This award was funded through the Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict, and Cooperation competition, a joint venture between NSF and the Department of Defense.
The goal of this project is to determine whether and how international institutions can prevent and manage conflicts between riparian states. Due to population growth, pollution, development, and climate change, humanity is facing the prospect of inadequate access to water, which is straining the Earth's international river systems. The growing consumption of river water has important implications for global security, as the unregulated use of rivers exacerbates problems of pollution and water scarcity and increases the risk of political and military conflict between states.
This project focuses specifically on treaties that govern the use of international rivers. The central hypothesis is that the ability of a river treaty to prevent conflict depends on the treaty's level of institutionalization that is the extent of formal institutional features it provides to oversee the agreement. The impact of four institutional features is investigated: monitoring provisions, conflict management provisions, enforcement mechanisms, and permanent intergovernmental organizations. The theory posits two different casual mechanisms. First, by supporting the cooperative management of rivers, treaty institutionalization can address the core problem of water scarcity and prevent the emergence of conflict. Second, in the event that disputes over rivers do arise, treaty institutionalization can provide mechanisms to resolve them before they escalate to militarized conflict. These expectations are tested using a large sample of river treaties signed between 1950 and 2007 and on several different outcomes: the emergence of competing claims to a river, militarization of those claims, dispute settlement attempts, and successful conflict resolution.
This project represents a novel extension of theories of international institutions and international law into the topic of environmental security. It presents a new theoretical model of the effect of international institutions on conflict based on two distinct causal mechanisms, and tests the predictions of this model with a comprehensive data set. It builds on and extends a growing number of empirical studies of the management and resolution of conflicts over rivers by treating river cooperation agreements in a much more detailed and nuanced fashion. The findings of this study also have implications for the extant literature on conflict management, the design of international institutions, and compliance with international law.
This project will inform policy in an area of growing importance to global security. If international institutions do promote cooperation and facilitate conflict management, then supporting the creation of institutionalized river treaties should be a natural policy response to the growing problem of water scarcity. Promoting the management of rivers through institutionalized agreements could help prevent the water wars that some scholars anticipate in the coming decades. Thus, institutions could play an important part in a proactive foreign policy that seeks to prevent or manage conflicts over water, heading off the need for greater military involvement after those conflicts escalate. This is also relevant for global climate change, given that some of the many anticipated consequences of climate change are widespread reductions and significant irregularities in the volume of river flows. The promotion of new and improvement of existing river treaties present considerable opportunities because over half of the World's rivers are not yet covered by any agreement while well over one-half of the existing treaties are only minimally institutionalized. But the optimal design of (new) agreements will require a detailed and rigorous understanding of the effects and utility of specific institutional features.
