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This study seeks to understand why nations find it difficult to include climate-uncertainty mechanisms in treaties regulating international rivers. It also aims to examine the implications of not adopting these mechanisms, particularly during a crisis. The study focuses on the negotiation process of three water treaties, and seeks to identify the underlying reasons behind the inclusion - or exclusion - of such mechanisms. Second, it reviews how the treaties performed and evolved during drought. The first case study is the current drought along the lower Rio Grande and the 1944 water treaty between Mexico and the USA; the second is the 1961-1964 drought along the Great Lakes and the 1909 water treaty between Canada and the USA and, finally, it examines the 1997-2000 water shortage in the Jordan Basin and the 1994 treaty between Israel and Jordan. It was found that issues of sovereignty, water stress, power asymmetry, optimistic water scenarios and the nature of the treaties as “package deals” impede riparians from adopting some of these mechanisms. Among them is a joint institution with wide scope and geographical jurisdiction, an escape clause, allocating water according to percentage of flow, balance mechanism and a binding arbitration procedure. By excluding these mechanisms the anticipated political cost of an agreement decreases. However, this exclusion process limits the ability of these treaties and their institutions to manage a crisis situation, which may in turn engender controversy between the riparians as to how to divide the water in such a situation. Yet, it was found that during crises, treaties tend to evolve as the different parties supplement them with new legal and institutional measures that provide only partial immediate remedy to the crisis at hand. This stresses the need to incorporate mechanisms that are simultaneously politically feasible and hydrologically effective.

Cooperation over transboundary environmental resources, water in particular, has been analyzed from various perspectives. Each study identifies the problems of cooperation differently and suggests different mechanisms to enhance it. Yet, the role of ambiguity, particularly significant in treaty design to resolve environmental disputes, has thus far been overlooked. Such a focus is warranted, since many international agreements regulating the use of natural resources are ambiguous in their schedule of resource delivery during crisis events or in their cost-sharing arrangements and may even include contradictory resource-allocation principles while remaining vague on how to settle the contradictions. This study aims to examine why, when, and how ambiguity is applied in agreements pertaining to natural resources, and water in particular. The Israeli—Jordanian peace agreement, which includes an annex on water-use regulation, is used as a case study. It was found that, under asymmetric power relations, when both sovereignty costs and uncertainty are high, several types of deliberate ambiguity were intentionally incorporated into the treaty. Some ambiguities allowed each side to present the treaty differently at home, thereby defusing domestic opposition, while others provided leeway to adjust the resource allocation during a future crisis without the need to renegotiate the treaty.

This article examines the scale dynamics of water governance. Five generic scales are identified, each associated with a particular ideology and discourse. Hence, scale dynamics are hypothesized to oscillate as a function not only of power and economic factors (although these are central) but as reflections of shifts in dominant ideologies and shifts in sanctioned discourses. The dynamics are examined in the intra-Israeli and the Israeli-Arab cases. In the intra-Israeli case the scale dynamics largely conform with the hypothesis. Once the national level is exceeded, however, the different story lines associated with the generic scales are used only to legitimize negotiating positions, and the actual regime scale is a compromise among physical features, power factors, and sovereignty considerations. The difference in dynamics between the intranational and international levels is explained by the need of international regimes to address the discrepancy between resource domains and sovereignty rights domains, rather than the discrepancy with property rights domains at the intrastate level.Este artículo examina la dinámica de escala sobre el gobierno del agua. Se identifican cinco escalas genéricas, cada cual asociada con una ideología y discurso particular. En consecuencia, se hipotetiza que las dinámicas de escala oscilan como una función, no solo de factores económicos y de poder (aunqueéstos son centrales), sino como reflejo de cambios en las ideologías dominantes y cambios de los discursos autorizados. Las dinámicas son examinadas a la luz de casos en contexto israelí e israelí-árabe. En el caso israelí propiamente dicho, la dinámica de escala en gran parte está conforme con la hipótesis. Tan pronto como se transmonta el nivel nacional, sin embargo, las diferentes líneas de la historia asociadas con las escalas genéricas se utilizan apenas para legitimar posiciones de negociación, y la escala del régimen real aparece como un compromiso entre rasgos físicos, factores de poder y consideraciones de soberanía. La diferencia de dinámica entre los niveles intranacionales e internacionales se explica más por la necesidad que tienen los regímenes internacionales de tomar en cuenta la discrepancia entre dominios de los recursos y dominios de los derechos de soberanía, que por la discrepancia con dominios de derechos de propiedad al nivel intraestatal. Palabras clave: Israelí-árabe, escala, transfronterizo, agua.

Environmental peacebuilding represents a paradigm shift from a nexus of environmental scarcity to one of environmental peace. It rests on the assumption that the biophysical environment’s inherent characteristics can act as incentives for cooperation and peace, rather than violence and competition. Based on this, environmental peacebuilding presents cooperation as a win-win solution and escape from the zero-sum logic of conflict. However, there is a lack of coherent environmental peacebuilding framework and evidence corroborating the existence of this environment-peace nexus. Building on a multidisciplinary literature review, this article examines the evolution of environmental peacebuilding into an emerging framework. It unpacks the concept and explains its main building blocks (conditions, mechanisms and outcomes) to develop our understanding of when, how and why environmental cooperation can serve as a peacebuilding tool. It assembles these building blocks into three generic trajectories (technical, restorative and sustainable environmental peacebuilding), each characterised according to their own causality, drivers and prerequisites, and illustrated with concrete examples. Finally, this article draws attention to the remaining theoretical gaps in the environmental peacebuilding literature, and lays the foundations for an environmental peacebuilding research agenda that clarifies if and how environmental cooperation can spill over across borders, sectors and scales towards sustainable peace.

Many places in the world are experiencing a water crisis. This water crisis is attributed to a governance crisis, whereas often fragmented institutional and physical water structures are used to explain a policy of overexploitation. The Israeli water system, which adopted integrated water resource management (IWRM), is often cited as a model for other countries struggling with fragmented water systems. Yet, despite the exceptional degree of integration, Israel in the past two decades has adopted an unsustainable water policy. The aim of this study is to understand this failure and thereby to postulate on the institutional conditions required for successful implementation of IWRM. The study focuses on the politics of water allocation during the drought of 1999 to 2002. It was found that the failure originates in setting administrative divisions in the decision-making process and in differential checks, with no balances implicitly instituted within the integrated water system. These two factors have resulted in a water system that is physically integrated but is not coupled by a balanced institutional structure. This case study teaches us that when reforming the water sector along IWRM lines, measures must be taken to ensure that the physical integration coincides with a balanced institutional integration-otherwise the results may be worse than if there were no integration at all.

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