How has the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam changed the legal, political, economic and scientific dynamics in the Nile Basin?

Yihdego, Zeray; Rieu‐Clarke, Alistair; Cascão, Ana Elisa

doi:10.1080/02508060.2016.1209008

Cited by 28 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 8 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This may partly be due to inadequate compensation and partly to an uneven split of total profit. Since cooperation is mostly conditional, providing a set of preconditions, such as a series of motivation options, are available, and certain ranges of incentives are ensured, cooperation continues [46]. In Figure 4, the percentage numbers of each round of the game represent the chances of cooperation for all the groups' decisions during the game.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Trust-building in Fostering Cooperation in the Eastern Nile Basin: A Case of Experimental Game Application

Motlagh

Bhaduri

Bogárdi

et al. 2017

J. nat. resour. dev.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Escalating tension and a sense of mistrust currently prevail between downstream and upstream countries in the Nile Basin over Ethiopia's construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Striving for self-sufficiency in hydropower generation, Ethiopia has initiated a new series of upstream reservoir construction projects, with the GERD being the largest, and this may affect the water availability in downstream countries of Egypt and Sudan. This paper examines a set of compensation options to induce cooperation through trust-building, possibly minimizing uncertainties in water allocation decision-making and simplifying complex interrelationships in the basin using laboratory game experiments. The game was developed and conducted using hydro-economic modeling of the basin with GAMS software, an expert survey with the SPSS program and Z-tree software to design and analyze the laboratory experiment. This paper presents the results of the laboratory game experiment where the Eastern Nile Basin scenario was modeled as a multi-round, adjusted trust game with nonbinding deals among players. The results suggest that the "win for all" situation may be reached through a stable integrative, cooperative framework. Building the enabling environment, in particular, transparency, knowledge, trust, and confidence among riparian states is the first step in developing transboundary cooperation. Basin-wide cooperation requires a transparent environment including a variety of compensation options, institutional changes, and incentive-compatible considerations.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Trust-building in Fostering Cooperation in the Eastern Nile Basin: A Case of Experimental Game Application

Motlagh

Bhaduri

Bogárdi

et al. 2017

J. nat. resour. dev.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For illustrative purposes, Figure 1 presents a geographic conceptualisation of the key actors and processes that shape dam planning in a hypothetical country setting, showing how these actors and linkages might be distributed across the levels of analysis of the framework. Overall, the bulk of the existing literature tends to focus on one of two things: either the international dynamics shaping water governance within river basins and in terms of linkages to global actors (for example, on the Nile Basin, see Nicol & Cascão, 2011;Salman, 2016;Tawfik, 2016aTawfik, , 2016bYihdego et al, 2016); or the local level impacts of dams and the response of local communities to them (Tsikata, 2006;Turton, 2011;Lavers, 2012;Kirchherr et al, 2017). Comparatively underresearched areas include the interlinkages between intra-elite relations, the hydro-bureaucracy and sources of domestic and international finance in the resurgence era, as well as the political economic relations shaping the choice of construction and engineering companies.…”

Section: Conceptualising the Politics Of Dams: A Research Agendamentioning

confidence: 99%

Theorising the Political Economy of Dams: Towards a Research Agenda

Lavers

Dye

2019

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The politics of dams has been analysed from a range of disciplinary perspectivesincluding comparative politics, international relations, political economy and political ecologyand at varying levelsinternational, national and local. This paper provides a critical review of this literature, highlighting key research themes and gaps in current analysis as a means of developing a broad framework and research agenda for the FutureDAMS project. This framework emphasises the importance of integrating material and ideational drivers of dams across multiple levels of analysis. Much valuable work has been done on the international politics of dams and the micro-politics of displacement and resistance to dam construction. However, a comparatively neglected area of studyparticularly where the recent dam boom in developing countries is concernedis to link these transnational and micro-political processes to national-level decision making. To this end, the paper proposes a central concern with such national-level processes, including process tracing decision making, the distributional politics of energy, the development of bureaucratic and technical capacity to carry out dam projects and the companies contracted to build, assess and design dams.

show abstract

“…As Fred Pearce (2015) observed, this threat worked until 2011 but then, when Egypt was going through the turbulences of the Arab Spring, Ethiopia seized the moment and, without warning, began building the GERD on the Blue Nile. The launch of the GERD represents, according to many (among others Hammond, 2013;Chen & Swain, 2014;Yihdego et al, 2016), a turning point in water politics in the Nile River Basin, as it brings a change to the balance of power between its two most populous countries. It also led scholars and analysts to identify Ethiopia as the new emerging hegemon in Africa (Gebreluel, 2014: Verhoeven, 2015, and the journal Water International (2016) dedicated a special issue exclusively to the GERD.…”

Section: Water Politics In the Nile River Basinmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hydropolis: Reinterpreting the polis in water politics

Menga

2017

Political Geography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The construction of a large dam is often a contested and controversial matter. Delicate aspects related to the dam construction business such as the resettlement of peoples, environmental impact and financial costs, can trigger popular discontent and hinder the realisation of a particular project. By advancing the notion of the hydropolis, a reinterpretation of Hannah Arendt (1958) definition of the polis, this paper will explore how ruling elites can manipulate the public opinion to politically construct a large dam as a foreign policy matter. This, it will be argued, serves to conceal the negative consequences of a dam so that issues related to its social and environmental impact are removed from the national political debate. Specifically, the case of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in Ethiopia will be used to illustrate how a large dam can become a geopolitical object grounded on the friend/enemy distinction, in the context of the longstanding geopolitical tensions in the Nile River Basin.

show abstract

How has the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam changed the legal, political, economic and scientific dynamics in the Nile Basin?

Cited by 28 publications

References 8 publications

The Role of Trust-building in Fostering Cooperation in the Eastern Nile Basin: A Case of Experimental Game Application

The Role of Trust-building in Fostering Cooperation in the Eastern Nile Basin: A Case of Experimental Game Application

Theorising the Political Economy of Dams: Towards a Research Agenda

Hydropolis: Reinterpreting the polis in water politics

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About