Transnational cooperation for effective management of World Heritage sites in Africa

Abstract

Transnational cooperation is taking place at a staggering rate across a broad group of countries commonly referred to as the ‘Third World’ or ‘the South’. To complicate matters more, this cooperation is also taking place in the context of massive technological change, which is remapping the world’s economic geography. According to Dicken (1998), globalization is the financial, economic, social and political response to technological change.

Introduction

Transnational cooperation is taking place at a staggering rate across a broad group of countries commonly referred to as the ‘Third World’ or ‘the South’. To complicate matters more, this cooperation is also taking place in the context of massive technological change, which is remapping the world’s economic geography. According to Dicken (1998), globalization is the financial, economic, social and political response to technological change.

The term ‘transnational’ refers to cross-national boundaries.

Cooperation: A platform for effective management of World Heritage sites in Africa

With golden sand dunes, thundering falls and the world’s largest population of giant tortoises, Africa’s World Heritage sites will encompass staggering beauty and diversity without effective transnational cooperation.

For organizational development to be effective, people must be willing to share their ideas candidly with others; they must be willing to accept uncertainty, and they must be willing to show concern for others, especially members of their own team (Greenberg and Baron, 2003). This implies that for transnational cooperation in the Africa region to be effective, nations must be willing to share their resources openly with other nations; they must be willing to show concern for others, especially nations of their own region.

One of the documents of the Vatican Council (1965) rightly declares that ‘Common good refers to the sum total of social conditions which allows people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily’. This implies that nations should perform their obligations at both national and international levels – Anozie (2018) opined that there can be no adequate global society where there is no adequate consciousness of the national common good. This indicates primarily that there will be no real peace in the world if there is no true notion of effective transnational cooperation.

Cooperation, therefore, is a pattern of behaviour in which groups or organizations work together towards shared goals for their mutual benefit. It is a form of coordination in work settings, largely because by cooperating, the individuals or groups involved can accomplish more than is possible by working alone. In view of transnational cooperation for the management of World Heritage sites in Africa, more will be achieved if the African nations cooperate effectively.

Factors affecting cooperation

According to Greenberg and Baron (2003), there are many factors which determine whether an individual chooses to cooperate with others in situations involving mixed motives. The following three motives are relevant to this research:

• The reciprocity principle. This principle is the application of the ‘golden rule’, which tells us to ‘do to others as we would have them do to us’. However, this does not accurately describe the way people behave. Instead of treating others as they would like to be treated, most people tend to treat others the way they have been treated in the past by them. We are more inclined to follow a different principle – ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. Social scientists refer to this as the ‘principle of reciprocity’.

• Personal orientation. While some people tend to be naturally more cooperative, other people tend to be far more competitive.

• Organizational reward system. It is not only differences between people that lead them to behave cooperatively or not but also differences in the nature of organizational reward systems. With an eye towards eliminating these, and fostering cooperation, a system of team-based rewards should be adopted. The key task in establishing cooperation among nations is straightforward: getting it started. That is, one nation’s cooperation encourages cooperation among other nations. Therefore, to encourage transnational cooperation, nations should first attempt to get the process underway.

In the past, the joint use of transnational rivers was often seen as a potential cause of major security-related conflict. In the late 1980s, and particularly the 1990s, blaring headlines such as ‘water more precious than gold’, or ‘water seen as fuel for military conflicts’ made people aware of the potential disputes around existing uses of transnational water bodies. A much-cited example was the conflict among the riparian countries along the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates river system.

While cooperation in transnational river and lake basins is a necessity, it is not at all a matter of course. If it is not possible to satisfy the accumulated demands of all riparian countries sharing a river or lake system, then the result may be water-use conflicts of many different kinds. These conflicts are generally concerned with the quantity and quality of water, which can usually be resolved by a higher level state authority or by informal means, i.e. by the users themselves. One particular feature of transnational water-use conflicts is that they can only be resolved through negotiation between sovereign states. However, there is some evidence that domestic conflicts among water users results in violence if the authorities are not able to balance interests and enforce the law. Developments in Southern Africa clearly show that access to transnational water resources depends on political and economic power relationships between the riparian countries. Furthermore, the different levels of economic power and administrative capacities between riparian countries have an important influence on their ability to engage in cooperation.

