Latin America; in English (pdf) - Transboundary Freshwater Dispute ...
Latin America; in English (pdf) - Transboundary Freshwater Dispute ...
Latin America; in English (pdf) - Transboundary Freshwater Dispute ...
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Load<strong>in</strong>g sugar, Amazon, Peru. Photo credit: Iva Nafz<strong>in</strong>ger.<br />
arrangements. Even the existence of technical<br />
work<strong>in</strong>g groups can provide some capability to<br />
manage contentious issues, as they have <strong>in</strong> the<br />
Middle East.<br />
The overarch<strong>in</strong>g lesson of the study is that<br />
unilateral actions to construct a dam or river<br />
diversion <strong>in</strong> the absence of a treaty or <strong>in</strong>stitutional<br />
mechanism that safeguards the <strong>in</strong>terests of other<br />
countries <strong>in</strong> the bas<strong>in</strong> is highly destabiliz<strong>in</strong>g to a<br />
region, often spurr<strong>in</strong>g decades of hostility before<br />
cooperation is pursued. In other words, the red<br />
flag for water-related tension between countries is<br />
not water stress per se, as it is with<strong>in</strong> countries, but<br />
rather the unilateral exercise of dom<strong>in</strong>ation of an<br />
<strong>in</strong>ternational river, usually by a regional power.<br />
In the Jordan River Bas<strong>in</strong>, for example,<br />
violence broke out <strong>in</strong> the mid-1960s over an<br />
“all-Arab” plan to divert the river’s headwaters<br />
(itself a pre-emptive move to thwart Israel’s<br />
<strong>in</strong>tention to siphon water from the Sea of Galilee).<br />
Israel and Syria sporadically exchanged fire<br />
between March 1965 and July 1966. Waterrelated<br />
tensions <strong>in</strong> the bas<strong>in</strong> persisted for decades<br />
and only recently have begun to dissipate.<br />
A similar sequence of events transpired <strong>in</strong><br />
the Nile bas<strong>in</strong>, which is shared by 10 countries—<br />
of which Egypt is last <strong>in</strong> l<strong>in</strong>e. In the late 1950s,<br />
hostilities broke out between Egypt and Sudan<br />
over Egypt’s planned construction of the High<br />
Dam at Aswan. The sign<strong>in</strong>g of a treaty between<br />
the two countries <strong>in</strong> 1959 defused tensions<br />
before the dam was built. But no water-shar<strong>in</strong>g<br />
agreement exists between Egypt and Ethiopia,<br />
where some 55% of the Nile’s flow orig<strong>in</strong>ates,<br />
and a war of words has raged between these two<br />
nations for decades. As <strong>in</strong> the case of the Jordan,<br />
<strong>in</strong> recent years the Nile nations have begun to<br />
work cooperatively toward a solution thanks <strong>in</strong><br />
part to unofficial dialogues among scientists and<br />
technical specialists that have been held s<strong>in</strong>ce the<br />
early 1990s, and more recently a m<strong>in</strong>isterial-level<br />
“Nile Bas<strong>in</strong> Initiative” facilitated by the United<br />
Nations and the World Bank.<br />
1.2.2 Intranational Waters<br />
The second set of security issues occurs at the<br />
sub-national level. Much literature on transboundary<br />
waters treats political entities as<br />
homogeneous monoliths: “Canada feels . . .”<br />
or “Jordan wants. . . .” Analysts are only recently<br />
highlight<strong>in</strong>g the pitfalls of this approach, often by<br />
show<strong>in</strong>g how different subsets of actors relate<br />
very different “mean<strong>in</strong>gs” to water. Rather than<br />
be<strong>in</strong>g simply another environmental <strong>in</strong>put, water<br />
is regularly treated as a security issue, a gift of<br />
nature, or a focal po<strong>in</strong>t for local society. <strong>Dispute</strong>s,<br />
12 — Hydropolitical Vulnerability and Resilience along International Waters: <strong>Lat<strong>in</strong></strong> <strong>America</strong> and the Caribbean