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Article Excerpt
Many case studies and some large-N research have shown that upstream-downstream cooperation in international river basins occurs quite frequently. The same holds for global water governance efforts more generally. Yet such findings are blind in one eye because they focus primarily on political commitments or compliance with international agreements. A policy performance metric (PER) allows for a more substantive assessment of success or failure in international water governance. To test its usefulness, this article applies this metric to the Naryn/Syr Darya basin, a major international river system in Central Asia. Management of the Toktogul reservoir, the main reservoir in the Naryn/Syr Darya basin, was internationalized in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Compliance with an international agreement, concluded in 1998, has been quite high. This agreement establishes an international trade-off between water releases for upstream hydropower production in winter and water releases for downstream irrigation in summer. However, performance of this agreement over time has been very low and highly variable. The management system in place is therefore in urgent need of reform. Studies of international and global water governance should pay more attention to the degree to which political commitments actually further de facto problem solving. Keywords: international cooperation, governance, compliance, performance, water management, Naryn/Syr Darya, Toktogul dam.
The scientific literature on water governance issues has experienced a boom in recent years. (1) It has produced innovative concepts and theories that help make sense of hundreds if not thousands of collaborative efforts that are under way in water systems around the world at various levels, from the local to the global. Yet one weakness in the existing literature is its heavy focus on legal arrangements and institutional processes. Scant attention is given to the nexus between policy measures and changes in hydrological systems. Studying these connections is necessary to determine whether water governance efforts are effective not only in a discursive, legal, or institutional sense, but also in terms of solving concrete problems on the ground. Research on this issue creates exciting opportunities for collaboration across the social, natural, and engineering sciences, as is evident in this article, which has been coauthored by a political scientist and an environmental engineer.
The article speaks to the special issue theme of global water governance primarily by offering an analytical tool that helps to assess the performance of particular water governance efforts based on explicit and transparent standards. This performance assessment tool is useful for diagnostic purposes--that is, it identifies governance efforts that require improvement. The tool is also useful for comparing governance efforts between water systems, across political scales, and over time. It can thereby generate more generic insights that can inform efforts to establish water management principles at the global level.
Cooperation, when defined as a dependent variable in causal explanations of international water management, is usually measured in binary terms--that is, with a yes/no answer to the question whether an agreement, treaty, or international institution is in place. Examples of this approach can be found in the many qualitative case studies on international water management (2) and the few large-N quantitative studies that exist on the subject. (3)
Many case studies also assess the degree of substantive international cooperation. However, the criteria against which the depth of cooperation is measured differ across studies, and the assessments are usually qualitative. (4) Moreover, most assessments rely on noncausal criteria. The most common approach is to describe, over time, the development of a particular problem targeted by a cooperative effort (e.g., pollution) and to assess compliance with international obligations. This is usually done without a systematic analysis of whether international cooperation has, ceteris paribus, brought changes in environmental outcomes and in compliance levels. Coding of the contents of international agreements for purposes of measuring the depth of cooperation in large-N analysis is still in its infancy. (5)
Another approach has been to code cooperative and conflictual events among riparian countries, but this approach offers only indirect insights into the depth of cooperation. (6) International water management efforts are to some extent directly included in the codings of cooperative events. Moreover, deep cooperation may often be accompanied by conflict events. More cooperation than conflict may thus tell us little about whether international cooperation performs well in terms of problem solving.
Another line of research uses environmental parameters as proxies for cooperation. For example, two recent studies examine whether trade ties and other factors promote international efforts to clean up water pollution. (7) Since environmental outcomes are measured without causal reference to international cooperation (cleaner transboundary water is simply assumed to indicate more cooperation), this approach does not offer direct insights into the success or otherwise of cooperation.
Substantial progress has been made in recent years in measuring the performance (or depth) of international cooperation. Building on previous work, (8) the first part of this article outlines a methodology for estimating the performance of international cooperation. This policy performance metric (PER) is a time-dependent function of: (1) the outcome that should ideally be reached (optimum performance); (2) the outcome of a given policy at the time of measurement (actual performance); and (3) the outcome that would have occurred in the absence of this policy (counterfactual performance).
The PER measure has several advantages. First, it makes explicit reference to optimal performance and thus the target level for problem solving. Second, it focuses explicitly on the causal relationship between international policies and outcomes. Third, it can be used not only to assess international policy performance at specific points in-time in contexts marked by rather little data, but also to assess performance dynamics over time in contexts where more data exist. Fourth, the measure also allows a disaggregation of cooperative efforts with reference to particular objectives.
The PER approach has broader relevance in that it addresses an ongoing debate in international relations about situation structures and their effects on international cooperation. (9) With respect to international water policy, this debate has concentrated on the difficulties of handling upstream-downstream settings where preferences of the countries involved are often antagonistic. Recent quantitative and qualitative research suggests that upstream-downstream cooperation is quite frequent. (10) However, the empirical evidence remains controversial. For example, M. Brochmann and N. P. Gleditsch find contradictory effects of upstream-downstream settings on international cooperation. (11) According to their analysis, international cooperation in water issues is more likely in upstream-downstream circumstances than in other settings in the time period 1820-2001, but the effect is insignificant in the sample period 1975-2001. When cooperation is measured by signed treaties (instead of ratified treaties), the effects are largely insignificant. Brochmann and Gleditsch also find that upstream-downstream settings produce both more cooperative and more conflictive events. The latter result indicates that such settings lead to more interaction, but it does not reveal whether such settings facilitate or hinder cooperation. Other, more process-oriented studies show that compensation or issue linkages to offset upstream-downstream asymmetries are often difficult to construct and that cooperation, if it emerges at all, remains shallow. J. Tir and J. T. Ackerman conclude that international water treaties are less likely in upstream-downstream settings. (12) T. Bernauer shows that it took countries of the Rhine River basin several decades to reduce upstream-downstream water pollution and that forces other than international cooperation have been key. (13) If upstream-downstream cooperation is very difficult among highly developed democratic countries, one should expect even greater difficulties in achieving similar levels of cooperation in less fortunate regions of the world.
The approach we take in this article is relevant also...
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