introduction
Water is an essential, indeed crucially vital strategic natural resource for all economies. Every country’s drinking water supply, food production, energy supply, and, consequently, industrial development hinge on water availability. The resource is also the sine qua non for healthy human living conditions and sound ecosystems. Even today some countries, including many African countries, must be termed “water-stress economies” because to cover their water needs they are forced to fall back on water reserves generated outside their own national territory. Since developing countries use the lion’s share of their water resources for irrigated agriculture, with an increasingly important share going into power generation, and in view of the fact that these two sectors are essential for economic development, dependence on water supplies from other countries is widely seen as an important indicator for the crisis proneness of entire economies. In the past the joint use of transboundary rivers was often seen as entailing major security-related conflict potentials. In the late 1980s and particularly during the 1990s blaring headlines like “Water Wars,” “Water More Precious than Gold,” or “Water Seen as Fuel for Military Conflicts” drew the public’s attention to potential or existing use conflicts along transboundary water bodies. Rising consumption and the asymmetrical hydropolitical relations between countries fuelled the assumption that water shortages would just about inevitably lead to violent conflict. A much-cited example was conflict among the riparian countries along the Nile and EuphratesTigris; the relations between the riparian countries of Southern Africa were likewise seen as a potential source of conflict. However, actual developments have not borne out these somber forecasts. Indeed, experience shows that transboundary water resources are far more likely to serve as the motor of transboundary cooperation than of violent conflict between nations. Since the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa, it is precisely Southern Africa – a region with an exceptional number of transboundary rivers – that has a number of positive developments to show in this regard. But in other regions as well, Africa’s heads of state and government have set their sights on a cooperative management that has been affirmed in many declarations and bi- and multilateral agreements.
While cooperation in transboundary 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 demand of all riparian countries sharing a river or lake system, the result may be water-use conflicts of many different kinds.1 These conflicts are concerned quite generally with water-quantity and water-quality issues. Unlike domestic conflicts over water quantity and quality, which are generally accessible to resolution by a higher-level state authority or by informal means, i.e. by the users themselves, one particular feature of transboundary water-use conflicts is that they can be resolved only through negotiations between sovereign states. However, there is some evidence that domestic conflicts among water users lead to violence if authorities are not able to balance interests and enforce the law. Developments in southern Africa show clearly that access to transboundary water resources depends on political and economic power relations between the riparian countries. The unequal economic power of riparian countries and their unequally developed administrative capacities furthermore have an important influence on the ability of riparians to engage in cooperation. Africa is a continent exceptionally well endowed with river basins and large inland lakes2 that extend over the territories of several countries. Both crisis-prone hotspots and a good number of promising approaches to transboundary water management can be observed here. 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. Despite this limited number of formal coordination forums, transboundary water management has made considerable progress, especially in Southern Africa: New organizations have been founded, existing organizations have been restructured and leaned down, and some of such organizations have enlarged their fields of responsibility and redefined their functions. The
1 The term “conflict” refers to disputes and differences of interests between riparians that may occur when accumulated demand cannot be satisfied. The task of conflict resolution may be approach by cooperative or by confrontational means; under certain – restrictive – conditions, though, the riparians concerned may opt to settle a conflict over water use by violent means. 2 The term “lake” is used here for all inland lakes.
