Ana Elisa Cascão – författare

Climate change has an impact on the ability of transboundary water management institutions to deliver on their respective mandates. The starting point for this book is that actors within transboundary water management institutions develop responses to the climate change debate, as distinct from the physical phenomenon of climate change. Actors respond to this debate broadly in three distinct ways – adapt, resist (as in avoiding the issue) and subvert (as in using the debate to fulfil their own agenda).

The book charts approaches which have been taken over the past two decades to promote more effective water management institutions, covering issues of conflict, cooperation, power and law. A new framework for a better understanding of the interaction between transboundary water management institutional resilience and global change is developed through analysis of the way these institutions respond to the climate change debate. This framework is applied to six river case studies from Africa, Asia and the Middle East (Ganges-Brahmaputra, Jordan, Mekong, Niger, Nile, Orange-Senqu) from which learning conclusions and policy recommendations are developed.

Climate change has an impact on the ability of transboundary water management institutions to deliver on their respective mandates. The starting point for this book is that actors within transboundary water management institutions develop responses to the climate change debate, as distinct from the physical phenomenon of climate change. Actors respond to this debate broadly in three distinct ways – adapt, resist (as in avoiding the issue) and subvert (as in using the debate to fulfil their own agenda).

The book charts approaches which have been taken over the past two decades to promote more effective water management institutions, covering issues of conflict, cooperation, power and law. A new framework for a better understanding of the interaction between transboundary water management institutional resilience and global change is developed through analysis of the way these institutions respond to the climate change debate. This framework is applied to six river case studies from Africa, Asia and the Middle East (Ganges-Brahmaputra, Jordan, Mekong, Niger, Nile, Orange-Senqu) from which learning conclusions and policy recommendations are developed.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) will not only be Africa’s largest dam, but it is also essential for future cooperation and development in the Nile River Basin and East African region. This book, after setting out basin-level legal and policy successes and failures of managing and sharing Nile waters, articulates the opportunities and challenges surrounding the GERD through multiple disciplinary lenses.

It sets out its possibilities as a basis for a new era of cooperation, its regional and global implications, the benefits of cooperation and coordination in dam filling, and the need for participatory and transparent decision making. By applying law, political science and hydrology to sharing water resources in general and to large-scale dam building, filling and operating in particular, it offers concrete qualitative and quantitative options that are essential to promote cooperation and coordination in utilising and preserving Nile waters. The book incorporates the economic dimension and draws on recent developments including: the signing of a legally binding contract by Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan to carry out an impact assessment study; the possibility that the GERD might be partially operational very soon, the completion of transmission lines from GERD to Addis Ababa; and the announcement of Sudan to commence construction of transmission lines from GERD to its main cities. The implications of these are assessed and lessons learned for transboundary water cooperation and conflict management.