Encyclopedia
Introduction
Management of Transboundary water resources is expected be one of the biggest challenges facing human development over the next decades [1]. In general, transboundary water resources can describe water shared across political, economic, or social boundaries [2]. Shared water resources have been always a potential source of competition. The English language, as well as many other Latin-rooted languages, reflects this historical relation between shared rivers and competition, as it uses the word “rival” to refer to a competitor against others. The word “rival” is derived from the Latin word rīvālis, which refers to an individual using the same river stream as another and originated from the Latin word rivus meaning river stream [3]. At present, water scarcity and interdependence among water-sharing countries have created complex conflicts over shared water resources around the world. Moreover, these conflicts are expected to escalate as a result of the growing world population, industrial development, and increasing urbanisation, as well as the negative consequences of climate change [1]. This complexity and the increasing significance of water resources shared across political borders conflicts have attracted considerable research interest in many scientific fields during the past years. Thus, this article aims at reviewing this literature that addressed conflicts over water resources that are shared across political borders, which is henceforth referred to as transboundary water conflicts. The literature regarding transboundary water resources conflicts has proposed various approaches
for allocating transboundary water resources [4]. Engineering studies have focused on finding the optimal water allocation among parties sharing water resources [5]. Economic studies have attempted to identify the different economic options for allocating water optimally among conflictive countries [6]. Some of these studies have resorted to conventional economic approaches, such as “social planner” and “water market”, to identify optimal water allocation [7]. A more comprehensive economic approach has been provided by game theory in the past two decades [8]. These game theoretic studies have linked the process of transboundary water conflict resolution to its outcome [8]. Political studies have addressed the political constraints that determine the dynamics and the outcome of transboundary water conflicts [9]. Finally, management studies have focused on the facilitation of the process of water conflict resolution [10]. Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) is one major approach that has been promoted by negotiations research [6]. However, the solutions that have been offered by the literature have not resulted in tangible actual practice of transboundary water conflict resolution [11].
The main objective of this study is to assess the gap between theory and practice in the field of transboundary water conflict resolution. More specifically, this research aims to identify why practitioners in actual transboundary water conflict resolution have not used the approaches that are offered by the academic literature. To achieve this, the research examines the approaches that have been suggested in the literature by four different academic fields, namely engineering, economics, political science, and management, as mechanisms of transboundary water conflict resolution. Subsequently, it identifies which of these mechanisms have been used in practice to solve transboundary water conflicts, in an attempt to assess the gap between theory and practice. Finally, based on this examination, the study identifies the reasons behind this gap and provides some recommendations to bridge the theory-practice gap in transboundary water conflict management.
This research provides an original contribution in its three key components: research theme, research scope, and its analytical framework. With regard to the research theme, it analyses the gap between the academic literature and real practices in the field of transboundary water conflict resolution. With regard to research scope, the research provides a multidisciplinary study that analyses academic literature on transboundary water conflict resolution originating from four different fields of inquiry, namely engineering, economics, political science, and management studies. Finally, the research introduces an analytical framework that offers a generic structure of water conflict resolution mechanism that can be used to assess the capacity of mechanisms either offered by academic literature or used by practitioners for transboundary water conflict resolution.
The study is divided to four sections, including this introductory section. The following section introduces the analytical framework that was used in this study. The third section explores these transboundary water conflict resolution mechanisms that are introduced by different scientific disciplines and its state of application. It then uses the analytical framework that was developed in this study to evaluate of the theoretical transboundary water conflict resolution mechanisms and the reasons behind the theory-practice gap. The final section discusses the findings of these study and provides some concluding remarks
Analytical Framework and Method
This section begins by exploring the different conceptualisations of conflict resolution that literature has proposed. Subsequently, these conceptualisations are used to delineate a functional structure for conflict resolution mechanism. This structure will be used as analytical framework to evaluate the theoretical mechanisms that have been used to analyse transboundary water conflicts.
