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Resilience in Transboundary Water Governance: the Okavango River Basin…
Citation:
Odom Green, O., B. A. Cosens, AND A. S. GARMESTANI. Resilience in Transboundary Water Governance: the Okavango River Basin…. Ecology and Society. Resilience Alliance Publications, Waterloo, Canada, 18(2):Art. 23, (2013).
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public
Description:
When the availability of a vital resource varies between times of overabundance and extreme scarcity, management regimes must manifest flexibility and authority to adapt while maintaining legitimacy. Unfortunately, the need for adaptability often conflicts with the desire for certainty in legal and regulatory regimes, and laws that fail to account for variability often result in conflict when the inevitable disturbance occurs. Another key to resilience is collaboration between physical scientists, political actors, local leaders, and other stakeholders, and when the commons is shared among sovereign states, collaboration between and among scales is critical. At the scale of transboundary river basins, where treaties govern water utilization, particular treaty mechanisms reduce conflict potential by fostering collaboration and accounting for change. One of the more effectual mechanisms is the establishment of an international commission to jointly manage water, but establishment of a joint commission alone does not ensure resilient water management. To better guide resource management, study of applied resilience theory has revealed a number of management practices that are integral for adaptive governance. This article describes key resilience principles for treaty design and adaptive governance and then applies them to a case study of one transboundary basin where the need and willingness to manage collaboratively and iteratively is high- the Okavango River Basin of southwest Africa. This descriptive and applied approach should be particularly instructive for treaty negotiators, transboundary resource managers, and aid program developers.
