The increasing structural and physical scarcity of water across the globe calls for a deeper understanding of trans-boundary water conflicts. Conventional analysis tends to downplay the role that power asymmetry plays in creating and maintaining situations of water conflict that fall short of the violent form of war and to treat as unproblematic situations of cooperation occurring in an asymmetrical context. The conceptual Framework of Hydro-Hegemony presented herein attempts to give these two features – power and varying intensities of conflict – their respective place in the perennial and deeply political question: who gets how much water, how and why? Hydro-hegemony is hegemony at the river basin level, achieved through water resource control strategies such as resource capture, integration and containment. The strategies are executed through an array of tactics (e.g. coercion-pressure, treaties, knowledge construction, etc.) that are enabled by the exploitation of existing power asymmetries within a weak international institutional context. Political processes outside the water sector configure basin-wide hydro-political relations in a form ranging from the benefits derived from cooperation under hegemonic leadership to the inequitable aspects of domination. The outcome of the competition in terms of control over the resource is determined through the form of hydro-hegemony established, typically in favour of the most powerful actor. The Framework of Hydro-hegemony is applied to the Nile, Jordan and Tigris and Euphrates river basins, where it is found that current hydro-hegemonic configurations tend towards the dominative form.. There is evidence in each case of power asymmetries influencing an inequitable outcome – at the expense of lingering, low-intensity conflicts. It is proposed that the framework provides an analytical paradigm useful for examining the options of such powerful or hegemonized riparians and how they might move away from domination towards cooperation.

This paper argues for realistic expectations of Multi-Stakeholder Platforms (MSPs). MSPs are currently a hot topic in the water policy community, despite voices of disillusionment with participation in development work. Research carried out in Peru, Argentina, India, South Africa and Belgium suggests that platforms certainly can prove helpful networks in communication on and management of competing claims to water, managing coordination problems, coalition-building and/ or visioning. However, experience has put paid to implicit and explicit expectations from platforms, especially with a view to the integration of knowledge and actors. It makes no sense to separate distributive negotiation and politics (‘bad’) from integrative negotiation and social learning (‘good’). Platforms mix both modalities of negotiation, and actors may strategically withhold or contribute their knowledge. Second, no significant power sharing (vertical inclusion) takes place. A typology of MSPs ranked by influence finds no platform with a significant mandate. It is suggested that MSPs are an institutional bargaining space that is especially useful for visioning and information exchange, but cautioned not to insist that ‘water MSPs’ confine themselves to water issues only, and to institutionalized groups only. For some stakeholders, the communication and information process itself is good enough, but others will want results: ‘food on the table’. Some stakeholders will never join as they do not see how it benefits them and/or because they find it more advantageous to work around the platform. Initiators of platforms for stakeholder involvement in water management should therefore be very clear on what the participatory process aims at and can realistically achieve.

This article engages with the currently hegemonic status of a triad of water policy prescriptions: multi-stakeholder platforms, integrated water resources management, and river basin management. A more reflective approach that opens up the choices underlying these concepts, and their limits, is needed. The choice to manage water on the basis of river basins is a political choice, and thus river basins are as much political units as they are natural units. The article concludes that the delineation of river basin boundaries, the structuring of stakeholder representation, and the creation of institutional arrangements for river basin management are political processes that revolve around matters of choice, and hence require democratic debate.

Water connects, and transboundary rivers connect a host of actors in different states in multiple ways. Riparian states can depend on each other for sea access, generating joint benefits and minimising the losses from natural hazards. Yet, riparians can also use the river to annoy, threaten, and damage each other by discharging wastewater into the basin or constructing sufficient dams to store and regulate the river’s flow (Zawahri 2008). In an increasingly interdependent world, we would expect a growing number of transboundary river treaties as states attempt to minimise the social, economic, and political losses incurred from developing the basin and preventing unwelcome unilateral action. Such attempts at cooperation may also lead to more integrated river basin management. Yet even when international water agreements are signed, it does not mean contracting states are actually cooperating, and the lack of agreement does not mean riparian states are fighting. In other word

Van Buuren, A., G. J. Ellen, and J. F. Warner. 2016. Path-dependency and policy learning in the Dutch delta: toward more resilient flood risk management in the Netherlands? Ecology and Society 21(4):43. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-08765-210443