Conflict Resolution: Definition
This section develops an operational definition for “Conflict resolution”, which will be used in this study in four steps. First, the various perspectives of situations considered as conflicts will be discussed in order to establish a definition of conflict. Subsequently, the different conceptualisations of the conflict resolution process are presented, from which a working definition of conflict resolution will then be derived and used in this study.
Interest in studying conflict as a defined field grew in the second half of the twentieth century, although conflict as a general phenomenon has existed throughout human history. Fears of international conflict that were generated by the Cold War led scholars from different fields to study conflict, and, in particular, to identify the main defining characteristics of conflicts. The academic scholarship on conflict has been divided since then between two theoretical schools. The first school maintained the ancient conception of conflict as a physical confrontation [12]. This ancient conception was reflected in the Latin origin of the term conflict, cōnflīgō, which means to strike together [13]. Therefore, when Coser [14] introduced the concept of social conflict, he defined it as a struggle in which conflicting parties act to neutralise, wound, or eliminate their opponents. Similarly, Mack and Snyder [15] characterised conflict by the presence of behaviour aiming to hurt the other party. Deutsch [16] adopted a softer approach, perceiving conflict as a situation in which parties carry out, or attempt to carry out, incompatible activities. According to Bercovitch, Kremenyuk [12], the second school of thought perceives conflict as a psychological state of affairs. It broadens the scope of conflict to include conflict of goals, whether or not these goals are acted upon [17]. According to this school of thought, a situation is considered as a conflict when parties have incompatible desires and are mutually aware of this incompatibility [18]. Galtung [19] further develops the concept of conflict as a conflict of goals, introducing the concept of structural conflict to separate the periods before and after this incompatibility is recognised. According to him, a structural conflict exists among the parties when they have conflicting interests, whether they perceive this conflict of interest or not. This structural conflict would be latent until the parties perceive this incompatibility of goals. The structural conflict becomes a manifest conflict when the parties perceive the incompatibility.
Several conceptualisations of conflict resolution process have been presented in the literature. Some scholars prefer giving a broad meaning to conflict resolution process to include two stages: conflict settlement and conflict transformation. Conflict settlement refers to the achievement of a consensus among parties to settle their political conflict over the issue of conflict [17]. Conflict transformation implies a deep transformation in the deep-rooted sources of conflict to establish a more stable structure of relationships among the conflict parties [12].
Various scholars preferred to confine the term conflict resolution to conflict settlement stage, owing to the complexity of the conflict settlement stage. This study adopts this confined definition of conflict resolution. Conflict resolution is defined in this study as a process that aims to solve the central incompatibilities between conflict parties and create agreement among them on a solution for the conflict issues. This process is a multidimensional process that facilitates constructive social change among conflictive parties [20]. This multidimensional process is a macro-process that is composed of connecting micro-processes aiming at differences reconciliation and bargaining that usually occur during negotiations. These macro and micro conflict resolution processes may, or may not, include active involvement of a third party that can act as intermediary, arbitrator or even superior authority that can mandate a settlement.
Conflict Resolution Mechanism: Structure
Significant research in recent years has focused on developing comprehensive approaches to explain and influence complex social processes, such as conflicts and their resolution. In social sciences, as in science at large, three main competing perspectives of social processes explanation and prediction have generated considerable research interest. These perspectives are covering laws, scepticism, and mechanistic approaches.
On the one hand, the covering-law model entails that an explanation of an event implies subjecting it to a higher general law. A general law is a statement of universal causal form that works functions the same way under all [21]. This rule of universal application of general laws establishes structure equality between the explanation and prediction of events [22]. If a causal relation between event that has already occurred and particular initial conditions can be established, then the future occurrence of this event can be predicted if these initial settings exist at present. An explanation cannot be considered as complete unless it can function a prediction, according to this perspective [22]. Thus, in the covering laws, the causal relationship between the initial conditions and the terminal condition is deterministic. The difference between explanation and prediction using such a general law is the object of scientific enquiry. In explanation, the object of enquiry is the initial determining conditions of an existing or past event. In prediction, particular events are known to exist or to have happened, but there is a need for a projection of their future conditions. Thus, in this view, a general law is needed to connect an event, a terminal condition, to a group of events, initial conditions, with an invariant causal relationship.