Africa is a continent exceptionally well endowed with river basins and large inland lakes that extend over the territories in several countries. Both crises-prone hot spots and a good number of promising approaches to transnational water management can be observed. Today, there are international agreements in effect for 20 of Africa’s 63 river basins, and in 16 river basins there are institutionalized forums that have the task of coordinating national initiatives. This will be discussed later in this paper.

In addition, the Southern African Development Communities (SADC) provide an overarching political framework conducive to efforts aimed at transnational cooperation. Another important success factor is the incremental, pragmatic approach that has been pursued in the development of transnational water organizations. There have been many promising developments for older river-basin organizations, such as the Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du Fleuve Sénégal (OMVS), the Niger Basin Authority (NBA) and the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC), and new initiatives for cooperation are presently underway on Lake Victoria. The founding of the African Ministers Council on Water (AMCOW) in 2002 in Abuja, Nigeria, has established a continent-wide context that has placed transnational water cooperation firmly on the agenda, including promoting cooperation, security, social and economic development and poverty eradication among member states.

By comparison, cooperation along the region’s 38 or so transnational ground water systems is weakly developed, and examples of cooperation may be found only in North Africa on the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System and the North Western Sahara Aquifer System. Even though some African countries have increasingly been tapping groundwater resources for agriculture and to supply household needs, very few forms of institutionalized cooperation have been established thus far.

Transnational water management in Africa with reference to selected rivers and lakes

This section presents key hydrological, economic and political framework data on selected water bodies: the Orange-Senqu, the Zambezi, the Limpopo, Lake Victoria and Lake Chad.

These are used as a basis to access risks and conflict factors, as well as needs and the potential for cooperation.

Orange-Senqu

The Orange River is roughly 2,300 km in length. Its immediate riparian countries are Lesotho (source), the Republic of South Africa (RSA) and Namibia (estuary). Botswana also shares the Orange River basin, which has an area of close to 1 million km². The RSA holds the largest share of the basin, followed by Namibia, Botswana and Lesotho. The Orange River Basin is one of the most highly developed basins in all of Southern African. There are a total of 37 large-scale dams with a height over 25 m, and a storage capacity over 12 million l³. The mean annual run-off (MAR) is 11,000 million m³. The river’s most important tributaries are the Sequ in Lesotho, the Vaal in the Republic of South Africa and the Fish in Namibia.

Zambezi

The Zambezi is some 3,000 km in length. Its basin encompasses an area of roughly 1.4 million km², making it Africa’s fourth largest river. It has eight riparian countries: Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, with Zambia holding the largest share of the river’s basin. With an annual run-off of 94,000 million m³, its resources are used by households as well as for irrigated agriculture, mining, power generation and, to a lesser extent, industry, fishing and shipping.

Limpopo

The Limpopo is roughly 1,800 km in length. Its riparian countries are Botswana, Mozambique, the Republic of South Africa and Zimbabwe. The Republic of South Africa holds the largest share of about 44%. The upper course of the Limpopo (Crocodile River), forms the border first between the Republic of South Africa and Botswana and then between the Republic of South Africa and Zimbabwe. The Limpopo MAR is 7,330 million m³. The riparian countries contributed as follows: RSA 66%, Zimbabwe 16%, Mozambique 12% and Botswana 6%. The Limpopo is intensively exploited to supply urban centres, industry and agriculture. Its basin is home to around 14 million people. It is thus one of the African’s most densely settled and urbanized river basins.

Lake Victoria

Lake Victoria has an area of about 69,000 km² and a basin of 193,000 km². This makes it the world’s second largest, and African largest, lake. It has a volume of 2,760 km³, its shoreline is 3,450 km long (1,750 km in Tanzania, 1,150 km in Uganda and 550 km in Kenya). It has an average depth of 40 m, and a depth of 80 m at its deepest point. The lake is 412 km long from north to south and 355 km wide from east to west. The water of Lake Victoria overflows into the Nile and into Uganda through the Ripon Falls/Owen Falls.

