Transboundary river basins: Benefit sharing or water sharing?

SINCE freshwater in rivers is a flow resource, no single country can claim absolute sovereignty over it; different riparians in transboundary basins may have different needs and goals, which have potentials for conflict as well as cooperation.
Probable transboundary impacts and conflicting interest can, however, be solved by equity-based cooperation, strong and enforceable legal framework, and joint approaches to planning and management.

Sharing benefits
Using water as a catalyst for cooperation in transboundary basins, some water practitioners and policy makers have been promoting the concept of benefit sharing as a cooperation strategy. The main theme of the benefit sharing concept is to move away from the sharing of water quantities to the sharing of benefits the users might obtain from its use. 'Benefit sharing' is proposed as a strategic approach to 'bypass' the contentious issue of water rights to the common pool resource, viz, transboundary waters. The focus is on emphasising and prioritising the values derived from water utilisation and development, and share those benefits between co-riparians. The benefits that could be derived from an agreement on benefit sharing include such positive externalities as hydropower development and trade, flood control through upstream storage measures as well as flow augmentation in the lean season, irrigation expansion across the basin, pollution control, improvement of navigation, etc. The concept also subsumes an arrangement for cost sharing by the beneficiary riparian. On the other hand, upstream actions would also produce such negative externalities like water shortage in the downstream country on account of unilateral water abstraction by the upstream country as well as negate most of the benefits cited above. Such negative unidirectional externality problems will be very acute in the absence of any agreement on water rights and apportionment among the riparian countries.
One argument advocated by the proponents of the benefit sharing concept that it yields a positive-sum outcome through optimising benefits rather than the perceived zero-sum outcome associated with dividing water. Nonetheless, it cannot be ignored that running water being a shared resource, its use by one riparian will, in most cases, diminish the benefits available to other riparians. Water use in upstream part of a river basin creates external effects in the downstream part, and hence, the total benefits for the basin are reduced and the outcome will be suboptimal. Economists say that optimisation does not necessarily ensure equity, and that optimal outcomes are not necessarily equitable. Besides, the idea of 'bypassing' the issue of water rights and sharing in order to promote the concept of benefit sharing is ominous and worrisome for a downstream riparian like Bangladesh because volumetric share of transboundary waters is vital for our economy, livelihood and ecosystem.

Water rights
The argument that a focus on sharing benefits in a transboundary basin would avoid the difficulties associated with conflicts and negotiations on water allocation is simply untenable, because of the simple fact that by avoiding or bypassing a problem, the problem does not disappear. A sound and enforceable legal instrument is essential to ensure a fair water allocation arrangement. Unfortunately, the 1997 UN Convention on the Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses is not yet in force; besides, the notions of 'equitable use' and the 'no-harm' rule are vague, somewhat ambiguous and subject to multiple interpretations. Some water academics have argued that the issues of equitable allocation of transboundary water resources and the sharing of benefits are two faces of the same coin -- to be considered jointly.

Third party role
A UN-Water report says that since 1948, only 37 incidents of acute conflict over water were recorded, while during the same period, approximately 295 international water agreements on transboundary water management were signed. Despite this impressive figure -- the same report says that there are still numerous watercourses without adequate legal frameworks for cooperation. Some 158 of the world's 263 international water basins lack any types of cooperative management framework.
In a number of cases, however, the involvement of a third party had been instrumental in promoting cooperative arrangements in water sharing and total basin management. Examples of such success stories are the Indus Basin Treaty -- facilitated by the World Bank (1960), the Nile Basin Initiative by the World Bank (1999), and the Agreement on the Cooperation for the Sustainable Development of the Mekong River Basin by the UNDP [1995]. In these cases, the international organisations did manage to narrow the gaps in the riparian countries' needs and vision. While the third parties alone cannot produce a final solution for the basin, they can actively play three simultaneous roles to encourage the negotiating parties to reach a cooperative agenda for implementation. These roles could be (a) facilitation-cum-mediation (not necessarily arbitration); (b) providing technical and legal expertise; and (c) offering financial investments in post-agreement settings.

Conclusion
Finally, a question arises among the transboundary water stakeholders -- especially the downstream riparians -- whether benefit sharing and water sharing issues should be addressed collectively or be entirely delinked. In cases where benefit sharing measures involve transferring/diverting/abstracting water to the disadvantage of another riparian, the potentially aggrieved riparian's volumetric water property rights must be protected before the other riparian can go ahead with its benefit sharing schemes and infrastructure implementation. This scenario will be very common in most instances of benefit sharing in transboundary basins. Hence, it is argued here that, in order to prevent negative externality for the downstream riparian, water allocation problems should be solved through a cooperative arrangement prior to any economic benefit exchange programme. Until such time when a joint basin-wide authority is formed in a transboundary river basin for its total planning and management, the issues of water property rights and benefit sharing must remain delinked.

The writer is former Professor of Geography and Environment, University of Dhaka.