Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
principles, norms and rules are formed within several of the regime's arenas. Actors in
the governance regime meet within these arenas and create the principles and norms.
This happens at every governance level (from the international to the individual level)
and the activities on these levels are linked. An example at the international level is the
formation of the Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International
Watercourses and the formulation of the Draft Articles of the Law on Transboundary
Aquifers, which aims at setting up rules for a governance regime in which fair and
equitable use and the principle of no significant harm are paramount (United Nations
1997; Smidt and Satijn, 2013). This example further shows how difficult it can be
to establish a working regime with many different actors. Moreover, the regimes are
influenced heavily by the political, socio-economic and institutional domain within
which they are placed. Water governance takes place on different levels in a society,
and in different spaces of governance. Feitelson and Fischendler (2009) recognise five
different spaces of governance: the household, community, national, basin and eco-
nomic level. These different spaces of governance form different arenas in which actors
face one another. These spaces are interlinked and often defined by political structures.
5.3 CONFLICT AND COOPERATION
When we discuss conflict over resources, it is important to keep an eye on the complete
picture. Resources are part of the natural environment, and the human environment is
contingent on both. Influence and feedback mechanisms ensure that both the human
and natural system have a large impact on each other (Costanza et al. 1997). The
differences in the importance of resources for the human system and their importance
in the ecosystem also have a large influence on conflict. While oil is most important
in the human system and has little importance for sustaining the ecosystem, water is
of paramount importance to sustaining both systems. However, most people are more
aware of international and violent conflicts over oil than they are of conflicts over
water (Smidt and Satijn 2013). The latter do not lead to international wars, but they
do cause tensions, contribute to local conflicts, and result in considerable loss of life
and goods on a local scale. 11 This example demonstrates that resource management
conflicts differ greatly, whether the conflict is competitive, manipulative or inspired
by factors unrelated to the resource itself. This makes a broad theory of resource
conflicts an impossible feat. It is nevertheless useful to view the mechanisms at work
and recognize them, especially with regard to the political domain. Optimisation of
cooperation is the primary focus of literature on transboundary water management,
common pool resources management, and international and inter-organisational rela-
tions. Cooperation generally means working together. In practice, it may refer to the
11 Price and monopolised access to resources are key factors that determine the risk of war for a
resource. There is currently an international discussion about the possibility of 'water wars'. By
facilitating the development of cheap desalinisation techniques and higher energy efficiency in
transportation of water, the risk of international conflicts for water will be minimised. Uncer-
tainty arises when water is part of a conflict that is rooted in the domains of politics and religion.
The GPP's contribution to this dispute will be to link knowledge available within the water sector
(Wolf et al. 2005; Zeitoun et al. 2010) to other sectors like public health (viz. de Jong, 2010) and
as called upon in integrative studies (Steenbergen and El Haouri 2011; Smidt and Satijn 2013).
 
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