The lake’s three riparian countries are Kenya (6% of the surface), Tanzania (49%) and Uganda (45%). The basin is home to some 35 million people, which is roughly one third of the overall population of the three countries. The lake and its resource are used to supply water to households, industry and agriculture, fisheries, transportation, to acquire building materials, to generate power, and for waste disposal. The lake basin is fertile and is farmed intensively for coffee, tea, cotton and sugar cane.

Lake Chad

The Lake Chad Basin has an area of roughly 2.39 million km². The lake surface is extremely variable, fluctuating as a function of season and macroclimatic events (droughts). One of the striking features of the lake is its dramatic shrinkage since the mid-1960s, a development due on the one hand to climate change and on the other to human environmental degradation, through over-exploitation of the lake’s water, over-grazing, deforestation and non-sustainable irrigated agriculture. It in extreme cases, the river area has even shrunk to 2,000 km². The lake is very shallow, with an average depth of 1.5 m and a maximum depth of 12 m. The countries that share the lake Chad Basin are Chad, Niger, the Central African Republic, Nigeria, Algeria, Cameroon, Libya and Sudan. The Lake Chad Basin is home to some 22 million people, and provides livelihoods for over 150,000 fishers.

An overview: Institutions managing the selected African waters

The Lesotho Highlands Water Project and the Lesotho Highland Water Commission

The Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) was conceived as a means of meeting South Africa’s need for a secure water supply, by tapping the water-rich Sengu in Lesotho to meet water needs in the Gauteng region. The project is designed to divert the waters of the Sengu (in Lesotho) to Gauteng via a complex system of dams and tunnels and at the same time to generate hydroelectricity. The idea is that water transfer and power generation will benefit the development of both countries.

Zambezi Water Commission (ZAMCOM)

The creation of ZAMCOM has meant a real breakthrough for basin-wide water resources management. This development significantly increases the likelihood of cooperative arrangements, especially in view of the fact that the ZAMCOM Agreement makes explicit reference to the 1997 UD Convention and the Revised SADC Water Protocol of 2000.

Lake Victoria Fisheries Organisation

The organization came about via the contract for the Lake Victoria Environmental Management Project (LVEMP). The Lake Victoria Fisheries Organisation is responsible for fishery management and research.

The Limpopo Basin Permanent Technical Committee (LBPTTC) and the Limpopo Water Commission (LIMCOM)

In 1986, in Harare, the riparian parties signed an agreement on funding the Limpopo Basin Permanent Technical Committee, which advised the parties in their efforts to develop the Limpopo Water Commission.

Lake Chad Basin Commission

On 22 May 1964, the four riparian countries Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria and Chad signed the Fort Lamy (now N’Djamena) Convention, creating the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC). In March 1994, the Central African Republic became the fifth member of this intergovernmental organization. In July 200, Sudan was also granted membership. The LCBC is Africa’s oldest river/lake basin organization.

The parties commit themselves to a shared use of the basin’s natural resources. In practice, however, these obligations have been violated again and again by certain member countries, where dams are constructed without prior notification.

Following the Fort Lamy Convention, the largest project underway aims to stop the lake shrinkage by supplying it with water from the Congo River Basin. The plan is to divert 900 m³ of water from the Oubangui River in the Congo Basin to Lake Chad through a pipeline and a navigable canal of some 2,400 km in length. The project’s progress is as yet unclear.

Senegal River Development Organisation

The Senegal River Development Organisation is responsible for overall policy.

Methodology

This study is limited to a few selected rivers and lakes in Africa. They are Orange-Senqu, the Limpopo, the Zambezi, Lake Victoria and Lake Chad. The exploratory survey method of investigation was used. The researcher used data collecting instruments other than questionnaires, as suggested by Aina and Ajiferuke (2002).

Data collection was by documentary analysis or source. According to Uhegbu (2009), documentary sources are a method of collecting data used in social science research. Documents are records accumulated by government, its agencies, institutions or departments, organizations and corporate bodies, and even individuals over time.

The research aimed not only to collect data per se, but also to discover the meaning of the collected data, so that facts and events could be better interpreted, explained and understood (Nwizu, 1998). In order to display the results more clearly, tables, figures and simple percentages were used.