reasons for this must be sought in the overall political constellation given at present, with the Republic of South Africa, the dominant regional power, pursuing a cooperative and pro-integration course. Furthermore, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) provides an overarching political framework conducive to such efforts aimed at transboundary cooperation. Another important success factor must be seen in the incremental, pragmatic approach that has been pursued in the development of transboundary water organizations. Two features typical of the approach are confidence-building measures and the procedures and forums governing transboundary cooperation that have now been established. Many promising developments may also be noted for older river-basin organizations like 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 being undertaken on Lake Victoria. In addition, the founding of the African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW) has established a continent-wide cooperation context that has placed transboundary water cooperation on its agenda, and is receiving external support for the purpose. By comparison, cooperation along the region’s roughly 38 transboundary groundwater systems is weakly developed, and examples of cooperation may be found only in North Africa, on the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System and the North West 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. The international donor community has played an important role in the foundation of nearly all river and lake basin organizations. It has contributed important financial and technical support for the building and development of such organizations, in taking stock of the current situation, in exchanging data, in developing options for and programs of action, in supporting international and local NGOs and stakeholder groups, and it is involved in the funding of infrastructure projects. Apart from international donor organizations, regional actors like the 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 Africa’s Development (NEPAD) also play a role here, and they themselves have been receiving financial and technical support for this purpose. Germany is engaged at several levels of transboundary water management in Africa: at the international level through the G8 and the European Union Water Initiative; at the continental level (AMCOW, NEPAD); at the regional level (SADC Water Unit), in river and lake basin organizations (ORASECOM on the Orange-Senqu, the LIMCOM on the Limpopo, the Nile Basin Initiative, and the Lake Chad Basin Commission) and, indirectly, at the bilateral level, making use of the instruments of financial and technical cooperation in the water sector (water supply and wastewater disposal, water sector reforms, harmonization of water policies); in the agricultural and in the energy sector. In order to further promote international cooperation on the African continent, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) has funded the project Transboundary Water Resources Management in Africa. It asked the German Development Institute (DIE) to commission a number of studies (see below), the themes of which were defined by DIE in communication with development and water experts. On the basis of these studies, a results workshop was held at the DIE in Bonn on April 14, 2005, where participants from universities and development organizations reached agreement on some core recommendations for development cooperation. The recommendations given in the studies and during the discussion process were condensed in a policy paper (see below). It provides further grounding of and some new ideas for transboundary water management, a relatively new field of development cooperation. Wirkus and Boege take an in-depth look at the present state of transboundary water management and the experiences made with it on selected African transboundary rivers and in lake regions, including the OrangeSenqu, the Limpopo, the Zambezi, Lake Victoria, and Lake Chad. For each of these cases the study presents hydrological, economic, and general political background data and analyzes risks, conflict factors, and the potential and need for development cooperation. One focus of the presentation is water-related agreements and international institutions with their mandates and procedural rules. Wirkus and Boege show that apart from promoting individual river basin organizations, one other strategy that has proven successful is support for continental and regional actors like
AMCOW and SADC’s water sector unit, respectively. At present transboundary lake basin management is still in a rudimentary state of development and could be expanded; a promising window of opportunity appears to be opening up for Lake Victoria. The authors also stress that more attention should be paid to the development potential of transboundary groundwater reserves as new field of activity for development cooperation on the African continent. Klaphake, in collaboration with Voils, investigates the concept of benefitsharing, which plays a prominent role in the international discourse on transboundary water cooperation. Making use of the concept could provide crucial impulses for water cooperation, despite divergences in interests and the upstream-downstream problems typically involved here. The study looks into 18 concrete cases, a number of them on the African continent, in which riparian countries have concluded agreements with a benefitsharing character. Most projects with benefit-sharing features are concerned with dam construction designed to jointly generate and use water power, a development that is due in large measure to the simple and rarely contentious predictability of the benefits stemming from energy generation. On the other hand, there are as good as no benefit-sharing agreements for projects designed to improve water quality or to achieve other ecological objectives. Klaphake