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 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 is 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. With the proposed benefit-sharing mechanism, the efficiency-equity trade-off still exists, but the extent of the imbalance is reduced because benefits are maximized and redistributed according to a key that has been collectively agreed upon by the participants. 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.

Analysis of Dam Inflow Variation Using the Hydrological Sensitivity Method in a Trans-Boundary River Basin: Case Study in the Korean Peninsula

“…Therefore, there is a consensus that cooperative water resources planning and management in a trans-boundary river basin can provide opportunities to increase water benefits [4][5][6][7][8]. Phillips et al [4] suggested a policy context for shared responsibility and an institutional framework for analyzing shared benefits resulting from the corporation between countries.…”

“…Leb [6] analyzed the dynamics of international cooperation and described the role of international law in achieving mutually beneficial relations. Jalilov et al [7] and Arjoon et al [8] used hydro-economic models to estimate the total economic benefits using various scenarios in trans-boundary river basin operations and provided an experimental case study on how the concept of benefit sharing could be used to motivate riparian countries to enhance their cooperation and develop shared water resources.…”

Reframing for Sustainability: Exploring Transformative Power of Benefit Sharing

“…First, within the context of transboundary water management, benefit sharing has been suggested and promoted as a new way to seek cooperation between countries with competing interests by development-oriented agencies such as the World Bank, Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and Overseas Development Institute (e.g., [11,15,16,40]). The suggested concept has been picked up by a number of scholars, who developed models for different transboundary river basins around the world (e.g., [41][42][43][44]), and by donor community and basin management organizations, who actively promoted the approach in negotiations to foster cooperation between riparian states (e.g., [45][46][47]). Second, the conference of parties to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) took active steps to establish a new international regime on access to genetic resources and benefit sharing (ABS), which resulted in adoption of the Nagoya Protocol in 2010 [20,48].…”

Design of optimal reservoir operating rules in large water resources systems combining stochastic programming, fuzzy logic and expert criteria.

“…However, the resulting allocation strategy would imply an asymmetrical distribution of revenues causing equity issues. To deal with them, cooperation strategies should be explored using, for example, Game Theory (Madani, 2010;Madani and Hipel, 2011), and solved applying proper benefit-sharing mechanisms (Arjoon et al, 2016).…”

“…However, this efficiency improvement is not symmetrically distributed, so equity issues may arise. These could be examined using, for example, Game Theory (Girard et al, 2016;Madani, 2010), and they could be addressed by employing benefit-sharing mechanisms (Arjoon et al, 2016).…”