Fragmented Governance of International Rivers: Negotiating Bilateral versus Multilateral Treaties1

Abstract

Despite warnings of interstate conflict over shared water resources, states are reaching hundreds of treaties and agreements over their international rivers. We have extensive knowledge about the negotiations process of individual treaties, but there is a paucity of systematic analysis of the forces influencing treaty formation. In addition, the few quantitative studies examining the formation of agreements fail to consider the different factors influencing the rise of bilateral versus multilateral agreements on multilateral basins. Correcting this omission is important because scholars have discovered that states frequently sign bilateral agreements over multilateral rivers, which contradicts the integrated river basin management approach advocated by environmentalists, engineers, and water experts. This study seeks to fill this vacuum within the existing literature by distinguishing between the formation of bilateral treaties on bilateral and multilateral basins and comparing these bilateral forms of cooperation to the formation of multilateral treaties on multilateral basins. Through quantitative analysis, we argue that treaty type is a by-product of state interest, transaction costs, and distribution of power.Although experts have been warning of the increasing potential for conflict over international rivers, states have been reaching hundreds of agreements to regulate their use of freshwater resources (Wolf 2002). An examination of these agreements reveals that the majority cover multilateral basins (shared by three or more states), even though 67% of the world's 263 international rivers are bilateral (shared by two states) (Wolf 1998). To govern multilateral basins, states have tended to select bilateral treaties rather than multilateral treaties (Song and Whittington 2004). Consequently, the conventional wisdom that has evolved is that negotiations are more likely to take place over multilateral rather than bilateral basins and that the by-product of these talks is more likely to be bilateral rather than multilateral treaties (Conca, Wu, and Mei 2006). However, we still 1 We thank Ariel Dinar, Mark Giordano, Paul Hensel, Cliff Morgan, Cameron Thies, and Jaroslav Tir for helpful comments. Replication data can be found online at http://www.saramitchell.org/research.html.

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