Title: Cooperation over the Nile basin water management and the permanent risk of conflicts

Authors: Olivier Dismas Ndayambaje

Addresses: Department of Political Science and International Relations, National School of Administration/Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA Burundi), Bujumbura, Burundi-BI

Abstract: The Nile basin states are reluctant to undertake serious cooperation between them. All through the history, the agreements over the use of the Nile waters have been partial biding some of the riparian countries. All the attempts to set an inclusive treat like the Cooperative Framework Agreement in the Nile Basin came to fail maintaining a status quo to the benefit of Egypt. However, new trends are drawing a new configuration of the social, ecological, diplomatic and political context in the region causing the upstream states to contest this status quo. The construction and the exploitation of the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam shows how this region of Africa is subject to a permanent risk of armed conflict due to lack of collaborative use of the water resources of the Nile Basin. The research methodology used in this paper has been the desk study approach combining analysis of well renowned authors' writings and jurisprudence.

Keywords: water resource management; international watercourse; shared water; water conflicts; cooperation; Nile basin; cooperative framework agreement in the Nile Basin; Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.

DOI: 10.1504/IJW.2023.136042

International Journal of Water, 2023 Vol.15 No.4, pp.325 - 334

Received: 13 Dec 2022
Accepted: 23 Nov 2023
Published online: 12 Jan 2024 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article