First Draft Paper 8
A Joint Project of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs &
the Centre for International Cooperation and Security
Conflict Prevention, Management and Reduction in Africa
Paper 8
Access to freshwater and Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution in Africa
Volker Boege and Mandy Turner
Financed by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland
Executive Summary
Water-related conflicts are caused by the way in which water and its uses are governed, which inevitably involves conflicting interests. Water is not only becoming a scarce resource but is also one that is divided unevenly between regions and states, and within societies. Unevenly divided scarce resources are – as history shows – contentious subjects which can lead to conflict. Conflicts may easily arise if water is, or is perceived as being, (over)used and/or degraded by other actors at a cost to oneself. The possibility of conflicts over access to and use of freshwater poses a serious threat to both human security and the security of states, especially in regions of the world seriously affected by water scarcity. There is no doubt that the challenges facing extending access to freshwater and harnessing water resources for modernization/development programmes in sub-Saharan Africa are huge. These efforts have had, and will continue to have, the potential, if not managed properly, to provoke unrest and violence. There are a number of factors which will impact on water resources – climate change, increasing population and urbanization – and thus increase the potential for conflict creation.
More than 260 rivers in the world transcend international boundaries and are used by more than two or more riparian states – 63 are on the African continent. It is hence easy to imagine the number of potential international conflicts as any unilateral action by one riparian that affects the quantity or quality of water flowing down a shared river system can seriously impact on other riparians. Therefore any endeavours to develop the river economically and make use of its resources, e.g. the production of hydroenergy, can become contentious. However recent important empirical work has concluded that the risk of “water wars” between states has been exaggerated and that fully-fledged inter-state wars over water are less likely than localised violent conflict over: actions that degrade water quality, reduce access or heighten competition over access; the impact of dams and diversions, and the privatization of water services. In addition, major advances made in transboundary water governance – such as Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) and the creation of regional, pan-African and river basin institutions, has reduced the potential for water-related conflict between states. The European Water Initiative has given valuable support to building capacity in this regard.
While transboundary water governance has made great advances, there exists a huge lacuna at the local level. The main future priorities therefore, should be to support the continuation and extension of IWRM, particularly down to the local level. Stakeholder participation, while not a panacea, is a necessary aspect of pro-poor water governance and conflict prevention, particularly given that in the future intra-state conflicts over water – so called “water riots” – are likely to be more common occurrences than inter-state conflicts.
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Map 1: African River Basins[1]
Introduction
Water-related conflicts are caused by the way in which water and its uses are governed, which inevitably involves conflicting interests (rather than merely the issue of scarcity). Water is not only becoming a scarce resource but is also one that is divided extremely unevenly between regions and states as well as within societies. Unevenly divided scarce resources are – as history shows – contentious subjects which can lead to conflict.[2] Conflicts may easily arise if water is, or is perceived as being, (over-)used and/or degraded by other actors at a cost to oneself. The possibility of conflicts over access to and use of freshwater therefore poses a serious threat to both human security and the security of states, especially in those regions of the world already severely affected by water scarcity. However, while there is always likely to be competition for water resources – at inter-state, regional and local level – it is how competing interests are addressed which is important for the prevention, management and resolution of conflict. The structures that manage and govern water resources therefore need to recognise the conflicting interests at different levels and mediate between them.
This paper assesses some of the key issues relating to access to freshwater and CPMR in Africa. Section 1 outlines some of the key issues facing Africa in terms of freshwater provision, including impacts on resources. Section 2 provides a brief overview of the existing literature relating to conflict and water, which are divided here into the (albeit interconnected) problems of inter-state and intra-state conflict. Section 3 explores the catalysts of international water-related conflicts and identifies future hotspots. Section 4 assesses the potential for intra-state, local conflicts over water. It identifies five key issues around which (different) communities mobilise: the degradation of water quality; pastoral grazing rights; irrigation schemes; large dams; and water privatisation. Section 5 moves on to an assessment of existing mechanisms for CPMR, focusing on water governance and River Basin Organisations. The paper also provides an assessment of the European Water Initiative (EUWI) as it pertains to Africa. This section finishes with an overview of the shortcomings of current water governance strategies, particularly relating to the local level. Section 7 identifies the development of meaningful stakeholder participation as a key priority for national governments and international actors, particularly if the poor are to have equitable access to freshwater. The concluding section 8 argues that the ultimate aim of all these endeavours to address water-related CPMR directly or indirectly should be the development of new ways of conflict-sensitive thinking about water governance based on community participation and equality of access to fresh water.
