Double-Edged Hydropolitics on the Nile - Center for Security Studies ...

Introduction
particularly stress the role of information availability and management
(Milner 1997), or of competing narratives concerning the issue under negotiation
(Bosold and Oppermann 2006).
Robert Putnam himself does not make concrete suggestions as to how
exactly the domestic constraints should be conceptualized and measured, but
challenges political scientists to ‘marry’ the two-level game framework with
different theories of domestic policy-making. Reflecting the high diversity
and complexity of theories developed to frame domestic policy processes (i.e.,
Public Policy Analysis), no broadly accepted approach to operationalizing
two-level games has yet been established. Moravcsik’s (1993) observation
that analysts investigating the interface between domestic policy-making
and international relations are left with a ‘haphazard checklist’ of potentially
influential domestic factors is still valid to date.
The multi-dimensional nature of the Nile Basin negotiations, comprising
legal and institutional issues as well as joint river development projects,
complicates the application of the two-level game framework. Cooperation
in the Nile Basin is likely to proceed through flexible legal provisions and
slow de facto water re-allocation towards the most productive uses, rather
than through a one-time assignment of new national water quotas. Water
policy decisions have multiple and often uncertain impacts on a broad range
of water users and sectoral interest groups. Informal processes of consultation
and information transfer at both the international and the domestic levels are
considered particularly important in the context of cooperation in the Nile
Basin, but are difficult to operationalize in a two-level game framework.
The two-level game approach as applied in this thesis thus takes a middle
course between the anecdotal and formal applications found in the literature.
The win-set is used as an explanatory concept, and a systematic analysis of
domestic water policy processes is conducted. Key domestic factors are
qualitatively linked to the questions concerning if, when, and regarding
what specific issues a basin-wide agreement or any kind of transboundary
cooperation is likely to be reached. Rather than attempting to quantify the
exact width of the win-sets, the characteristic of domestic policy processes
are analyzed with regard to their broadening or narrowing effects on different
dimensions of the win-set (see Chapters 5 and 7).
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