identifies a number of factors that may have conducive or obstructive impacts on benefit-sharing agreements. Such agreements, with their reciprocal benefits, become increasingly important in situations marked by growing water scarcity, since this case entails rising economic costs for non-cooperation. There are, for instance, substantial problems involved in implementing win-win projects if the countries concerned pursue conflicting interests, uncertainties over project impacts have not been clarified, and administrative and economic capacities are underdeveloped. Since benefit-sharing can best be realized in connection with river development and acquisition of new water resources (e.g. interbasin water transfer), development cooperation should work to implement standards of project monitoring and design of the kind set out in the guidelines of the World Commission on Dams. Development cooperation should also undertake efforts to render transparent the potential economic benefits of other forms of water cooperation. In view of the fact that successful international win-win projects hinge cru
cially on competent and effective project organization, funding, and control, development cooperation can provide support for national administrations in the form of assistance for capacity-building. Promotion of regional water agreements and river basin organizations also increases the likelihood that benefit-sharing agreements will in fact be concluded, since such efforts serve to create an environment that is at the same time stable and conducive to confidence-building. In view of the fact that a substantial share of the expenditures of many transboundary water management projects goes into data gathering and processing, Grossmann starts out by discussing the general need for a shared database. In the author’s opinion the concern here is not simply to generate as many data as possible; a more promising approach would be to work on data which serve to illustrate the specific advantages and drawbacks of different strategies for the parties concerned. One aspect of central importance here is that the database find acceptance among the parties to negotiations; such acceptance could be supported through jointly organized river basin studies and water resource assessments. Grossmann investigates, in a number of African river basins, the role that individual river basin organizations have played in this process. The findings clearly indicate that the capacities required to collect and process the relevant data needed to address transboundary water management issues hinge in particular on the spectrum of tasks assigned to a river basin organization (operational management of transboundary infrastructure systems and/or strategic water resource planning) and the way in which such river basin bodies are organized. Development cooperation should provide support for those approaches designed to strengthen information management that are at the same time conducive to achieving the core functions of a given river basin organization. Promotion of transboundary water management organizations is regarded as an important priority by the Southern African Development Community, and other regional and continental associations have also placed transboundary water management on their agenda. These efforts are supported by the international community, e.g. by the G8 Africa Action Plan and the EU Water Initiative, but also by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the African Development Bank (AfDB), and other influential organizations. However, according to Mostert, the influence of donors should not be overestimated, although donors could play an important role in the different phases involved in establishing systems of transboundary water management. With a view to these phases – e.g. initial meetings, negotiations, conclusion, implementation, and monitoring of agreements – the article discusses the instruments that are presently in use. These include the organization of opportunities to exchange information and experiences, capacity-building, funding of infrastructure projects, and financial support for national delegations and the development and design of international forums. Hardly any studies have been published that assess the issue of donor engagement in the development of transboundary water management and point to approaches that appear especially promising. This is one reason why the only way to identify the promising fields and instruments used by individual donors is to take a specific approach, i.e. one not devised against the background of years of experience and not geared to coming up with universally applicable solutions. This in turn depends, among other things, on regional interests and the strengths of individual donors. Engagement, though, need not necessarily take shape at the international level, since solutions to use conflicts are often best found at the national or local level. Donors could play a supportive role in harmonizing national water legislation and policies. Only a limited number of river basin organizations provide for any form of public participation, although examples can be found among North American and European organizations. Development of approaches for, among others, the African context might prove to be a promising field of activity in its own right. It would also be important to develop innovative approaches for a sustainable funding policy for river basin organizations. Mostert generally advocates the principle of building on existing developments and potentials and responding to concrete needs of the riparian countries concerned. As a final point, he emphasizes the need to evaluate the effectiveness and sustainability of donor engagement, in the interest of both the donor community and regional and national actors. In all African countries investigated, water resources will be further exploited by means of constructing dams and interbasin water transfer projects in