Water Diplomacy

by Islam, Shafiqul; Susskind, Lawrence E.

• ISBN13: 9781617261039
• ISBN10: 1617261033
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-06-20
• Publisher: Resources for the Future

Summary

Water is the resource that will determine the wealth, welfare, and stability of many countries in the 21st century. This book offers a new approach to managing water that will overcome the conflicts that emerge when the interactions among natural, societal, and political forces are overlooked. At the heart of these conflicts are complex water networks. In managing them, science alone is insufficient but neither is policy-making that doesn't take science into account. Solutions will only emerge if a negotiated or diplomatic approach -- that blends science, policy, and politics - is used to manage water networks. The authors show how open and constantly changing water networks can be managed successfully using collaborative adaptive techniques to build informed agreements among disciplinary experts, water users with conflicting interests, and governmental bodies with countervailing claims. Shafiqul Islam is an engineer with over twenty five years of practical experience in addressing water issues. Lawrence Susskind is founder of MIT's Environmental Policy and Planning Program and a leader of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Together they have developed a text is relevant for students and experienced professionals working in a variety of engineering, science, and applied social science fields. They show how new thinking about water conflict can replace the zero-sum battles that pit experts, politicians, and stakeholders against each other in counter-productive ways. Their volume not only presents the key elements of a theory of water diplomacy; it includes excerpts and commentary from more than two dozen seminal readings as well as practice exercises that challenge readers to apply what they have learned.

Author Biography

Shafiqul Islam is the first Bernard M. Gordon Senior Faculty Fellow in Engineering and Professor of Water Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is the Director of the Water Diplomacy Initiative. His research group-a diverse network of national and international partners-integrates theory and practice to create actionable water knowledge He has published over 100 refereed journal and other publications. Lawrence E. Susskind is Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has served on the faculty for 40 years. He is also Vice-Chair for Instruction at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, which he helped found in 1982, and where he heads the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, and teaches advanced negotiation courses. In 1993, Susskind created the Consensus Building Institute.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	p. x
Preface	p. xii
Acknowledgements	p. xv
List of Acronyms	p. xviii
A Water Management Fable for All Time (with Maia Majumder)	p. 1
Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Water Management	p. 4
The Evolution of Water Resources Management	p. 4
Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM)	p. 6
Reflections on Some Unsettled Problems of Planning in Managing Common Pool Resources	p. 7
Water Problems are Complex	p. 8
Water is a Flexible Resource	p. 10
Thinking in Terms of Water Networks Rather than Systems	p. 10
Acknowledging the Complexity of Water Networks	p. 12
A Synthesis of Natural, Societal, and Political Domains	p. 13
Water Diplomacy Framework: Three Propositions	p. 14
Selected Readings with Commentaries	p. 18
References	p. 37
Understanding and Characterizing Complex Water Management Problems	p. 41
The Properties of Complex Systems and Water Networks	p. 42
Domains, Scales, and Levels	p. 46
Watersheds are Disconnected from Problem-sheds and Policy-sheds	p. 51
Selected Readings with Commentaries	p. 53
References	p. 84
Addressing Complex Water Management Problems	p. 89
From Certainty and Consensus to Uncertainty and Disagreement	p. 89
Identifying Issues that Fall into the Zone of Complexity	p. 91
Implementation in the Zone of Complexity	p. 94
Adaptive Learning: A Key to Handling Evolving Complex Water Management Problems	p. 97
Selected Readings with Commentaries	p. 98
References	p. 121
A Non-Zero-Sum Approach to Water Negotiations (with Peter Kamminga and Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio)	p. 128
From Competition to Value Creation	p. 131
Mediating Conflicting Claims	p. 133
The Dangers of Zero-Sum Thinking	p. 134
An Alternative Problem-Solving Approach	p. 137
A Non-Zero-Sum Approach	p. 138
Convening Problem-Solving Forums	p. 139
Important Lessons	p. 150
Selected Readings with Commentaries	p. 150
References	p. 189
The Practice of Water Diplomacy in a Nutshell (with Elizabeth Fierman)	p. 197
Stakeholder Representation	p. 198
Joint Fact-Finding and Scenario Planning	p. 199
Value Creation	p. 200
Convening	p. 201
Collaborative Adaptive Management	p. 202
Societal Learning	p. 202
Conclusion	p. 203
Selected Readings with Commentaries	p. 204
References	p. 264
The Indopotamia Role-Play Simulation (with Catherine M. Ashcraft)	p. 269
Introduction	p. 269
Teaching Notes	p. 270
Exploring Interests and Building Coalitions	p. 275
Information Sharing and Knowledge Generation	p. 279
Option Generation	p. 283
Deal Making	p. 286
Background Readings	p. 290
General Instructions for Segment 1: Interests and Building Coalitions	p. 291
General Instructions for Segment 2: Information Sharing and Knowledge Generation	p. 298
General Instructions for Segment 3: Option Generation	p. 303
General Instructions for Segment 4: Final Packages and Implementation Strategies	p. 311
Glossary	p. 315
Index	p. 325
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