REC’ing Agreement: Outside Options Shaping Transboundary Water Cooperation

Growing water demand and dependence, juxtaposed with diminishing availability has created an emerging security threat that must be addressed through cooperation at the international level. Researchers investigating transboundary water negotiations have focused on dimensions of power and technical expertise, the causal importance of ‘outside options’ has largely been overlooked within the literature. There is a clear theoretical rationale and empirical support for the belief that such ‘outside options’ have a positive relationship on the outcome of transboundary water negotiations. States frequently look at negotiations through water regimes as a ‘fixed-sum’ game, especially in the absence of tangible incentives, each focusing on their immediate water needs. Regional and international actors can play an important role to establish the conditions for agreement, bridging the gap between states’ immediate concerns and long-term cooperation. This paper discusses mechanisms to enhance transboundary water cooperation, most notably through regional economic communities, with the potential to modify the basin. In doing so the paper aims to answer the question ‘how and under what conditions, can outside options shape multilateral negotiations over water?’. This is illustrated through detailed evidence collected from two empirical cases, the Nile basin and the Zambezi basin. The paper demonstrates the impact of RECs on negotiations reflecting most notably on the role of SADC and COMESA in both the cases. It identifies challenges posed by Africa’s thirteen regional economic bodies, with overlapping memberships, mandates, and notably low levels of intra-regional trade. The paper argues that targeted water cooperation through RECs, creates interconnecting games and issue linkages, that expand the zone of potential agreement. In so doing, water negotiations are positioned within a broader process of regional integration, mitigating the pitfalls and limitations of a water-centric approach (outlier negotiation forum), adopted in some cases, which cannot account for the political priorities of states. Success is observed most commonly in instances where RECS work to broaden the zone of potential agreement, increasing the opportunity costs of non-cooperation.