Blending Cross-Sectoral Approaches For Peaceful Cooperation Over Water: Lessons from the water, peace and security partnership

art by Nina Montenegro (USA)

Jessica Hartog (International Alert); Joyce Kortlandt (Wetlands International)

Water-related conflicts are inherently complex and require different sectors to work together in realizing lasting peaceful solutions that tackle their direct and indirect causes.

Context

There is increasing concern that this century will see a surge in water-related conflicts, especially at the sub-national level. Population growth and rapid economic development mean that demand for water is growing whilst supply is becoming increasingly scarce, unreliable, or unusable due to the impacts of climate change, ecosystem degradation, and water pollution. These developments risk increasing social tensions through direct competition over water resources, or indirectly by undermining livelihoods, health, and economies.

Whether this does contribute to an increased level of conflict depends on the resilience of communities and societies. There are no easy solutions to tackling this. We need to bring together a technical understanding of water availability and management with the contextual understanding of the wider political economy, governance, social cohesion, social and economic inequality, and marginalization. To achieve this requires that sectors work together with a truly integrated approach.

Calls for breaking the siloes are not new, yet it remains a challenge to bring actors from different sectors together to explore and agree on joint solutions. There are institutional barriers that hamper cross-disciplinary coordination and communication, further complicated by differences in education, language, and cultural background. However, if we are to address water-related security risks, we must find ways to overcome these obstacles. The Water, Peace and Security (WPS) approach is one illustration of a partnership that is working to achieve this.

What’s been done

The mission of the WPS partnership is to raise awareness around water-related security risks and to propose and support efforts to address these risks. Six partner organizations with expertise ranging from water, wetlands ecosystems, geopolitics, security, to peacebuilding, work together in motivating and supporting policy makers and communities to take coordinated action at an early stage. We are currently working in Iraq, Kenya, and the Sahel, where we take an environmental peacebuilding approach with the expectation that bringing different parties together from across different sectors will foster dialogue and cooperation over water resources. We recognize that for this to be successful, we have to start from an understanding of the wider political economy and factor this into our interventions.

In Mali, we work to improve peaceful cooperation over water resources in the Inner Niger Delta. The area is embroiled in a violent conflict. The underlying causes of the crisis are long-standing and complex, but political choices prioritizing urban over rural needs have meant that increasing agricultural production and energy supply have come at a cost to rural communities and especially nomadic herders and fisher folk.

This situation is compounded by the increasing frequency and intensity of both floods and droughts. As a result, nomadic herders, farmers, and fisher folk compete over shrinking water resources. This situation is made even more vulnerable by the destabilization of the central government, resulting in poor governance of the remaining resources.  Weak governance and lack of trust in, and protection by, the state opens the space for armed groups (Islamist insurgent groups, criminal groups, or self-defence militias) to capitalize on this absence. They offer an alternative model to populations that feel disadvantaged by the system, thus contributing to the destabilization of the government and fuelling conflict.

The challenges are multiple and complex. There are no easy fixes. This crisis requires a coordinated response that understands and engages with the challenges around water, agriculture, energy, environmental protection, and security. It requires a response that addresses the ecosystem problems while enhancing social cohesion and governance systems.

To address these challenges, the WPS partnership is convening interlocutors at national, sub-regional, and local levels. They develop a shared understanding of the links between water use, livelihoods, and related conflict in the Inner Niger Delta with help of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Using different datasets, actors zoom in on the local water resource system and jointly identify:

●      Which groups of people may be impacted by changes in the water flow;

●      Which environmental, social, institutional, economic, and cultural factors play a role in the impact this has on their lives and;

●      What behaviour and choices each actor may develop in response.

Such discussions help to find common ground and potential entry points for conflict-sensitive water governance based on mutual understanding and trust. Ultimately, those tools will support informed, participatory decision making around the use of water resources in the Inner Niger Delta—which offers an opportunity to prevent water conflicts in the region.

Looking ahead

When pursuing environmental peacebuilding goals, there needs to be a shared understanding of what is driving these conflicts in each specific context, along with an understanding of each party’s perspectives, interests, and methods, before being able to embark on a journey of joint solution seeking. In Mali, for example, preparing and using different quantitative and qualitative datasets in a dialogue process has been instrumental in gathering different sector and livelihood group representatives around the table and has helped facilitate a shared analysis of the different causes of water-related conflicts. This is not an approach that should be taken lightly. It requires trust-building among the sectors involved, raising awareness about the importance of cross-sectoral collaboration. The use of datasets to establish a common ground can be helpful, especially when discussing issues that require quantitative analysis to understand the water stress situation. This requires robust datasets based on and verified during a participatory process. Furthermore, the understanding and ability to use these datasets needs to be nurtured among local facilitators and participants in the dialogue process.