Discussion of the findings

This discussion of the findings is based on Tables 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Table 1. Countries within the Limpopo Basin

Table 2. Countries within the Lake Chad Basin

Table 3. Countries within Lake Victoria

Table 4. Countries within Orange-Senqu Basin

Table 5. Countries within the Zambezi River

Information-Sharing: A platform for effective transnational cooperation management

The availability of information is determined by the accessibility of data and information, and their transmission through communication. Accessibility may be differentiated into private, shared and public information. Privately accessible information is available only to one negotiating party. During negotiations, a party may choose not to transmit information for strategic reasons, or for fear of its value. Strategic withholding of information in negotiation leads to a bargaining dilemma, since negotiations of course draw strength from the exchange of information. This is not healthy for the effective management of transnational cooperation. While shared information may also be the result of common observation, i.e. those made in the framework of a joint monitoring programme. In this case, there is no information asymmetry of the kind found in principal-agent constellations. And if there is any information asymmetry, it exists between the negotiating parties on the one side and outsiders on the other (e.g. the public, uninvolved government authorities, donors or organizations).

Public accessibility is given, for example, when one or more parties publishes its information, either on paper or the internet, and this information is accessible to everyone.

One aspect of communication important to us here is if a party takes the deliberate decision to accept or reject the information communicated to it – despite receiving the communication and understanding the information, the party denies the underlying data, and the effects of information, communication, and understanding are invalidated. This further emphasizes the need for stakeholders at all levels to reach agreement on the accuracy or acceptability of the available baseline data.

The joint fact-finding information method is the most suitable for effective cooperative transnational management. This concept rests on few key ideas – the first is that rather than withholding information for strategic advantage, the interested parties pull together relevant information. A second feature is that joint fact-finding involves face-to-face dialogue between technical experts, decision-makers and other key stakeholders. Usually, a nonpartisan facilitator or mediator assists in orchestrating this dialogue. Another significant aspect of the process is that while joint fact-finding is geared to building consensus, it tries to clearly ‘map’ areas of scientific agreement, and to narrow areas of disagreement and uncertainty. It was observed that the countries in Tables 1, 2, 3 and 4 agreed to the this method.

Benefit-Sharing: An obstacle to effective transnational cooperation management

The need for benefit-sharing arises when the optimal use of present or planned resources is associated with distributive effects that are not viewed as acceptable by all the countries concerned.

The coordinating problems are:

• Infrastructure provision: Generally speaking, the countries concerned will have parallel interest in realizing certain measures for the cooperation to be beneficial to all parties.

• Management of transnational water bodies: The countries concerned may achieve cooperation-related benefits by working together with international water bodies. One example would be the joint management of groundwater resources in times of scarcity.

In Table 2, Libya is among the countries within the Lake Chad Basin but has less than 0.5%, which is too low to be captured on the resource table. So too in Table 3, Rwanda and Burundi are among the countries within Lake Victoria but they were merged in resource-sharing with Tanzania. The question is what will happen when the benefits are to be shared? This is certain to hamper effective cooperation.

Upstream-Downstream dichotomy

The researcher found that upstream-downstream issues are among the classic problems encountered in transnational management. Activities on the upper course of a river are inevitably bound up with positive or negative externalities. This limits the possibilities of engaging in cooperation, in that an individual country may have no interest in coming up with cooperation solutions (see Table 4).

International donors as a catalyst for transnational cooperation management

In promoting transnational management in Africa, international donors can promote the development of effective, just and sustainable management institutions.

Nosce te ipsum – ‘know thyself’ – is the first step towards effective donor involvement. Donors may have motivations other than the promotion of effective transnational management. These should be recognized explicitly – only then will it be possible to see whether and how they can be accommodated and which priority they should be accorded. Donors should also recognize their possibilities and limitations, such as their financial resources, political influence, expertise and experiences – ‘know thyself’ is important for all stages of transnational management.

