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The Politics of transboundary water management in the Nile Basin

The Nile Basin is a transboundary water body system that covers around 10% of African territory and includes 11 African countries. This blog post’s focus is on the politics of transboundary water management in the Nile Basin.




The various actions that take place within a transboundary watershed as one would expect spreads many benefits and externalities unevenly across the different states and for the people living in these districts (Jägerskog et al., 2007). With that of course there are increased chances of conflicts between the different regions that use the Nile basin. Therefore, it could be argued that the Nile basin needs to be appropriately managed in order to bring benefits to all its users and to reduce the externalities felt by some countries. However, the question that needs to be addressed is who is responsible to manage such a large basin that runs across several borders. 

The ideas put forward in the paper by Jägerskog and others discusses the notion of how cooperation on the transboundary management of the Nile River Basin itself is a public good and if appropriately managed by investing in water resources infrastructure, it could also be the source for other regional public goods that will increase economic growth and development in the Nile Basin (2007). This is solely a reason why the World Bank funds and supports the vision of the Nile Basin Initiative, which was first established in 1999, and who's main objectives include effectively managing the Nile water resources in a sustainable and equitable way (Abawari, 2011). Some exemplar infrastructural projects such as those that are aimed at mitigating flood and drought risks or improving water quality are aimed at being ‘non-excludable’, ‘non-rivalrous’ and thus defined as a public good, bringing benefits to everyone who ‘consumes’ it. 

It’s important to highlight though that there needs to be multi-lateral cooperation and management of such water resources so that the benefits can be felt by everyone, since the Nile basin runs through different borders and regions. Water resources that are shared and crosses through different borders are easily a source of conflict, but this can be completely avoided if adequate institutions and government bodies on a regional and national scale are in place (Jägerskog et al., 2007). However, is it possible for such institutions to solve the possible conflicts that arise from trying to manage a shared water basin when such processes take a long time to implement and to start functioning, and even then, many of the African countries do not have the financial support to build such institutions in the first place. 

It’s easy to explain that the shared cooperation and management of the Nile Basin will bring benefits to everyone, but it is not as easy to find solutions on how this can be sustainably implemented. Power relations and onus on who is responsible for planning and funding such projects is constantly argued which further fuels political conflict in a continent that is already facing political instability in various forms. Some argue responsibility should fall on the international community as a whole, specifically colonisers, and that if individual Nile countries try to finance such projects themselves it will be too expensive for them. 
Others argue that the Nile Basin Initiative and the top down approach of managing water resources through the interference of the international community is the source of such problems in the first place and local level policy is more appropriate (Abawari, 2011). 

So, I’ll leave the question to you guys, who should take the responsibility of transboundary water management? In my next blog post, a more specific case-study focus in the Nile basin - I will discuss the much-disputed Grand Renaissance Dam in the context of the politics of transboundary water management further, see you soon!


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