Multidimensional Approach to Local Water Conflicts

Multidimensional Approach to Local Water Conflicts PDF Author: Azage Gebremariam
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Water is one of the most precious but least valued common property resource. Efficient ways of water resources management are vital to socio-economic development and the overall feat of societal stability. However, water conflicts have further exacerbated the access to water especially in low-income developing countries. Most notably, little attention has been given to studying water conflicts at the local level when compared to international water conflicts. As a result, there is insufficient information and theory on the exponentially increasing number of local water conflicts. In the Middle East, water was a tool for military purposes; in Asia disputes over water occur due to development-related activities, whilst in Africa, control over water resources has been the root cause of many conflicts affecting millions of vulnerable communities. This research investigates the nature, causes and dimensions of local water conflicts in the context of low-income developing countries based on the Afar region, which is located in the Awash Trans-regional River Basin of Ethiopia. The research suggests a new multidimensional approach for pre-identification, early warning services and local water conflict neutralization. This approach also introduces preparedness techniques, which play a significant role in reducing potential risks and tensions that trigger local water conflicts between communities sharing the same water resources. The study further proposes a policy guideline matrix that would serve as a technique for reducing local water conflicts by providing new ways of thinking about the links between sustainable developments, local water conflict management and strategic partnerships. The research is implemented through the process of designing a framework based on essential theoretical and practical findings supported by survey data of 134 household representatives of local communities and 26 institutions, together with 22 interviews. The introduced multipurpose framework is based on five fundamental parameters, namely: contribution to Sustainable Development, Information, Preparedness, Tolerance Capacity and Interaction (DIPTI). The research proposes the Sparkling Effects of Conflict, a new approach in understanding and predicting the coverage of the effects of conflicts other than the primary conflicting parties and conflict location. In addition, two pillars of the conceptual frameworks emerged from the findings. First, the WEC (Water, Early Warning and Conflict) information pyramid, a framework designed to indicate the core components of local WEC-related information identification and management. Second, the Pillars of Conflict Pyramid, the simplest conceptual framework, easily helps to pre-identify the effects of local water conflicts with certain limitations. Besides, the study addressed six additional conflict neutralization and resolution inputs that incorporate the significance of the participation of women and other vulnerable members of communities. These findings also highlight the advantage of co-existence between useful traditional and modern practices in neutralizing conflicts. Overall, the study will assist local people, policy and decision makers and institutions in low-income developing countries with a similar context to that of the study area.

Managing and Transforming Water Conflicts

Managing and Transforming Water Conflicts PDF Author: Jerome Delli Priscoli
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521632161
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
A practical guide to water conflict resolution for professionals and academics involved in water management.

Multidimensional Approach to Local Water Conflicts

Multidimensional Approach to Local Water Conflicts PDF Author: Azage Gebremariam
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Water is one of the most precious but least valued common property resource. Efficient ways of water resources management are vital to socio-economic development and the overall feat of societal stability. However, water conflicts have further exacerbated the access to water especially in low-income developing countries. Most notably, little attention has been given to studying water conflicts at the local level when compared to international water conflicts. As a result, there is insufficient information and theory on the exponentially increasing number of local water conflicts. In the Middle East, water was a tool for military purposes; in Asia disputes over water occur due to development-related activities, whilst in Africa, control over water resources has been the root cause of many conflicts affecting millions of vulnerable communities. This research investigates the nature, causes and dimensions of local water conflicts in the context of low-income developing countries based on the Afar region, which is located in the Awash Trans-regional River Basin of Ethiopia. The research suggests a new multidimensional approach for pre-identification, early warning services and local water conflict neutralization. This approach also introduces preparedness techniques, which play a significant role in reducing potential risks and tensions that trigger local water conflicts between communities sharing the same water resources. The study further proposes a policy guideline matrix that would serve as a technique for reducing local water conflicts by providing new ways of thinking about the links between sustainable developments, local water conflict management and strategic partnerships. The research is implemented through the process of designing a framework based on essential theoretical and practical findings supported by survey data of 134 household representatives of local communities and 26 institutions, together with 22 interviews. The introduced multipurpose framework is based on five fundamental parameters, namely: contribution to Sustainable Development, Information, Preparedness, Tolerance Capacity and Interaction (DIPTI). The research proposes the Sparkling Effects of Conflict, a new approach in understanding and predicting the coverage of the effects of conflicts other than the primary conflicting parties and conflict location. In addition, two pillars of the conceptual frameworks emerged from the findings. First, the WEC (Water, Early Warning and Conflict) information pyramid, a framework designed to indicate the core components of local WEC-related information identification and management. Second, the Pillars of Conflict Pyramid, the simplest conceptual framework, easily helps to pre-identify the effects of local water conflicts with certain limitations. Besides, the study addressed six additional conflict neutralization and resolution inputs that incorporate the significance of the participation of women and other vulnerable members of communities. These findings also highlight the advantage of co-existence between useful traditional and modern practices in neutralizing conflicts. Overall, the study will assist local people, policy and decision makers and institutions in low-income developing countries with a similar context to that of the study area.

