Busting the Water Wars myth: how cooperation is preferred to conflict in Southern Africa

  It has often been suggested that conflicts over water will become increasingly common as the demand for water resources increases and a growing area experiences water scarcity (defined by existing metrics). This notion is not difficult to comprehend: as water becomes a scarce resource, nations will take stronger actions to ensure their water needs are met, thus increasingly the likelihood of conflicts over the distribution of water in trans-boundary water resources. Despite the pessimistic and Malthusian nature of this notion, it is a widely accepted theory that has been backed up by examples and literature. However, the example of Southern Africa would seem to buck this theory and it is upon this example and its analysis by Turton et al. (2010) that this post will be based.
  One of the more striking aspects of the south African example is how on paper conflict should be the far likelier outcome. Water is considered to be a major constraint for development in southern African nations and the colonial legacy (more specifically the arbitrary ways in which national boundaries are created during decolonisation) of region would all seem to suggest the presence of water-related conflicts-- a theory reinforced by the fact that 6 river basins in the region are considered to be 'basins at risk.'
  However despite this designation trans-boundary river basins in southern Africa have remained relatively peaceful, prompting Turton and his colleagues to suggest that there must be an alternative theory to the Water Wars idea at work in the region. After examining researches on river basins across the global, they have came up with an alternate conceptualisation of trans-boundary water resource management they called Hydropolitical Complex. This concept is underpinned by the ideas that a track record of peaceful cooperation is a good indicator of future behaviour and that endemic water scarcity within a shared river basin will produce sufficient incentive for nations to negotiate a long-term resolution rather than resort to violence. The Hydropolitical Complex stipulates that pivotal states (i.e. the more developed nations of the region) and pivotal basins (river basins shared between pivotal states) determine the ways in which trans-boundary water resources will be managed in the region. As such, the fact that the pivotal states in southern Africa have a long history of cooperation even without the existence of clear structure for collaboration could be used to explain the lack of water-related conflict in the region.
  Though the Hydropolitical Complex has only been applied to too limited a set of river basins to be considered universally applicable, it nonetheless offers an alternative view to trans-boundary water resource management; suggesting that trans-boundary water resource management should not focus on independent water resources but on all pivotal basins in the region as a whole.