How can we build peace over shared waters? 3 questions to Kerry Schneider
Kerry Schneider is Senior Programme Manager for the Shared Water Partnership. His expertise lies around advancing cooperation over shared water resources in regions where political tensions could be a source of conflict. In three questions, Kerry talks about how our essential connection to water as humans should be the base for peace.
From your perspective as a shared waters expert, why is water important for peaceful cooperation?
The distribution of freshwater resources around the world is uneven and uncomfortably inequitable. At best, climate change makes the availability of water less predictable and at worst threatens the supply entirely in some places. While availability and predictability of water oscillate with increasing discordance like the last wobbles of a spinning top giving up hope, our rapidly growing global population is as certain and reliable as taxes further skewing the dynamics of supply and demand.
As indisputable and as hard as these trends are to ignore, we, as humans, and the custodians of planet Earth must focus on the connectivity of water. At a very basic human level, water connects us wherever we are and at every scale. Water connects us as individuals, it connects us at the community level, and water eagerly crosses the lines on our maps so it defiantly connects us internationally. Water connects us to the places and the ecosystems that surround us and support us even in the most urban environments and it does so even when we aren’t paying any attention to it. Water plays a defining role in our identities religiously, culturally and historically.
Water is there to be fought over just like oil or diamonds or any other commodity- but to what end? History tells us water management and development would rather hold hands with peace and cooperation so this is something we simply can’t afford to ignore.
“We, as humans, and the custodians of planet Earth must focus on the connectivity of water.”
What are the obstacles that you foresee to peaceful cooperation that includes water?
As humans, we tend to take a me-first attitude towards most things including water management. At the transboundary or trans-national scale, what’s in the best interest of an upstream country is often perceived as a competing interest to downstream neighbours. This causes political tension and sovereignty or ownership of water resources is a difficult conversation to have amongst countries that have no choice but to share. Beyond the physical availability of water, the ways in which one country might use the water to irrigate crops or spin turbines to produce electricity can cause conflict if there isn’t a balance of trust and accountability with a neighbouring country that might have divergent interests or ambitions. These tensions further expose the disparity between the “haves” and the “have nots”. There are commonalities to the barriers to cooperation around the world, which may be manifested through economic, cultural/historical, legal/institutional, geopolitical, or other technical disparities amongst countries to varying degrees. However, despite these specific contextual disparities that hinder cooperation from one place to another, it is important that we understand that they can all be overcome through water diplomacy and carefully coordinated support both from within and outside of a shared basin or water resource.
“The ways in which one country might use the water to irrigate crops or spin turbines to produce electricity can cause conflict if there isn’t a balance of trust and accountability with a neighbouring country that might have divergent interests or ambitions.”
How do your projects with the Shared Waters Partnership contribute to peaceful cooperation?
The Shared Waters Partnership (SWP) is designed to bring stakeholders and countries together with the aim of strengthening cooperation processes in regions or basins where water is or could become a source of conflict. Acknowledging that overcoming barriers to cooperation relies on water diplomacy, SWP engagements draw from SIWI’s extensive history and reputation as an impartial and international expert organization to facilitate dialogue and to complement the formal tracks of diplomacy by strengthening the political will to cooperate.
SIWI often achieves this through capacity development and experience sharing initiatives that encourage knowledge sharing, developing a shared understanding of specific problems or barriers to cooperation, and highlighting ways in which these shared problems can be overcome collaboratively and inclusively. SIWI understands that these processes can take years, if not decades, so support from the SWP is often framed as a long-term and step wise process even when the trajectory of cooperation appears to be following a one-step-forward followed by two-steps-backward rhythm.
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The Shared Waters Partnership programme offers a dialogue platform, knowledge, and tools to strengthen transboundary water cooperation. Managing shared waters sustainably gives countries a chance to prosper, despite emerging threats from environmental degradation and climate change.
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