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A review of the evolution and state of transboundary freshwater treaties

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Abstract

Internationally shared basins supply 60 % of global freshwater supply, are home to about 1/3 of the world’s population, and are focal points for interstate conflict and, as importantly, cooperation. To manage these waters, states have developed a large set of formal treaties, but until now these treaties have been difficult to access and systematically assess. This paper presents and makes publicly available the assembly and organization of the largest known collection of transboundary water agreements in existence. We apply for the first time a “lineage” concept to differentiate between independent agreements and groups of legally related texts, spatially reference the texts to a global basin database, and identify agreement purposes, goals and a variety of content areas. The 688 agreements identified were signed between 1820 and 2007 and constitute 250 independent treaties which apply to 113 basins. While the scope and content varies widely, these treaties nominally govern almost 70 % of the world’s transboundary basin area. In terms of content, treaties have shifted from an earlier focus on regulation and development of water resources to the management of resources and the setting of frameworks for that management. While “traditional” issues such as hydropower, water allocation and irrigation are still important, the environment is now the most commonly mentioned issue in treaty texts. Treaties are also increasingly likely to include data and information sharing provisions, have conflict resolution mechanisms, and include mechanisms for participation beyond traditional nation-state actors. Generalizing, treaties have become more comprehensive over time, both in the issues they address and the tools they use to manage those issues cooperatively.

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Notes

  1. http://www.transboundarywaters.orst.edu/database/interfreshtreatdata.html.

  2. U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, 1 Systematic Index of International Water Resources Treaties, Declarations, Acts and Cases, by Basin, Legislative Study No. 15 (1978) and U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, 2 Systematic Index of International Water Resources Treaties, Declarations, Acts and Cases, by Basin, Legislative Study No. 34 (1984).

  3. Due to translation limitations, agreements available only in Russian, Ukrainian or Arabic are excluded from our analysis. However, these documents are available in the TFDD collection.

  4. Vienna Convention of the Law of Treaties, Article 2 (1), United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 1155 (1969), p. 331.

  5. In some cases, a protocol to an agreement is the only portion related to water. For the purposes of this work, those protocols were considered to be the primary agreement.

  6. Definitions from our coding manual are included as an online supplement. Coding was done for more variables than are described here. All data and results are available at TFDD.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Water Management Institute, PO Box 2075, Colombo, Sri Lanka

    Mark Giordano

  2. Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G3, Canada

    Alena Drieschova

  3. College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, 104 CEOAS Administration Building, Corvallis, OR, 97331-5503, USA

    Aaron T. Wolf

  4. Geodynamics Department, Faculty of Geological Sciences, Complutense University of Madrid, c/ José Antonio Nováis, 4, Madrid, 28040, Spain

    Lucia De Stefano

  5. Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont, 705 Spear St, South Burlington, VT, 05403, USA

    James A. Duncan

  6. Science, Technology and International Affairs, School of Foreign Service ICC 301, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 20057, USA

    Mark Giordano

  7. ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability, Japan Office Cosmos Aoyama B1F, 5-53-67 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, 150-0001, Japan

    Yoshiko Sayama

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  1. Mark Giordano
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  2. Alena Drieschova
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  5. Lucia De Stefano
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Correspondence to Mark Giordano.

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Giordano, M., Drieschova, A., Duncan, J.A. et al. A review of the evolution and state of transboundary freshwater treaties. Int Environ Agreements 14, 245–264 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-013-9211-8

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