1. Dimensions and scale of problem
There is no doubt that the challenges facing extending access to freshwater and harnessing water resources for modernisation/development programmes in sub-Saharan Africa are huge. These efforts have had, and will continue to have, the potential, if not managed properly, to provoke unrest and violence. There are a number of factors which will impact on water resources – climate change, increasing population and urbanisation, and industrialisation – and thus increase the potential for conflict creation. These are outlined below. The section concludes with some thoughts on potential to meet the MDG relating to water provision and sanitation.
1.1 Climate change
According to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the African continent is the most vulnerable to climate change. Runoff and water availability are expected to decline in the northern and southern regions of the continent; and the frequency of floods and droughts will increase. As a result, 25 African countries are expected to experience water scarcity or water stress over the next 20–30 years.[3] Some of these changes are happening already. The flow of Africa’s rivers has been declining over the past 10 years.[4] Large donors such as USAID and DFID are funding projects on managing the impact of climate change in the developing world. However, these are unlikely to have any major impact while political will to reduce CO2 emissions in the North is weak.[5] However, while it is clear that climate change is going to have an impact on water resources worldwide and thus considerable conflict-creating potential, there seems to be some consensus among researchers that “poverty and the lack of institutions to manage conflicts are more important reasons for conflict than actual scarcity”.[6]
1.2 Increasing population and urbanisation
The annual per capita requirement for water for habitation and subsistence crop production is 1250 cubic metres. A large number of countries are already suffering from severe water scarcity and the situation is likely to worsen since per capita availability declines with increasing population levels.[7] The demand for water use is also being ratcheted up by the global trend towards urbanisation. Population numbers in most urban areas, particularly in developing countries, increase faster than general population growth. This will create problems for water resource planning as cities cannot be easily relocated to areas where there is a better water source nearby. Increasing population also means a need for more food, and hence more water required for irrigation. In Africa, 60 per cent of food production is from non-irrigated agriculture. A sizeable part of irrigation potential is already used in North Africa, but a large part remains unused in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1999 UNESCO reported that irrigated land as a percentage of potential was only 13 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa, whereas in South Asia it was 85 per cent.[8] Water for irrigation is a high priority for economic development and stability.[9] This has fuelled the construction of dams across Africa. The region hosts more than 1,200 dams, more than 60 per cent of which are located in South Africa (539) and Zimbabwe (213). More than 50 per cent of these were constructed to facilitate irrigation, only 6 per cent for electricity generation.
1.3 Industrialisation
As industrialisation and urbanisation increases apace across Africa (and indeed the rest of the developing world), problems of pollution will emerge unless industries have strict control frameworks to ensure that water sources such as rivers, lakes etc do not become polluted. National level development priorities may conflict with the day-to-day priorities of the poor at local levels. Hydropower projects, for instance, require flooding large areas, the clearing of forests and the relocation of the local population. This is a source of tension and conflicts, as witnessed for instance in India, China, the Philippines and Africa. It is generally accepted that access to energy services is a prerequisite to the achievement of all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The International Energy Agency estimates that four out of five people without energy live in rural areas predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.[10] Outside of West Africa, only the richest 20 per cent of households have electricity. Electricity supply, of course, is not the only energy source. However, despite potential conflictual issues arising from their location, the construction of hydroelectric dams is likely to continue as sub-Saharan African countries try to raise energy standards.
1.4 Meeting the MDG on water and sanitation
Unfortunately, water and sanitation has a low priority within many national government development plans due to lack of sufficient information on the plight of the urban and rural poor (or indifference to it) and a failure to understand the severe health, social and economic impacts of inadequate access. In Sierra Leone, for instance, the road fund receives twice as much as water services despite the fact that in a 2004 Participatory Poverty Assessment, sickness and ill health were named as the number one cause of poverty, a large proportion of which is due to unsafe water and inadequate hygiene.[11] All of these issues are likely to aggravate an already desperate situation. Africa’s share of global freshwater resources is about 9 per cent.[12] These resources are distributed unevenly across the continent – western Africa and central Africa have greater precipitation than northern Africa, the Horn of Africa and southern Africa. Africa has the lowest proportional coverage of any region of the world – only 64 per cent of the population has access to improved water supply. The situation is worse in rural areas, where coverage is only 50 per cent compared with 86 per cent in urban areas (this drops to 50 per cent in urban areas if the definition of supply is a house connection or yard tap).[13] Meeting the MDGs and the targets set during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 (reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and the proportion of people who do not have access to basic sanitation by 2015) will require tripling the rate at which additional people gained access to water between 1990 and 2000 and quadrupling the rate at which sanitation was improved.[14] It is very unlikely that this will be achieved in sub-Saharan Africa given the current levels of investment and funding.[15]
2. Recent research into water and conflict
Until very recently, research relating to water and conflict focused on the idea of “water wars”. This relates predominantly to conflict at the inter-state level, particularly around transboundary river systems. However, recent important empirical work (reviewed below) concludes that the risk of water wars between states has been exaggerated and largely overtaken by the problem of localised intra-state conflict, dubbed “water riots”.