Water Conflicts

Water Conflicts PDF Author: Mark Zeitoun
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190864087
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
"Our ambition with this book is that it helps tranform at least a few inter-state water conflicts, by providing a lucid way to understand and to address their complex nature. The need for clarity is urgent, if researchers and analysts are to assist all those who are caught up in, and suffer from, water conflicts. While we wrote this book, mothers in Aleppo dodged snipers' bullets as they collected water for their children - just as so many mothers before them did, in Jenin in 2002, Sarajevo in 1994, Beirut in 1985, Leningrad in 1943, and Warsaw in 1944 and 1914. Explosive weaponry, designed to penetrate eighteen-inch thick concrete bunkers, ripped through the zinc roofs of several water treatment plants in Iraq; drinking water channels were demolished in Dombass; cholera spread through wastewater in Yemen, and superbugs mutated in the wastewater in Gaza. In most cases, the repair crews who risked their lives to supply clean water were denied access or shot at. The Bolivian Lake Poopó dried up as we were finishing the first draft of our early chapters. Caused by unregulated abstractions for agriculture and mining, this catastrophe evidences our collective inability to adequately manage human need for food and minerals, and human greed for money. However, it seems we have not learnt lessons from our past mistakes - rather we appear intent on repeating them. Lake Poopó has now joined the well-documented graveyard water bodies of Lake Urmia, Lake Tulare, the Oglala (or Ogallala) and Ceylanpinar Aquifers and the Dead Sea (and others counting). Each of these is an example of how tensions generated in the political and economic systems that run our lives can devastate our relationship and reliance upon the natural environment. Cambodia's Tonlé Sap Lake - not to mention millions of its fish and thousands of local fishermen - is currently at risk because of upstream dams in Laos, Thailand and China (see Box Matthews). The likely outcome is that the monsoon-driven flood-pulse of the river is contained to such an extent that the Mekong river no longer washes back into the lake when it reaches the sea. This is a stark example of a worrying global trend, resulting from extensive construction of large dams building despite public-private-civil society consensus on their destructive downsides. Sea-land nutrients, which sea-to-river fish rely upon (most famously, salmon), have been virtually eliminated - with global nutrient flow standing at only 4% of historic levels. According to WWF, freshwater species' populations declined by 81% from 1970-2012, with an average annual decline of 3.9%"--

Resolving Water Conflicts Workbook

Resolving Water Conflicts Workbook PDF Author: Lynette de Silva
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000479137
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This book works to build trust, consensus, and capacity to enhance understanding through a water conflict management framework designed to bolster collaborative skills. Built on case-studies analysis and hands-on real-life applications, it addresses issues of water insecurity of marginalized systems and communities, global water viability, institutional resilience, and the inclusion of faith-based traditions for climate action. The authors assess the complexities of climate challenges and explain how to create sustainable, effective, and efficient water approaches for an improved ecological and socioeconomic future within the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

Split Waters

Split Waters PDF Author: Luisa Cortesi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000405907
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Limited, finite, contaminated, unavailable or expensive, water divides people all around the globe. We all cannot do without water for long, but can for long enough to fight for it. This commonsensical narration of water conflicts, however, follows a pattern of scarcity and necessity that is remarkably unvaried despite different social and geographical contexts. Through in-depth case studies from around the globe, this volume investigates this similarity of narration—confronting the power of a single story by taking it seriously instead of dismissing it. In so doing, it invites the reader to rethink water conflicts and how they are commonly understood and managed. This book: Posits the existence of the idea of water conflict, and asks what it is and what it produces, thus how it is used to pursue particular interests and to legitimise specific historical, technological and environmental relations; Examines the meaning and power of ideas as compared to other categories of knowledge, advancing theoretical frameworks related to environmental knowledge, discursive power, social constructivism; Presents an alternative agenda to deepen the conversation around water conflicts among scholars and activists. Of interest to scholars and activists alike, this volume is addressed to those involved with environmental conflicts, environmental knowledge and justice, disasters and climate change from the disciplinary angles of environmental anthropology and sociology, political ecology and economy, science and technology studies, human geography and environmental sciences, development and cooperation, public policy and peace studies. Essays by Gina Bloodworth, Ben Bowles, Patrick Bresnihan, Luisa Cortesi, Mattia Grandi, K. J. Joy, Midori Kawabe, Adrianne Kroepsch, Vera Lazzaretti, Leslie Mabon, Renata Moreno Quintero, Madhu Ramnath, Jayaprakash Rao Polsani, Dik Roth, Theresa Selfa,Veronica Strang, Mieke van Hemert, Jeroen Warner, Madelinde Winnubst.

