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Water resources data and information exchange in transboundary water treaties

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Abstract

Despite international calls for data and information sharing in transboundary waters and basin-specific evidence of its importance to cooperative management, no systematic research has been undertaken to answer questions of where, how frequently, and which water resources data and information are exchanged. This paper examines all available transboundary water agreements signed between 1900 and 2007 to determine the degree to which water resources data and information is exchanged in the world’s regions, how the level of exchange has developed over time, and the different ways in which data and information sharing has been codified in practice. In doing so, we reveal important trends regarding the mechanisms, types, and frequencies of water resources data and information sharing—as well as differences across temporal and spatial scales, by treaty type and function, and regime type. The results indicate that data and information exchange as already practiced is more nuanced and, in some senses, widespread than may commonly be recognized. Further, the results reveal key linkages between democracy and data and information exchange and provide a basis to test analogous linkages related to data sharing and other variables in transboundary water settings.

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Notes

  1. Notably, however, it is not mandatory for states to sign an agreement to share data and information. Examples of states sharing data in absence of a signed treaty are indeed known to exist.

  2. Article XXIX. The Helsinki Rules on the Uses of the Waters of International Rivers. Adopted by the International Law Association at the fifty-second conference, held at Helsinki in August 1966. Report of the Committee on the Uses of the Waters of International Rivers (London, International Law Association, 1967).

  3. United Nations. (1997). Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses. United Nations General Assembly document A/51/869, April 11, 1997.

  4. According to a recent UNESCO report (2009: xxiii), there are “insufficient data to understand and predict the current and future quantity and quality of water resources, and political protocols and imperatives for sharing data are inadequate”.

  5. Data may be accessed from the TFDD website at http://www.transboundarywaters.orst.edu/database/. Please contact the authors for a complete listing of the cases.

  6. For example, the 1966 Helsinki agreement is considered by some to form an important basis for a greater exchange of information and data and hence a clear benchmark, yet the document was under development for years prior to 1966.

  7. A cursory look at these treaties suggests that a high percentage of these were signed by North American and European states.

  8. To define regions, a generic classification scheme based on a combination of geography and broad political affiliation was adopted (Volgy et al. 2008). For our purposes, regions consist of: Europe, Asia, Middle East (including states with dominant Arab or Islamic populations directly adjoining the Middle East, such as Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, and Turkey), North America (including United States, Canada, and Mexico), Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America (including Central America).

  9. Note, however, that the absolute number of bilateral agreements containing a data and information exchange component is greater than multilateral agreements. This is because the absolute number of bilateral agreements in much greater than the absolute number of multilateral agreements.

  10. We adopt an average score of all of the states in the basin because it is more theoretically appropriate for multilateral-level analyses. If we were looking at the dyadic level, we might prefer to use the weakest-link logic.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Basman Towfique for preliminary work in the conceptualization of this document and Nishath Yapa for the management of the Treaty Database. We are also grateful to Keith Grant for his work on the statistical analyses.

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  1. University of Arizona, 324 Social Sciences, Tucson, AZ, 87521, USA

    Andrea K. Gerlak

  2. International Water Management Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka

    Jonathan Lautze & Mark Giordano

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Gerlak, A.K., Lautze, J. & Giordano, M. Water resources data and information exchange in transboundary water treaties. Int Environ Agreements 11, 179–199 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-010-9144-4

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