18.1 International River cooperation

Although the number of international river basin would update to 279 (Bakker, 2006), 263 is still widely familiarized and cited by most authorities mainly due to the publication of Atlas of International Freshwater Agreements and its Sponsors(UNEP, FAO and OSU, 2002). Why we always impressed by political chaos over these international rivers? The historical fact that it has caused severe political tensions between Arabs and Israelis, Turkey and two downstream Arabic counties and some riparian states of the Nile River made the "water war thesis" prominent, together with the pile works of international relations scholars(Cooley, 1984; Starr, 1991). On the contrary, according to a research of a project covering last 50 years (from 1945 -1999, recently updated to 2007) global water events reported of interaction on international fresh water, there have been only 37 cases of reported violence between states over water. And compare to total 1,228 cooperative events, only 507 conflicting events were recorded, in which more than two-thirds involved just barely showed low-level verbal hostility (Wolf et, 2003). From a more optimistic perspective, there would be no water war in the future, and rising competition nowadays on international rivers can be seen as a catalyst for deeper cooperation (UNDP, 2006).

If conflict is the exception to the rule, how do countries cooperate? A dozen years have passed since Wolf (1998) stated that shared interests along an international river basin seem to consistently outweigh water's conflict-inducing characteristics. However, cooperation is still often missing in disputes over international rivers (Wolf, 2007). The smaller numbers of collision, however, cannot conceal the fact that cooperation is still at its infancy. Of 263 international water basins, 157 have no cooperative framework at all. And where such frameworks do exist, the geographical scope of cooperation is also limited. Of 106 basins with water institutions, two thirds have three or more riparian states, yet less than a fifth of the accompanying agreements are multilateral (Wolf et, 2003).
Consequently, despite the fact that we may say that cooperation had been prevalent on international transboundary water issues, things should not be so simple. A reading of over 300 treaties from Oregon State University's Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (TFDD) reveals that how problematic the existing water treaties are: More than half of these treaties lack monitoring provisions; 2/3 fail to delineate specific allocations, and 4/5 have no enforcement mechanism(Chalecki et, 2002).