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The Palgrave Handbook of Climate Resilient Societies pp 97–115Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Building Resilience Through Transboundary Water Resources Management

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Abstract

The Earth’s climate is changing, affecting society mainly through hydrological changes; floods, droughts, and impaired water quality. Improved water management, specifically water governance, is needed to cope with these changes, especially in transboundary basins. Resilient water governance needs an enabling environment that can deal with existing water management problems as well as has the flexibility to deal with future, uncertain situations. This chapter discusses how the enabling environment can be developed and improved to account for climate change and gives directions on how to achieve that.

Where there is a general reluctance among countries to cooperate on water management issues, experiences have shown that cooperation holds benefits for all riparians that go beyond the direct benefits of noncooperation. These benefits are not restricted to the water domain but extend to general economic, social, and environmental benefits. A major task in transboundary cooperation is to share those benefits in an equitable way.

The enabling environment consists of five elements: policy, legal, and institutional setting, information management and exchange, and financial arrangements. These elements are closely interlinked. A working enabling environment builds on the OECD principles of water governance. This chapter describes a series of lessons learned from experiences in transboundary water management adaptation. The lessons and the associated case studies are linked to the elements of the enabling environment and can be used to guide the process of developing and improving transboundary cooperation. In all of this, there has to be a political will to cooperate.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Waterframes, Lelystad, The Netherlands

    J. G. Timmerman

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  1. J. G. Timmerman
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  1. Our Future Water, Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand

    Robert C. Brears

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Timmerman, J.G. (2021). Building Resilience Through Transboundary Water Resources Management. In: Brears, R.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Climate Resilient Societies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42462-6_17

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