Improving water co-operation to build stability

A major OSCE event, the Economic Forum, focuses for its tenth edition on issues relating water management to security, 28 to 31 May 2002 in Prague. Aaron T. Wolf, a world expert on water resource agreements, talks about the need for interaction between water science and water policy, particularly as they relate to conflict prevention and resolution.

Profile

Aaron T. Wolf is an associate professor of geography in the Department of Geosciences at Oregon State University. His recent research focuses on issues relating international water resources to political conflict and co-operation.

An advisor to the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Department of State, and other organizations on various aspects of international water resources and dispute resolution, he has been involved in developing the strategies for resolving water aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Mr. Wolf, how is water related to security issues?

Water ignores political boundaries, evades institutional classification, and eludes legal generalizations. As a consequence, water resources - including scarcity, distribution, and quality - have been named as a likely factor to lead to intense political pressures, while threatening the processes of sustainable development and environmental protection.

Rather than being simply another environmental input, water is regularly treated as a security issue, a gift of nature, or a focal point for local society. Disputes, therefore, need to be understood as more than "simply" over a quantity of resources, but also over conflicting attitudes, meanings, and contexts.

Can regional co-operation help avoiding or solving water conflicts?

One productive approach to the management of water resources has been to examine the benefits from a regional point of view. This requires to get past looking at water as a commodity to be divided and rather to develop an approach which equitably allocates, not the water, but the benefits derived from it.

Water management must be understood in terms of the specific, local context. The meaning of water to its users is critical to understanding conflicts, sometimes more so than its quantity or quality.

How can the international community encourage this approach?

Analysts argue that water resources institutions from around the world should provide for on-going evaluation, comprehensive review, and consistency among actions, but in practice this is rare. Rather, we find lack of quality considerations in quantity decisions, and a general neglect for environmental concerns in water resources decision-making.

To address these deficiencies, some have argued that international agencies might take a greater institutional role. Despite decades of institutional risk-aversion and a general lack of leadership in international waters, there appears to be some recent momentum at global level. For example, one result of the Rio Conference and Agenda 21 has been a tremendous expansion of international freshwater resource institutions and programmes.

Which role could the OSCE play in this regard?

International water resources management often requires an interested but objective third-party facilitator, ideally one with global resources, yet an acute awareness of local issues and concerns.

Unlike many organizations, the OSCE explicitly includes economic and environmental matters in its consideration of security issues and, as such, can mobilize its broad credibility to bear on these intricate issues.