Transboundary water management Game‐theoretic lessons for projects on the US–Mexico border^⋆

Abstract

Of the twelve million people who live within 100 km of the US-Mexico border, 90 percent are clustered in transboundary sister cities that share common water sources and pollution problems. New institutions created to address environmental concerns over NAFTA offer the promise of greater financial and technical assistance for water management in border cities. This paper reviews US-Mexico border water issues and institutions. Using insights from game theory, it draws policy lessons for institutions funding border water projects. We examine how the design of assistance programs, technical support, and pre-existing water rights and regulations affect project outcomes. The diversity and geographic dispersion of water conflicts suggests potential for applying the interconnected game approach to US-Mexico water negotiations. 0 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

An agent-based platform for simulating complex human–aquifer interactions in managed groundwater systems

“…be used to retrofit published ABMs of land-use change (Matthews et al, 2007;Parker et al, 2003) with a groundwater component. Defining joint water sharing rules in transboundary aquifer problems such as the Guarani Aquifer System (South America), the Stampriet Kalahari Karoo Aquifer (Africa), or the Colorado River (US-Mexico border) (see Frisvold and Caswell, 2000;Tujchneider et al, 2013). In these cases, FlowLogo models could be used to explicitly represent the different socioeconomic drivers, groundwater right systems, and interests in environmental conservation of each state/party.…”

Water use scenarios assessment using multicriteria analysis

“…Game theory is useful in cases of adversarial situations (Getirana et al, 2008;Salazar et al, 2007), involving several stakeholders who can mutually influence each other with their choices. In particular, game theory is suitable for international basin (Ansink and Rujs, 2008) or transboundary water management situations (Frisvold and Caswell, 2000), or in cases with a clear 'rights scenario' between stakeholders (Wang et al, 2008) but with an interconnection of their gains. Moreover, game theory is also used for analyses of agreement on the management of a specific area (Ansink and Rujs, 2008) and in cases of pollution and restoration costs (Ni and Wang, 2007).…”

International cooperation among nation-states of the North Pacific Ocean on the problem of competition among salmon for a common pool of prey resources

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