Hydropolitics

Hydropolitics PDF Author: Leif Ohlsson
Publisher: Zed Books
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
As well as a major overview of the global situation and problems involved, there are authoritative case studies of particular river systems in three continents, including the Nile Valley, the Tigris and Euphrates, the River Jordan, the Mekong and several cases from South Asia.

Metropolitan Water Use Conflicts In Asia And The Pacific

Metropolitan Water Use Conflicts In Asia And The Pacific PDF Author: James E. Nickum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429715870
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Although Asia is the least urbanized continent, it contains half of the world’s megacities and many of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Urban growth is already stressing local water supplies and causing intense conflict among water users—between haves and have-nots in urban areas as well as between farmers and fishers outside the cities. In addition, concern is growing over the depletion and degradation of water sources and over the impact of water policies and patterns of water use on the natural environment. From the perspective of the maturing metropolitan water economy, the contributors to this volume consider the problems of urban water management in the region. They focus on the institutional and policy dimensions of conflict and seek to provide a range of viable options for reducing the growing frictions among water users. Eight specific case studies of urban areas in Asia and the Pacific span a wide range of economic levels of development, physical settings, and hydrological conditions. The book will be of interest to scholars and policymakers concerned with issues of water and environmental policy, urban management, and resource conflict in general.

Adaptive Governance and Water Conflict

Adaptive Governance and Water Conflict PDF Author: John T. Scholz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136524878
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Water policy seems in perpetual crisis. Increasingly, conflicts extend beyond the statutory authority, competence, geographical jurisdictions, and political constituencies of highly specialized governing authorities. While other books address specific policy approaches or the application of adaptive management strategies to specific problems, this is the first book to focus more broadly on adaptive governance, or the evolution of new institutions that attempt to resolve conflicts among competing authorities. Adaptive Governance and Water Conflict investigates new types of water conflicts among users in the seemingly water-rich Eastern United States. Eight case studies of water quality, water quantity, and habitat preservation or restoration in Florida were chosen to span the range of conflicts crossing fragmented regulatory boundaries. Each begins with a history of the conflict and then focuses on the innovative institutional arrangements - some successful, some not - that evolved to grapple with the resulting challenges. In the chapters that follow, scholars and practitioners in urban planning, political science, engineering, law, policy, administration, and geology offer different theoretical and experience-based perspectives on the cases. Together, they discuss five challenges that new institutions must overcome to develop sustainable solutions for water users: Who is to be involved in the policy process? How are they to interact? How is science to be used? How are users and the public to be made aware? How can solutions be made efficient and equitable? In its diverse perspectives and unique combination of theory, application, and analysis, Adaptive Governance and Water Conflict will be a valuable book for water professionals, policy scientists, students, and scholars in natural resource planning and management.

Water Diplomacy

Water Diplomacy PDF Author: Shafiqul Islam
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136186565
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Water is the resource that will determine the wealth, welfare, and stability of many countries in the twenty-first 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 and so 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 that 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.

Water Diplomacy in Action

Water Diplomacy in Action PDF Author: Shafiqul Islam
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 178308491X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Complex water problems cannot be resolved by numbers or narratives. Contingent and negotiated approaches are necessary for actionable outcome. In the face of a constantly changing array of interconnected water issues that cross multiple boundaries, the challenge is how to translate solutions that emerge from science and technology into the context of real-world policy and politics. Water Diplomacy in Action addresses this task by synthesizing two emerging ideas––complexity science and negotiation theory––to understand and manage risks and opportunities for an uncertain water future. Rooted in the ideas of complexity science and mutual gains negotiation, this edited volume shows why traditional systems engineering approaches may not work for complex problems, what emerging tools and techniques are needed and how these are used to resolve complex water problems.