order to satisfy increasing economic demand and social needs. In order to avoid negative impacts on riparian states and to balance benefits and costs, the promotion of coordinating forums is significant. However, promoting their establishment and their management capacities is one instrument of development cooperation. Scheumann and Neubert assume in their recommendations that development cooperation will also continue to be bilateral in nature. Of all the instruments referred to here, it is the funding of infrastructure projects that poses a particular challenge. While some projects can be agreed upon directly with river or lake commissions (the KfW e.g. is conducting energy-sector projects together with the OMVS as the contract partner in charge of the projects), this is more the exception than the rule. As a rule credits for infrastructure investments (dam construction, irrigation and drainage systems, municipal water supply and wastewater disposal, etc.) are provided on a bilateral basis. Since some projects may tend to aggravate existing conflicts, it would be important to conduct, in advance, risk analyses concerning their inter-country conflict potential. These may e.g. be projects designed to expand irrigated agriculture in a given country or on the upper course of a river. Furthermore, this may also apply for projects that are designed to promote certain industries and may have impacts on downstream water quality. Our recommendation is therefore generally to review DC projects to determine whether there is reason to assume that they may entail transboundary impacts and what types of impacts these may be. In providing bilateral support for water measures that are likely to have impacts on other riparian countries, DC should insist that the countries planning such measures adhere to the principle of prior notification, and it should become engaged only in the case that countries that may be faced with adverse impacts raise no objections. The principle of prior notification and the no-objection rule should also be applied precisely for projects for which Germany provides Hermes credit guarantees. This recommendation is more political than technical in nature. Finally, Scheumann and Neubert sum up the findings of the studies in a number of strategic recommendations covering several fields of action, viz.: (i) Improving transboundary coordination by identifying economic and noneconomic incentives
(ii) Supporting the establishment of coordination and cooperation forums
(iii) Giving due consideration to water-quality and environmental issues
(iv) Supporting efforts to develop disaster-prevention plans
(v) Strengthening information exchange and management
(vi) Capacity-building for monitoring and for public participation (vii) Promoting the sustainable funding of river- and lake-basin organizations
(viii) Extending cooperation to cover groundwater management
(ix) Strengthening donor coordination. We would like to thank the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) for funding the project as well as for the confidence it has placed in the authors. We also wish to extend our cordial thanks to those who participated in the discussion rounds as well as to the experts from universities and development organizations for the valuable contributions they provided during work on the study was in progress.
Bonn, in November 2006 Waltina Scheumann / Susanne Neubert ,,
to read the full report please click on
/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Transboundary_water_management_on_Africa.pdf
^
introduction
Water is an essential, indeed crucially vital strategic natural resource for all economies. Every country’s drinking water supply, food production, energy supply, and, consequently, industrial development hinge on water availability. The resource is also the sine qua non for healthy human living conditions and sound ecosystems. Even today some countries, including many African countries, must be termed “water-stress economies” because to cover their water needs they are forced to fall back on water reserves generated outside their own national territory. Since developing countries use the lion’s share of their water resources for irrigated agriculture, with an increasingly important share going into power generation, and in view of the fact that these two sectors are essential for economic development, dependence on water supplies from other countries is widely seen as an important indicator for the crisis proneness of entire economies. In the past the joint use of transboundary rivers was often seen as entailing major security-related conflict potentials. In the late 1980s and particularly during the 1990s blaring headlines like “Water Wars,” “Water More Precious than Gold,” or “Water Seen as Fuel for Military Conflicts” drew the public’s attention to potential or existing use conflicts along transboundary water bodies. Rising consumption and the asymmetrical hydropolitical relations between countries fuelled the assumption that water shortages would just about inevitably lead to violent conflict. A much-cited example was conflict among the riparian countries along the Nile and EuphratesTigris; the relations between the riparian countries of Southern Africa were likewise seen as a potential source of conflict. However, actual developments have not borne out these somber forecasts. Indeed, experience shows that transboundary water resources are far more likely to serve as the motor of transboundary cooperation than of violent conflict between nations. Since the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa, it is precisely Southern Africa – a region with an exceptional number of transboundary rivers – that has a number of positive developments to show in this regard. But in other regions as well, Africa’s heads of state and government have set their sights on a cooperative management that has been affirmed in many declarations and bi- and multilateral agreements.
