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47. African Models of Transboundary Governance

Full Title:

Transboundary Water Governance for Agricultural and Economic Growth and Improved Livelihoods in the Limpopo and Volta Basins: Towards African Indigenous Models of Governance

Website:

http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/africa/atb/

Download project proposal [PDF 167Kb]

There are over 60 international river basins in Africa, and virtually every African country shares at least one of them. Implementation of basin-level integrated water resources management in Africa therefore requires international cooperation among riparian countries. While some basins have international agreements in place or under discussion, there are in fact few effective basin organizations. Nevertheless, there is strong political will among African leaders as articulated through the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, African Ministerial Council on Water, the Southern African Development Community and other institutions, supported by the African Development Bank, European Union and the World Bank, to invest in improved water governance and the development of water infrastructure.

The question is, thus, not whether transboundary water management in Africa should be strengthened, but rather how. In part, the needed knowledge can be derived from experiences in developed countries and Asia. However, there are at least three reasons why Africa must be cautious in copying the transboundary experience of others. First, general water scarcity in sub-Saharan Africa is primarily ‘economic’ water scarcity; i.e., it is not lack of water but the lack of financial and human resources and poor governance that are the key issues. This implies that the win-win option of capacity building for new resource development should receive higher priority than the division of scarce resources among competing users, as is often the case elsewhere. Second, sub-Saharan Africa is overwhelmingly poor, and there is an extreme dependence upon access to water for rural livelihoods, particularly for the poor and women—groups that tend not to be strongly represented in decision-making bodies at the international scale. Third, indigenous arrangements in the management of natural resources, in particular land and water, continue to be very important in Africa, a point invariably neglected in international agreements.

So how can transboundary institutions, which address sub-Saharan Africa’s unique conditions, be built? We hypothesize that through an indigenous African “bottom-up” approach, starting from local traditions and social arrangements, it will be possible to create more resilient and successful transboundary water institutions than would otherwise be possible, while also giving greater voice to the poor, women and men alike, in the process.

It is a methodology for developing such an indigenous approach to transboundary water institutions, applied to Sub-Saharan Africa that forms the basis of this project. In particular, the project will: 1) support project partners in constructing networks of researchers and implementers to increase awareness of African indigenous structures and disseminate project results, 2) create both “top-down” and “bottom-up” profiles of transboundary governance issues in two case study basins, the Volta and Limpopo, and 3) develop specific recommendations for including indigenous principles in the two case study basins by integrating the top-down and bottom-up approaches and develop a generic framework for incorporating indigenous principles throughout sub-Saharan Africa.