New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014 | Page 13

New Water Policy and Practice electricity shortages. It is a matter of fact that many of Africa’s rivers are shared between more than one country in a variety of geographical configurations. This is cited as the potential cause for conflict. Further, it is often stated (and taken for granted) that the development of water resource infrastructure on shared rivers should be undertaken jointly by riparian states. To this end, it is recommended that River Basin Organizations be established by riparian countries and be given sovereign powers to undertake such development and manage the water. These recommendations appear reasonable and more or less consistent with practice in other infrastructure sectors where cooperation is necessary to join roads, railways, and energy grids. Yet it ignores the fact that the shared rivers already provide the infrastructure linkages that other sectors need to build. And the assumption that joint projects are inherently preferable is often incorrect because Africa’s water resources are (with notable exceptions in the south and north of the continent) still barely used. There are thus usually better national projects (in terms of cost and location) than projects shared between a number of countries—and that is before the transaction costs of cooperative projects are considered (this is documented in more detail in Muller 2014). What is required on shared rivers is some system of communication to ensure that information about hydrology and other dimensions can be shared and proposed developments and their cross-border impacts can be discussed. It has been repeatedly demonstrated in practice that the institutional requirements for this can usually be met by inter-governmental committees rather than stand-alone institutions. Indeed, evidence from other parts of the world including Europe (with the Rhine) and South East Asia (the Mekong) suggest that areas of water management that require the involvement of national governments are best organized on a cooperative rather than an integrated basis, in order to ensure effective liaison between sectors within each country which is often more challenging than the liaison between water authorities of different countries. In Africa, almost all effective river basin cooperation that has produced demonstrable outcomes has been organized on the basis of ad hoc inter-governmental cooperat