While cooperation in transboundary 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 demand of all riparian countries sharing a river or lake system, the result may be water-use conflicts of many different kinds.1 These conflicts are concerned quite generally with water-quantity and water-quality issues. Unlike domestic conflicts over water quantity and quality, which are generally accessible to resolution by a higher-level state authority or by informal means, i.e. by the users themselves, one particular feature of transboundary water-use conflicts is that they can be resolved only through negotiations between sovereign states. However, there is some evidence that domestic conflicts among water users lead to violence if authorities are not able to balance interests and enforce the law. Developments in southern Africa show clearly that access to transboundary water resources depends on political and economic power relations between the riparian countries. The unequal economic power of riparian countries and their unequally developed administrative capacities furthermore have an important influence on the ability of riparians to engage in cooperation. Africa is a continent exceptionally well endowed with river basins and large inland lakes2 that extend over the territories of several countries. Both crisis-prone hotspots and a good number of promising approaches to transboundary water management can be observed here. 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. Despite this limited number of formal coordination forums, transboundary water management has made considerable progress, especially in Southern Africa: New organizations have been founded, existing organizations have been restructured and leaned down, and some of such organizations have enlarged their fields of responsibility and redefined their functions. The
1 The term “conflict” refers to disputes and differences of interests between riparians that may occur when accumulated demand cannot be satisfied. The task of conflict resolution may be approach by cooperative or by confrontational means; under certain – restrictive – conditions, though, the riparians concerned may opt to settle a conflict over water use by violent means. 2 The term “lake” is used here for all inland lakes.
reasons for this must be sought in the overall political constellation given at present, with the Republic of South Africa, the dominant regional power, pursuing a cooperative and pro-integration course. Furthermore, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) provides an overarching political framework conducive to such efforts aimed at transboundary cooperation. Another important success factor must be seen in the incremental, pragmatic approach that has been pursued in the development of transboundary water organizations. Two features typical of the approach are confidence-building measures and the procedures and forums governing transboundary cooperation that have now been established. Many promising developments may also be noted for older river-basin organizations like 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 being undertaken on Lake Victoria. In addition, the founding of the African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW) has established a continent-wide cooperation context that has placed transboundary water cooperation on its agenda, and is receiving external support for the purpose. By comparison, cooperation along the region’s roughly 38 transboundary groundwater systems is weakly developed, and examples of cooperation may be found only in North Africa, on the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System and the North West 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. The international donor community has played an important role in the foundation of nearly all river and lake basin organizations. It has contributed important financial and technical support for the building and development of such organizations, in taking stock of the current situation, in exchanging data, in developing options for and programs of action, in supporting international and local NGOs and stakeholder groups, and it is involved in the funding of infrastructure projects. Apart from international donor organizations, regional actors like the 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 Africa’s Development (NEPAD) also play a role here, and they themselves have been receiving financial and technical support for this purpose. Germany is engaged at several levels of transboundary water management in Africa: at the international level through the G8 and the European Union Water Initiative; at the continental level (AMCOW, NEPAD); at the regional level (SADC Water Unit), in river and lake basin organizations (ORASECOM on the Orange-Senqu, the LIMCOM on the Limpopo, the Nile Basin Initiative, and the Lake Chad Basin Commission) and, indirectly, at the bilateral level, making use of the instruments of financial and technical cooperation in the water sector (water supply and wastewater disposal, water sector reforms, harmonization of water policies); in the agricultural and in the energy sector. In order to further promote international cooperation on the African continent, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) has funded the project Transboundary Water Resources Management in Africa. It asked the German Development Institute (DIE) to commission a number of studies (see below), the themes of which were defined by DIE in communication with development and water experts. On the basis of these studies, a results workshop was held at the DIE in Bonn on April 14, 2005, where participants from universities and development organizations reached agreement on some core recommendations for development cooperation. The recommendations given in the studies and during the discussion process were condensed in a policy paper (see below). It provides