authority to act at different scales or with respect to different aspects of an ecological system. At the scale of transboundary river basins, where treaties govern water utilization, particular treaty mechanisms can reduce conflict potential by fostering collaboration and accounting for change. One necessary element is a mechanism for coordination and collaboration at the scale of the basin. This could be satisfied by mechanisms ranging from informal networks to the establishment of an international commission to jointly manage water, but a mechanism for collaboration at the basin scale alone does not ensure sound water management. To better guide resource management, study of applied resilience theory has revealed a number of management practices that are integral for adaptive governance. Here, we describe key resilience principles for treaty design and adaptive governance and then apply the principles to a case study of one transboundary basin where the need and willingness to manage collaboratively and iteratively is high—the Okavango River Basin of southwest Africa. This descriptive and applied approach should be particularly instructive for treaty negotiators, transboundary resource managers, and should aid program developers.
منابع مشابه
Okavango Collections: Sharing Environmental Information Resources of the Cubango-Okavango River Basin
This paper provides an account of the development of the web-based Okavango Collections (OC) metadata catalogue. In light of climate change, growing population, and developmental pressures on the transboundary CubangoOkavango river basin, there is an urgent need to ensure timely access to reliable environmental data and information for environmental decision-making. Commissioned by the Permanen...
متن کاملResilience and Water Governance: Adaptive Governance in the Columbia River Basin
The 1964 Columbia River Treaty between the United States and Canada is currently under review. Under the treaty, the river is jointly operated by the two countries for hydropower and is the largest producer of hydropower in the western hemisphere. In considering the next phase of international river governance, the degree of uncertainty surrounding the drivers of change complicates efforts to p...
متن کاملSecurity to All: Allocating the Waters of Euphrates and Tigris
The highly contested and complex issue of transboundary water governance calls for rethinking fairness and equity in the allocation of water between sovereign nation-states. This paper provokes ideas about the problem of allocation and access as it is stated in the Earth System Governance Project. It starts out arguing that the problem of allocation in the Middle East is framed by both upstream...
متن کاملManaging hydroclimatic risks in federal rivers: a diagnostic assessment.
Hydroclimatic risks and adaptive capacity are not distributed evenly in large river basins of federal countries, where authority is divided across national and territorial governments. Transboundary river basins are a major test of federal systems of governance because key management roles exist at all levels. This paper examines the evolution and design of interstate water allocation instituti...
متن کاملA Southern African Perspective on Transboundary Water Resource Management
Southern Africa is characterized by a large number of international river basins, inherent climatic variability, and a natural maldistribution of perennial rivers. The region also has a history of political instability, driven by liberation struggles against the former colonial powers and the Cold War. Southern Africa’s transboundary rivers and their associated ecosystems could become either dr...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
دوره شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2013