On the other, a wide-spread sceptic view emphasises that any attempt to create universal law that is based on social events will fail. First, social events arise from actual sequence of events and particular connecting processes [23]. This complexity makes them singular events that cannot be subjected to general laws. Second, the difficulty of conducting controlled experiments excludes any possibility to uncover universal social law, if one exists. Therefore, this doctrine claims that social enquiry is mainly concerned with the description the experiences that led to particular events [21]. However, they stress that such descriptive accounts do not have any predictive power. Therefore, according to this perspective, there is a division between explanation and prediction, as social events are singular.
The third major approach to social analysis is the mechanistic approach, or simply mechanisms. A mechanism-based approach was developed as intermediate-level approach between general laws and descriptive accounts. Some scholars have proposed small-scale social processes to be the units of causal analysis, recognising the difficulty of analysing large-scale social events or processes in the framework of general covering rules [24]. Consequently, they introduced the concept of mechanism as a process-based approach that has explanatory and predictive power [25].
Various definitions of mechanisms have been proposed in the literature [23,26–34]. However, some characteristics are common among most of the accepted definitions. Two main characteristics of mechanism can be distinguished that not only define the nature of mechanisms, but also distinguish them from covering laws. First, covering laws analysis provides a black-box causal explanation between two events, while assuming that the causal link between them is devoid of structure. To the contrary, the structure of the link and its dynamic process are the main determinants of the terminal event. As Elster ([35], p. 49) explains, “going from a black-box regularity to mechanisms is to go from If A, then always B to If A, then always C, D, and B”. Second, having multiple mechanisms as explanatory options for any particular situation means that any particular mechanism is not absolutely true. It can be true in particular instances while being untrue in others. Again, as Elster ([35], p. 49) clarifies, “the move from theory to mechanism is from If A, then always B to If A, then sometimes B”. Therefore, the problem in any particular situation is to determine which mechanism has been followed, or can be applied, in this case [36].
The term mechanism is used in this study to refer to a scientific representation of a social process that produces a particular set of changes from initial conditions to terminal conditions in the light of all indicated above. The agents and activities involved in this process and their organisation, as well as the environment that constrains the process determine the process dynamics, operation, and outcome. This environment includes all physical, legal, psychological, economic, political, and social constraints of the process.
Consequently, a conflict resolution mechanism is defined as a scientific representation of a conflict resolution process, delineating the conflict parties, their activities in this process, the initial and terminal conditions of the process, and the conflict environment for the purpose of this study. The initial conditions refer to the state of the issues that represent the substance of the conflict among parties at the beginning of the conflict. Terminal conditions refer to the state of these conflict issues at the end of conflict resolution process. The conflict environment includes all physical, legal, psychological, economic, political, and social factors that influence the conflict resolution process. Figure 1 delineates the structure of conflict resolution mechanisms.
If a conflict resolution mechanism is used for explanatory purpose, it is referred to a positive or descriptive mechanism. In this case, its main objective would be to explain the process structure and dynamics that led from the given initial conditions the terminal conditions. On the other hand, if the mechanism is used for prediction and planning, it is referred to as a normative or prescriptive mechanism. Predicative mechanisms can be categorised into two types. In the first type, the initial conditions and the process structure and parties’ activities are given, while the terminal conditions are to be predicted. In the second, the initial conditions and the terminal conditions are given, while the process structure and parties’ activities are to be predicted. However, in reality, it is very common that analysts only have the current status identified, but not the optimal process or the optimal terminal conditions. It becomes their task to identify the optimal outcome and the optimal negotiations process to achieve that outcome. This conflict resolution mechanism structure is used in this study as thee analytical framework to examine the explanatory and predictive power of the theoretical water conflict resolution mechanisms presented in the literature.