further grounding of and some new ideas for transboundary water management, a relatively new field of development cooperation. Wirkus and Boege take an in-depth look at the present state of transboundary water management and the experiences made with it on selected African transboundary rivers and in lake regions, including the OrangeSenqu, the Limpopo, the Zambezi, Lake Victoria, and Lake Chad. For each of these cases the study presents hydrological, economic, and general political background data and analyzes risks, conflict factors, and the potential and need for development cooperation. One focus of the presentation is water-related agreements and international institutions with their mandates and procedural rules. Wirkus and Boege show that apart from promoting individual river basin organizations, one other strategy that has proven successful is support for continental and regional actors like
AMCOW and SADC’s water sector unit, respectively. At present transboundary lake basin management is still in a rudimentary state of development and could be expanded; a promising window of opportunity appears to be opening up for Lake Victoria. The authors also stress that more attention should be paid to the development potential of transboundary groundwater reserves as new field of activity for development cooperation on the African continent. Klaphake, in collaboration with Voils, investigates the concept of benefitsharing, which plays a prominent role in the international discourse on transboundary water cooperation. Making use of the concept could provide crucial impulses for water cooperation, despite divergences in interests and the upstream-downstream problems typically involved here. The study looks into 18 concrete cases, a number of them on the African continent, in which riparian countries have concluded agreements with a benefitsharing character. Most projects with benefit-sharing features are concerned with dam construction designed to jointly generate and use water power, a development that is due in large measure to the simple and rarely contentious predictability of the benefits stemming from energy generation. On the other hand, there are as good as no benefit-sharing agreements for projects designed to improve water quality or to achieve other ecological objectives. Klaphake identifies a number of factors that may have conducive or obstructive impacts on benefit-sharing agreements. Such agreements, with their reciprocal benefits, become increasingly important in situations marked by growing water scarcity, since this case entails rising economic costs for non-cooperation. There are, for instance, substantial problems involved in implementing win-win projects if the countries concerned pursue conflicting interests, uncertainties over project impacts have not been clarified, and administrative and economic capacities are underdeveloped. Since benefit-sharing can best be realized in connection with river development and acquisition of new water resources (e.g. interbasin water transfer), development cooperation should work to implement standards of project monitoring and design of the kind set out in the guidelines of the World Commission on Dams. Development cooperation should also undertake efforts to render transparent the potential economic benefits of other forms of water cooperation. In view of the fact that successful international win-win projects hinge cru
cially on competent and effective project organization, funding, and control, development cooperation can provide support for national administrations in the form of assistance for capacity-building. Promotion of regional water agreements and river basin organizations also increases the likelihood that benefit-sharing agreements will in fact be concluded, since such efforts serve to create an environment that is at the same time stable and conducive to confidence-building. In view of the fact that a substantial share of the expenditures of many transboundary water management projects goes into data gathering and processing, Grossmann starts out by discussing the general need for a shared database. In the author’s opinion the concern here is not simply to generate as many data as possible; a more promising approach would be to work on data which serve to illustrate the specific advantages and drawbacks of different strategies for the parties concerned. One aspect of central importance here is that the database find acceptance among the parties to negotiations; such acceptance could be supported through jointly organized river basin studies and water resource assessments. Grossmann investigates, in a number of African river basins, the role that individual river basin organizations have played in this process. The findings clearly indicate that the capacities required to collect and process the relevant data needed to address transboundary water management issues hinge in particular on the spectrum of tasks assigned to a river basin organization (operational management of transboundary infrastructure systems and/or strategic water resource planning) and the way in which such river basin bodies are organized. Development cooperation should provide support for those approaches designed to strengthen information management that are at the same time conducive to achieving the core functions of a given river basin organization. Promotion of transboundary water management organizations is regarded as an important priority by the Southern African Development Community, and other regional and continental associations have also placed transboundary water management on their agenda. These efforts are supported by the international community, e.g. by the G8 Africa Action Plan and the EU Water Initiative, but also by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the African Development Bank (AfDB), and other influential organizations. However, according to Mostert, the influence