2.1 The ‘water wars’ discourse
There have been serious tensions between upstream and downstream or bordering riparians of the Nile River, the Euphrates and Tigris, the Jordan River, the Amu-Darja and Syr-Darja. The “water wars” discourse repeatedly refers to these cases. However, in doing so, a highly distorted picture has been presented. Despite the vast number of transboundary river systems (260 worldwide, 63 on the African continent) there have been no serious conflicts to date, and even in the most conflict-prone cases violence has been avoided. The “Basins at Risk” (BAR) project at Oregon State University conducted comprehensive empirical work on the issue of international water courses and conflict. The findings of this project, presented in the “Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database” (TFDD), have put the “water wars” thesis into perspective. The project assessed all reported events of conflict and cooperation over water resources between two or more states from 1948 to 2000. It found that of the 1,831 interactions between riparians, the vast majority (1,228) were of a cooperative nature. Indeed, over the past 50 years approximately 200 treaties on the common use of shared water courses have been put into effect. Of the 507 conflictive events registered, only in 37 cases was violence used and only 21 of these included military action. Of these 21 cases (out of 1,831) 18 involved Israel and its neighbours, hence a very specific conflict constellation. In the database not one single “water war” can be found.[16]
The danger of “water wars” may be exaggerated but there is no doubt that water scarcity deriving from environmental degradation can and does lead to conflicts between (and within) states. At present the situation with regard to international river courses is characterised by a spectrum ranging between the extremes of: a) (rare) best practice examples of coordinated and integrated management of international water courses; and b) (also rare, albeit dangerous) cases in which a violent escalation of water-related disputes could happen. For instance, in 1999 Egypt’s President, Hosni Mubarak, threatened to bomb Ethiopia if it carried out plans for building dams on the Nile to the detriment of Egypt. These kinds of tensions have hampered development, not only in the case of the Nile, but also with regard to other international river courses.
2.2 New research on ‘water riots’
As reviewed above, recent research has shown that large-scale inter-state wars over water are less likely than localised violent conflict.[17] However, due to the overwhelming academic and policy focus on “water wars” little attention has been given to local water conflicts until recently. As discussed in greater detail in section 4 below, water conflicts have emerged at the local level in Africa over: the degradation of water quality; reduced access or heightened competition over access; the impact of dams and diversions; and the privatisation of water services. However, as concluded by researchers at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS); “Our current knowledge of local water-related conflicts is sporadic, making it difficult to assess their character, number and intensity.”[18]
Intra-state violence between different groups, and between different groups and a state or business over access to freshwater is a growing concern. With respect to dams, the World Commission on Dams, whose final report was launched in 2000, reviewed the impact of dams and offered recommendations which are discussed in section 4.1 below.[19] The issue has also been highlighted by journalists and campaigners such as Arundhati Roy. And, over the past two years, there has been an emergence of research on the issue of water privatization and its potential for creating conflict at the local level.[20] Nevertheless, local-level conflict remains a relatively under-examined and under-theorised issue in academic and policy circles.[21]
However, there is extremely rich (both empirical and theoretical) research being conducted on water governance that focuses on local level involvement.[22] Although most of it does not deal directly with conflict, it is grappling with the problems of power relations and how to ensure local participation in decision-making. For this reason, we posit in section 5.4 that it offers a fruitful avenue for exploring pro-poor CPMR.
3. International water-related conflicts in Africa
States sharing a river basin constitute a highly complex, interdependent hydropolitical system, the dynamics of which are intimately interwoven in terms of the environment, the economy, politics and security. Therefore hydropolitics have become an important area of international policy. More than 260 rivers in the world transcend international boundaries and are used by two or more riparian states – 63 are on the African continent. It is hence easy to imagine the number of potential international conflicts. Any unilateral activity by one riparian that affects the quantity or quality of water flowing down a shared river system can seriously impact on other riparians. Many states are dependent on water resources generated outside of their territories. Therefore, any endeavours to develop the river economically and make use of its resources, e.g. the production of hydroenergy, can become issues of contention. This section assesses the transboundary rivers in Africa most at risk of conflict escalation, with attention paid to the experience of the Nile and the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. Box 3.1 below summarises what we believe to be the main causes of water-related conflict.