Healing the enlightenment rift: rationality, spirituality and shared waters.

• Author: Wolf, Aaron T.
• Position: THE GLOBAL CONTEXT - Report

Water management, by definition, is conflict management. Water, unlike other scarce, consumable resources, is used to fuel all facets of society, from biologies to economies to aesthetics to spiritual practice. Moreover, it fluctuates wildly in space and time, its management is usually fragmented and it is often subject to vague, arcane and/or contradictory legal principles. As such, there is no such thing as managing water for a single purpose--all water management is multi-objective and based on navigating competing interests. Within a nation, these interests include domestic users, agriculturalists, hydropower generators, recreators and environmentalists. Any two of the interests are regularly at odds, and the complexity of finding mutually acceptable solutions increases exponentially as more stakeholders are involved. Add international boundaries, and the difficulty grows substantially yet again.

While press reports of international waters often focus on conflict, there are encouraging stories throughout the world on how water also induces cooperation, even in particularly hostile basins, and even as disputes rage over other issues. This has been true from the Jordan Basin (between Arabs and Israelis) to the Indus Basin (between Indians and Pakistanis) to the Kura-Araks Basin (among Georgians, Armenians and Azeris). Despite empirical research that repeatedly shows how water-related cooperation has vastly exceeded conflict over the last fifty years, prevailing theories fail to explain this phenomenon. (1) Certainly, there is a long history of conflicts over, or related to, shared freshwater resources; yet, there is also a long and in many ways deeper history of water-related cooperation. (2) Why do countries that share a basin cooperate on water, even when they will not cooperate over other issues? Water is a resource upon which we are all dependent and for which there is little detailed guidance in international law. (3) By any quantitative measure, water should be the most conflictive of resources, not an elixir that drives enemies to craft functioning and resilient institutional arrangements.

Studies offer economic, environmental or strategic rationale to explain this "hydro-cooperation," but none of these studies seem completely adequate. (4) Prevailing wisdom in both the science and policy of water resources does not seem to provide the foundation for answering this clearly ethical question. Perhaps some part of the answer lies not in the world of rationality, but rather in the spiritual, ethical and moral dimensions of water conflict resolution. Incorporating these components may offer not only new understanding of current disputes, but also models, tools and strategies for more effective water conflict management and transformation in the future.

This paper seeks to investigate the potential of integrating a spiritual understanding of water conflict transformation with currently prevailing economic, environmental and strategic constructs. First, the context of the current understanding of water conflict and cooperation is presented. Then, the geography of what I call the Enlightenment rift--the process by which the North/West separated out the worlds of rationality from spirituality--is investigated by exploring the impact this rift has on ideas related to natural resource management. (5) This idea is then developed under the context of the current clash of worldviews, as the North/West entwines its rational construct with the flow of international development capital and management philosophies, and the inevitable disconnect as these approaches collide with the more integrated views of the South/East. In closing, this paper describes how the two worldviews might be gently interwoven within a fairly universal construct of the Four Worlds of perception, and how this construct might be employed within the framework of more effective water conflict management and transformation.

WATER, CONFLICT AND COOPERATION

Water is a unique and vital resource for which there is no substitute. It ignores political boundaries, fluctuates in both space and time and has multiple and conflicting demands on its use--problems compounded in the international realm by the fact that the international law that governs it is poorly developed, contradictory and unenforceable. It is no wonder, then, that water is perpetually named not only as a cause of historic armed conflict, but also as the resource that will bring combatants to the battlefield in the 21st century What is the likelihood that "the wars of the next century will be over water," as some have predicted? (6)

In order to cut through the prevailing anecdotal approach to the history of water conflicts, researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) undertook a three-year research project, which attempted to compile a dataset of every reported interaction between two or more nations, whether conflictive or cooperative, that involved water as a scarce and/or consumable resource or as a quantity to be managed, i.e., cases in which water was the driver of events. (7) The study documented a total of 1,831 interactions, both conflictive and cooperative, between two or more nations over water during the past fifty years. The results challenge the notion that water will lead to the next big wars of our time. (8)

First, despite the potential for dispute in international basins, the record of acute conflict over international water resources is historically overwhelmed by the record of cooperation. The last fifty years have seen only thirty-seven acute disputes, i.e. those involving violence. Among these disputes, thirty took place between Israel and one of its neighbors, and that violence ended in 1970. Non-Middle East cases accounted for only five acute events, while, during the same period, 157 treaties were negotiated and signed. In fact, the only water war between nations on record occurred over 4,500 years ago between the city-states of Lagash and Umma in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. (9) The total number of water-related events between nations of any magnitude is likewise weighted towards cooperation: 507 conflict-related events versus 1,228 cooperative events. (10) This implies that violence over water is strategically irrational, hydrographically ineffective and not economically viable.

Second, despite the occasional fiery rhetoric of politicians--perhaps aimed more often at their own constituencies than at the enemy--most actions that occur over water are mild. Of all the events, some 43 percent fell between mild verbal support and mild verbal hostility. If official verbal support and official verbal hostility are included in the analysis, the share of verbal events reaches 62 percent of the total. Thus, almost two-thirds of all events were only verbal, and more than two-thirds of those had no official sanction. (11)

Third, cooperative events related to water covered a broad spectrum, including water quantity, quality, economic development, hydropower and joint management. In contrast, almost 90 percent of the conflict-laden events related to quantity and infrastructure. Furthermore, almost all extensive military acts--the most extreme cases of conflict--fell within these two categories. As such, water acted as both an irritant and a unifier. As an irritant, water can make good relations bad and bad relations worse. Despite the complexity, however, international waters can act as a unifier in basins with relatively strong institutions. (12)

This historical record suggests that international water disputes do get resolved, even among enemies, and even as conflicts erupt over other issues. Some of the world's most vociferous enemies have negotiated water agreements or are currently in the process of doing so. (13) The institutions they have created often prove to be resilient, even when relations are strained. For example, the Mekong Committee-established by the governments of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam as an intergovernmental agency in 1957--exchanged data and information on water resources development throughout the Vietnam War. Israel and Jordan have held secret "picnic table" talks on managing the Jordan River since the unsuccessful Johnston negotiations of 1953-1955, even though they were technically at war from Israel's independence in 1948 until the 1994 treaty The Indus River Commission survived two major wars between India and Pakistan. Moreover, all ten Nile basin riparian countries are currently involved in senior government-level negotiations to develop the basin cooperatively, despite water wars rhetoric between upstream and downstream states.

Therefore, the question of whether water leads to conflict or cooperation turns out to not be mutually exclusive at all--both are true, and often in the same place. Shared water often leads to tensions between nations, which in turn offer a vehicle for dialogue that often results in some form of joint management. In fact, a general pattern has emerged for international basins over time that exemplifies both conflict and cooperation. Riparians of an international basin implement water development projects unilaterally first on water within their territory, in attempts to avoid the political intricacies of the shared resource. At some point, one of the riparians, generally the regional power, will implement a project that impacts at least one of its neighbors. These projects can, in the absence of relations or institutions conducive to conflict resolution, become a flashpoint, heightening tensions and regional instability that, in turn, lead to negotiations, treaties and/or collaborative river basin organizations and mechanisms for future conflict management. (14)

These processes from conflict to cooperation have historically suggested room for greater efficiencies. The first complicating factor is the time lag between when nations first start to impinge on each other's water planning and when...