of donors should not be overestimated, although donors could play an important role in the different phases involved in establishing systems of transboundary water management. With a view to these phases – e.g. initial meetings, negotiations, conclusion, implementation, and monitoring of agreements – the article discusses the instruments that are presently in use. These include the organization of opportunities to exchange information and experiences, capacity-building, funding of infrastructure projects, and financial support for national delegations and the development and design of international forums. Hardly any studies have been published that assess the issue of donor engagement in the development of transboundary water management and point to approaches that appear especially promising. This is one reason why the only way to identify the promising fields and instruments used by individual donors is to take a specific approach, i.e. one not devised against the background of years of experience and not geared to coming up with universally applicable solutions. This in turn depends, among other things, on regional interests and the strengths of individual donors. Engagement, though, need not necessarily take shape at the international level, since solutions to use conflicts are often best found at the national or local level. Donors could play a supportive role in harmonizing national water legislation and policies. Only a limited number of river basin organizations provide for any form of public participation, although examples can be found among North American and European organizations. Development of approaches for, among others, the African context might prove to be a promising field of activity in its own right. It would also be important to develop innovative approaches for a sustainable funding policy for river basin organizations. Mostert generally advocates the principle of building on existing developments and potentials and responding to concrete needs of the riparian countries concerned. As a final point, he emphasizes the need to evaluate the effectiveness and sustainability of donor engagement, in the interest of both the donor community and regional and national actors. In all African countries investigated, water resources will be further exploited by means of constructing dams and interbasin water transfer projects in order to satisfy increasing economic demand and social needs. In order to avoid negative impacts on riparian states and to balance benefits and costs, the promotion of coordinating forums is significant. However, promoting their establishment and their management capacities is one instrument of development cooperation. Scheumann and Neubert assume in their recommendations that development cooperation will also continue to be bilateral in nature. Of all the instruments referred to here, it is the funding of infrastructure projects that poses a particular challenge. While some projects can be agreed upon directly with river or lake commissions (the KfW e.g. is conducting energy-sector projects together with the OMVS as the contract partner in charge of the projects), this is more the exception than the rule. As a rule credits for infrastructure investments (dam construction, irrigation and drainage systems, municipal water supply and wastewater disposal, etc.) are provided on a bilateral basis. Since some projects may tend to aggravate existing conflicts, it would be important to conduct, in advance, risk analyses concerning their inter-country conflict potential. These may e.g. be projects designed to expand irrigated agriculture in a given country or on the upper course of a river. Furthermore, this may also apply for projects that are designed to promote certain industries and may have impacts on downstream water quality. Our recommendation is therefore generally to review DC projects to determine whether there is reason to assume that they may entail transboundary impacts and what types of impacts these may be. In providing bilateral support for water measures that are likely to have impacts on other riparian countries, DC should insist that the countries planning such measures adhere to the principle of prior notification, and it should become engaged only in the case that countries that may be faced with adverse impacts raise no objections. The principle of prior notification and the no-objection rule should also be applied precisely for projects for which Germany provides Hermes credit guarantees. This recommendation is more political than technical in nature. Finally, Scheumann and Neubert sum up the findings of the studies in a number of strategic recommendations covering several fields of action, viz.: (i) Improving transboundary coordination by identifying economic and noneconomic incentives
(ii) Supporting the establishment of coordination and cooperation forums
(iii) Giving due consideration to water-quality and environmental issues
(iv) Supporting efforts to develop disaster-prevention plans
(v) Strengthening information exchange and management
(vi) Capacity-building for monitoring and for public participation (vii) Promoting the sustainable funding of river- and lake-basin organizations
(viii) Extending cooperation to cover groundwater management
(ix) Strengthening donor coordination. We would like to thank the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) for funding the project as well as for the confidence it has placed in the authors. We also wish to extend our cordial thanks to those who participated in the discussion rounds as well as to the experts from universities and development organizations for the valuable contributions they provided during work on the study was in progress.
Bonn, in November 2006 Waltina Scheumann / Susanne Neubert ,,
to read the full report please click on
/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Transboundary_water_management_on_Africa.pdf
^
