"When in Drought..."

By Geneviève Lalonde

Pretend you have a cottage on the side of a river; you have had this cottage for quite some time. One day there is some sort of drought. This affects your water supply. If you have a neighbor that is very agreeable, you will talk about this situation and discuss possibilities of how to best share the water. If not what rights to you have over his and how is conflict going to help the water levels? What is your likely course of action?

This recent paper entitled Contested Water Rights by Erik Ansink and Hans-Peter Weikard published in the European Journal of Political Economy introduces the main components that can lead to water wars. The parameters used include: Water use, water endowment, historical rights, fighting capacity (includes force as well as other means such as lobbying etc..), and the probability of third party intervention. Through their models and modeling exercises, they developed some interesting observations that are certainly not obvious at first hand.

The authors’ models test the probabilities of water wars to demonstrate how countries would react to different scenarios. The three main scenarios observed include the trans-boundary waters treaties, bargaining/negotiations and conflict. In all these three scenarios, the authors examine the probabilities of resolution between countries and what they define as the efficiency allocation. It is essentially a means to evaluate the efforts and costs to minimize the conflict and arrive at a resolution. In general but certainly not always, the decisions taken by neighboring countries will be determined by what are the most efficient means to reach an accord based on their position including that of their fighting capacity versus its neighbor.

Back to your neighbor and you; if he decides to take all the water, chances are likely that you are going to get frustrated and find some sort of way to get your fair allocation back. In your case, it will involve digging your side of the river, affecting the ecosystem and surroundings or just call in the authorities. If you take your little dispute and turn it into a war like conflict, the tactics might become a little more aggressive. As Ansink and Weikard explain, the production of fighting supplies to make damage will require water; therefore, they will drain out the water of other areas thereby calling for more conflict perhaps elsewhere. Without an agreement, it leads to a chain reaction and this is where the authors discuss the efficiencies and inefficiencies of the resolution to the conflict. Ultimately there has to be one.

Through their mathematical modeling of various possibilities, the authors conclude that their model might be applied to other types of conflicts such as upstream water versus downstream, fishing areas and disputed territory. The definition of what is a water war is yet to be defined but with these models, we can analyze other conflicts involving water.

References

Contested water rights

By Erik Ansink , Hans-Peter Weikard

European Journal of Political Economy 25 (2009) p. 247–260