Description
- The study explores why international river basin treaties were established among newly independent states.
- Despite fears of "water wars," data shows cooperation between states is historically more common. In the post-colonial period, newly independent states created international institutions, such as treaties, to manage water for nation-state modernization. Under what conditions were the international institutions established?
- Two systemic perspectives dominate prior research. At the systemic level, realist theories suggest that power asymmetry and a geographic position (upstream vs. downstream) influence cooperation. A state's dependence on the river and low transaction costs encourages treaty formation. At the national level, strategies such as issue linkages and side payments effectively foster negotiations. However, these approaches fail to explain why newly independent states pursued international agreements despite coordination challenges: After independence, rivers became cross-border concerns, transforming local matters into international negotiations, posing a challenge for successor states in navigating these complex treaty-making processes.
- This study introduces a micro-level argument, highlighting the networks among engineers before/after independence. Local engineers worked with colonial engineers during the colonial period. The former developed their knowledge of modern technology for managing water resources from the latter. They were also familiar with how the public used and demanded water resources. Even after independence, ex-local engineers still exchanged knowledge across national boundaries. Such a process gave the ex-local engineers a knowledge advantage over political elites in charge of international treaty negotiation. Such superiority helped to reconcile preferences between negotiating independent states, in other words, resolved the coordination difficulty.
- The interactive mechanism among engineers are analyzed by drawing from archival/secondary sources focusing on three case studies: the 1959 Nile Agreement, the 1960 Indus Treaty, and the 1992 Alma-Ata Treaty. This study shifts the focus from systemic and national-level explanations to the influences of networks on forming international treaties.
