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Review of Bridges Over Water: Understanding Transboundary Water Conflict, Negotiation and Cooperation

Bridges Over Water is a textbook that persuades as well as informs. In its own words, it ‘‘debunks’’ the water wars thesis, insisting that political disputes and even armed ‘‘skirmishes’’ have (and will) lead to cooperative management of water scarcity. To hasten this outcome, Bridges Over Water advocates research that uncovers and delineates the connections between conflict and cooperation. This book inaugurates the requisite comparative, integrated analysis of water treaties governing major river basins throughout the world. The book conveys its argument through its substance and through its structure. The first two chapters introduce issues arising from transboundary freshwater management. Neither polemical nor narrow, the literature review is evenhanded and critical, showing the need for a more comprehensive research agenda to advance water negotiations and cooperative agreements. Chapter 3 then surveys international water law, which is described as setting a context for conflict and negotiation even when an agreement is not yet in place. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 present economics and game theory as providing the intellectual frameworks—incentives, motivations, and associated calculations—for understanding the relationships that are expressed through conflict, negotiation, and cooperation. The use of a prisoner’s dilemma game to illustrate the process of groundwater management is particularly helpful. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 draw upon the theories of international relations and global studies to compare water treaties, while using economics and game theory to explain relationships among states. Chapter 10 discusses river basin modeling, which generates the empirical data requisite to sustainable and effective water agreements. Chapter 11, the conclusion, reminds the reader of the text’s agenda for research and activism, which is even more fully explored and tested in a series of appendices. These include four case studies, the texts of three transboundary water agreements, an analytic template for assessing transboundary river basin management, and an additional game theory application.