Donors should build on development and promote ownership, and should be aware that they cannot organize transnational management from the outside. They can influence transnational management in several ways, by getting all stakeholders involved, and not just ‘states’. This being said, it is no easy task to involve all stakeholders in transnational management. However, before any development project is approved, a proper stakeholder analysis is needed to prevent the project being appropriated by one national group (GEF, 2000, p. 131). In order to improve donor coordination, the evaluation should not only be through collecting and analysis data but by visits to the sites, and through reviewing and establishing an adequate internet presence. A good example of this is the IWLearn¹, although an internet site may not be enough for improving donor coordination. From Table 4 above, the researcher found that Orange-Senqu needed international donors in its negotiations, having observed that South Africa’s percentage of 64.2% overshadowed the other riparian countries.

Negotiating a win-win process to curb conflict

As we might imagine, cooperation does not work when parties rigidly adhere to their positions and ‘stick to their guns’. For cooperation to be effective, the parties involved must be willing to adjust their stances on the issues at hand. And for the African nations to be willing to make such an adjustment, they must believe that they will have an acceptable outcome – one that allows them to claim victory in the negotiation process. For cooperation to be most effective in reducing conflict, this must be the case for all countries within a region. This allows them to believe that they have ‘won’ the negotiation process. This result is known as a win-win solution and means all the nations gets what they want. Of course, getting each side to feel successful can take some effort. And that effort is one of the purposes of this research.

Conclusion

Experience shows that transnational water resources – with the World Heritage Sites in mind – are far more likely to serve as the engine of transnational cooperation management in Africa than violent conflict between nations.

This focal area will enable Member States to improve their institutions, strengthen professional capacities and develop regulations for the sustainable management and environmentally sound protection of transnational aquifers. More than half of the large continental aquifers are shared between two or more riparian countries. UNESCO IHP has developed wise practices and guidance tools concerning shared ground water resources management.

The international donor community has played an important role in the foundation of nearly all river and lake basin organization in Africa. It has contributed important financial and technical support for the building and development of such organizations, e.g. the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. Apart from international donor organizations, regional actors like SADC Water Division, the Water Division of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), AMCOW and the African Union (AU) via the new partnership for Africans Development (NEPAD), also played a role here.

Since the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa, it is precisely Southern Africa – as a region with an exceptional number of transnational rivers – that has recorded a number of positive developments to show in this regard. No wonder it is an ‘A’ group in the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites, with a total number of ten. In other regions as well, Africa’s heads of state and government have set their sights on a cooperative management that has be affirmed in many declarations, and in bilateral and multilateral agreements. It is therefore expected that the authorities should be able to balance interests and enforce laws in order to avoid domestic conflicts.

Cooperation is the main aim of this research. Countries preparing for accessing or implementing the outcome of this research should naturally reflect on the benefits that cooperation can generate, such as accelerated economic growth, improved human well-being, enhanced environmental sustainability and increased political stability. If these principles are adopted, there will be effective transnational cooperation which, in turn, will promote World Heritage sites.

Recommendations

In view of the fact that there is no automatism involved in the development of transnational cooperation, incentives can be an important stimulation in this area. The benefit-sharing concept favoured by the World Bank is based on this idea, following the line of argument pursued in the Klaphake Report (2005).

Secondly, it is important to strengthen information exchange and management by using different analytical instruments, in order to determine what kinds of information are needed for a given management task and what level of differentiation there should be to avoid duplication of data acquisition.

Further, the establishment and work of river and lake basin organizations should be supported, and public participation in transnational management strengthened. This will promote supraregional coordination between groups and associations, breathing life into the effective management of World Heritage sites, especially those in Africa.

I strongly suggest that more heritage sites be created, especially in Nigeria, which is the giant of Africa. I recommend Oguta Lake in Imo state, where two angry rivers flow side by side and never come together.

I also recommend Agulu Lake, with its hundreds of protected crocodiles and turtles, and the Oron Museum, established in 1958, which accommodates hundreds of ancestral figures.

Finally, the effective teaching of history must be enshrined in all African Schools, from primary to tertiary. This flies in the face of a popular saying that ‘if you want to hide something from a black man, put it in writing’. Africans can read now, and this will facilitate the future tasks of international bodies and the interventions of NGOs, and help them to promote the effective management of World Heritage sites in Africa.