Impediments and Innovation in International Rivers: The Waters of South Asia

International cooperation over the major rivers in South Asia has become much closer in the last several years, despite nuclear tests in India and Pakistan, and rising tension between those states. Five important treaties or agreements, signed in 1996 and 1997, against a background of greater regional economic and nongovernmental contact, could facilitate significant progress to mitigate flooding and drought, to provide a basis for greater regional cooperation, and to sustain irrigation expansion and industrial development. This paper identifies past impediments to cooperation, then examines how new agreements seem to offer negotiation on a wider range of issues than has previously been considered, and to expand the range of institutions involved in negotiations. Most notably, the new agreements expand the range of potential negotiating bodies beyond national governments to include cities, corporations, local governments and nongovernmental organizations. This integration of diplomacy and economics could have far-reaching implications elsewhere, as well as in South Asia. ∗ We are grateful to two referees whose painstaking and detailed comments on an earlier version led to substantial improvement in this paper. We are also grateful to Peter Kriz for helpful discussions and comments. Financial support was received from the University of California at Santa Cruz through the Academic Senate; Center for Global, International and Regional Studies; and Division of Social Sciences. The second author also received generous support from the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation Crow & Singh: Innovation and Water in South Asia 3 October 06, 1999 I The Conflicts and the Possibilities of South Asian Rivers The great rivers of South Asia, particularly the Ganges and Brahmaputra, have been the subject of at least four decades of discussion between governments of the region. While those discussions have continued, until 1996 with little productive outcome, the rivers have contributed, through flood and drought, to the uncertainty and impoverishment of the lives of the largest concentration of poor people anywhere in the world. There is nevertheless a growing consensus that the perils of the rivers can be turned into prosperity. This paper explores some of the possibilities opened up by recent innovations in international cooperation. In this first section, we describe the promise of South Asian rivers, provide an overview of the region's international relations over water, and outline the new directions opened by the agreements of 1996 and 1997. Section II explores the course of past diplomacy with case studies of the limited success of the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan, and of the Ganges river dispute between India and Bangladesh, including how this dispute colored a subsequent unsuccessful attempt at regional cooperation. Section II concludes with a description of grand visions of regional water and power development which have been expressed by the governments of India and Bangladesh. Section III introduces a range of conceptual issues relevant for negotiations over water development, such as conflict over the allocation of property rights, who is included in the bargaining process, the scope of their negotiations, and the rules that govern the process. These issues are related to the historical problems in South Asian river development discussed in Section II. Section IV examines the innovations incorporated in the five treaties signed in 1996 and 1997, and how they address some of the past obstacles to successful agreement as discussed in Sections II and III. This section also considers parallel innovations at the local level, as well as suggesting directions in which current innovations might be extended as bases of regional cooperation. Section V provides a summary conclusion. The problems and the promise of South Asian rivers South Asian governments seek to control the great rivers of their region because they offer partial, but tangible, solutions to the most fundamental problems of rural poverty, industrial constraints, and urban stress that those governments seek to address. At present, the ways in which control has been sought -through national visions, covert appropriation and bilateral bargaining -constrain what can be achieved. There is a growing community of scholars, officials and politicians in South Asia that believes that the region's rivers can be better harnessed in support of economic development. For example, George Verghese, a prominent former Indian-newspapereditor and long-time proponent of river development, has written: There is no reason why the immiserised population of this resource-rich Basin should remain poor and hostage to a recurring cycle of devastating flood and drought. There is sufficient indication that international funding and technical assistance will be forthcoming in ample measure if the BasinCrow & Singh: Innovation and Water in South Asia 4 October 06, 1999 states decide cooperatively to harness the waters of these mighty rivers, green the mountains and conserve ‘losing ground’. An American economist, James Boyce, reinforces this argument from a different point of view (which will be described below): Nowhere on earth is the contrast between the lushness of the landscape and the poverty of the vast majority of the people more striking. Nowhere is the gap between what is possible and what exists more poignant. These two writers agree about the promise that water development holds. They have contrasting, but not inconsistent, views about why poverty persists. Verghese argues that international conflict over the rivers is an important obstacle to utilizing their potential. Boyce presents a widely-debated case that conflict between rich and poor hinders the emergence of local cooperative institutions which could employ water resources effectively. Together these arguments make a powerful case for those types of river development which recognize the political and economic forces shaping current conflict at international and local levels. This argument was echoed in the US Congress in 1996 with a concurrent resolution urging South Asian governments to ‘redouble their efforts to devise development projects that could relieve the poverty of those people living in the Ganges and Brahmaputra River Basin and address the critical problems of flooding and drought...’ Failure of past negotiations There has been little regional cooperation in South Asia, least of all about the contentious topic of water. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), established in the 1980s, provides a forum for discussion of the least controversial topics. However, the most heated ones, particularly water resource negotiations, were excluded from its brief at the start. With the exception of one meeting in 1986, discussed in Section II, negotiations over water have been exclusively bilateral, that is, involving only two states. India, in fact, has repeatedly insisted on this bilateralism, a point we will take up again in Section II. The most heated and long-running, river disagreement has been between Bangladesh (and its predecessor, East Pakistan) and India over the sharing of the flow of the Ganges. This question has sometimes been temporarily settled by interim agreements, and has occasionally erupted into internationally publicized disagreement. More typically, as for the decade up to 1996, it has been marked by chronic lack of agreement: intergovernmental negotiations of varying frequency that repeatedly fail to make substantive progress (see Section II). The governments of India and Nepal have had many rounds of sometimes tense negotiations relating to hydroelectricity generation, irrigation water, and flood control, and early agreements about shared projects have been controversial in Nepal. Water has the potential to be Nepal’s major economic resource, and successive governments have Crow & Singh: Innovation and Water in South Asia 5 October 06, 1999 expected that the sale of hydroelectric power to India would generate significant revenues for economic development. Until 1996, little progress had been made toward this goal. In section II, two of the most prominent elements obstructing international cooperation will be identified and described: the Indian government’s insistence on bilateral rather than multilateral negotiations (this approach to diplomacy is termed bilateralism) and competing national visions for water development.