Sharing water and benefits in transboundary river basins

Abstract

Abstract. The equitable sharing of benefits in transboundary river basins is necessary to solve disputes among riparian countries and to reach a consensus on basin-wide development and management activities. Benefit sharing arrangements must be collaboratively developed to be perceived not only as efficient, but also as equitable in order to be considered acceptable to all riparian countries. The current literature mainly describes what is meant by the term benefit sharing in the the context of transboundary river basins and discusses this from a conceptual point of view, but falls short of providing practical, institutional arrangements that ensure maximum economic welfare as well as collaboratively developed methods for encouraging the equitable sharing of benefits. In this study we define an institutional arrangement that distributes welfare in a river basin by maximizing the economic benefits of water use and then sharing these benefits in an equitable manner using a method developed through stakeholder involvement.We describe a methodology in which (i) a hydrological model is used to allocate scarce water resources, in an economically efficient manner, to water users in a transboundary basin, (ii) water users are obliged to pay for water, and (iii) the total of these water charges are equitably redistributed as monetary compensation to users in an amount determined through the application of a sharing method developed by stakeholder input, thus based on a stakeholder vision of fairness, using an axiomatic approach. The whole system is overseen by a river basin authority. The methodology is applied to the Eastern Nile River basin as a case study. The described technique not only ensures economic efficiency, but may also lead to more equitable solutions in the sharing of benefits in transboundary river basins because the definition of the sharing rule is not in question, as would be the case if existing methods, such as game theory, were applied, with their inherent definitions of fairness.

Water resource management: IWRM strategies for improved water management. A systematic review of case studies of East, West and Southern Africa

“…The conflicts around the utilization of the Nile water resources persists due to the treaty of 1959 which led to the signing of Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA) by a number of the Nile basin countries, with the notable exceptions of Egypt, Sudan and South Sudan [ 67 ]. The CFA was signed between 2010 and 2011 and establishes the principle that each Nile Basin state has the right to use, within its territory, the waters of the Nile River Basin, and lays down some factors for determining equitable and reasonable utilization such as the contribution of each state to the Nile waters and the proportion of the drainage area [ 68 ].…”

Improving operating policies of large‐scale surface‐groundwater systems through stochastic programming

“…However, the resulting operation might involve benefits asymmetrically distributed among the stakeholders in the basin, creating equity issues. Benefit-sharing mechanisms could be implemented to compensate for equity issues [Arjoon et al, 2016].…”

Transboundary water sharing policies conditioned on hydrologic variability to inform reservoir operations

“…As suggested by Sadoff and Grey (2002), it is critical to understand and account for the range of inter-related benefits resulting from the development of international rivers in a cooperative way. Such cooperation of water resources development in international river basins has been widely investigated in recent years (Li et al, 2019;Luchner et al, 2019;Anghileri et al, 2013;Uitto and Duda, 2002;Dombrowsky, 2009;Tilmant and Kinzelbach, 2012;Arjoon et al, 2016;Wu and Whittington, 2006;Wheeler et al, 2018;Goor et al, 2010;Degefu et al, 2016). For example, Arjoon et al (2016) proposed a benefit-sharing method based on the optimization results from a hydro-economic model and evaluated the value of cooperative water management in the Eastern Nile River basin; Li et al (2019) analyzed the water benefits of stakeholders from transboundary cooperation under different reservoir operation scenarios by using cooperative game theory methods; Luchner et al (2019) simulated reservoir operations and water allocation in an international river basin in Central Asia and found that international cooperation in the power sector can ease the conflict between upstream hydropower production and downstream irrigated agriculture.…”

“…Although cooperation in transboundary river basins can result in a win-win situation for both downstream and upstream stakeholders, cooperative water use strategies are obstructed by single-sector interests, especially when long-term commitments are involved (Wu and Whittington, 2006 specifically, it is often difficult to achieve a mutually agreed-on cooperation strategy given divergent solution preferences by stakeholders. Additionally, there is no standard that regulates how the benefits of water use from various sectors (e.g., drinking, agriculture, industry, recreation, and navigation) are quantified and what mechanism should be used to allocate/share the benefits (Arjoon et al, 2016;Acharya et al, 2020). Thus, most previous studies focus on evaluating the impact of cooperative operation in transboundary river basins and illustrating the importance of a cooperative strategy through water system optimization and simulation (Goor et al, 2010;Anghileri et al, 2013;Uitto and Duda, 2002;Dombrowsky, 2009;Tilmant and Kinzelbach, 2012;Luchner et al, 2019).…”