New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014 | Page 43

New Water Policy and Practice

counterproductive, leading to diminished
confidence in governing institutions and a
lost opportunity to tackle a problem (Butterworth et al. 2010; Corcoran et al. 2010).

Working within the political, social,
and economic complexity of transboundary
watersheds requires site-specific and adaptive wastewater management strategies.
This is because up-stream and down-stream
dynamics, differences in political and governance systems, and asymmetries in water
and wastewater infrastructure make the
implementation of centralized wastewater
systems difficult. The hydrological reality
is that watershed boundaries often do not
follow political and administrative borders;
in fact, 60% of the world’s watersheds are
transboundary, meaning that they cross
international political borders. With 40%
of the world’s diverse population living in
transboundary watersheds, water sources
traverse areas of social and economic diversity—and occasionally politically conflicted areas, such as in Israel and the Palestinian Territories (UN Water 2008). A
government mandated water management
scheme is insufficient here because of this
complexity, so we must reevaluate how to
share water more effectively and promote
cooperative water resources management.
This is especially true where political conflict causes dramatic asymmetries in power
and infrastructure, which is the case in the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict as well as in other regions of conflict.

With little to no centralized sanitation services in the Palestinian West Bank
and erratic centralized capacity in Gaza,
communities and individuals rely on inadequate methods of waste disposal, often
dumping untreated sewage directly into
streambeds. Because the West Bank is most
often up-stream from Israel, the untreated
sewage blights Israel's attempts to maintain and protect groundwater resources,

streams, and public health. Further, this
untreated sewage pollutes Israeli and Palestinian shared surface water and groundwater resources, which are already stressed by
drought, population growth, and over-exploitation of a scarce supply. Pollution
due to upstream sewage also exacerbates
cross-border conflict thus, in these and other transboundary cases wastewater management and conflict resolution go hand in
hand.

The asymmetry in the Israeli–Palestinian context is perhaps extreme but it
represents the complexity of transboundary water and wastewater management.
Whereas, in Israel, a relatively stable government and economy has provided extensive centralized infrastructure (over
90% of the population is connected to a
centralized wastewater treatment facility
(Al-Sa'ed and Al-Hindi 2010)) only 35% of
the Palestinian population has access to adequate sanitation (Al-Sa'ed 2010). Further,
the Palestinian Territories are dependent
on financial support for wastewater infrastructure projects from international donors (Aburdeineh et al. 2010). In addition,
political and bureaucratic barriers make
it difficult for the Palestinian Authority to
obtain permits from the Israeli government
to build and operate centralized wastewater
treatment facilities in the West Bank. For
example, plans for a centralized wastewater treatment facility to serve Hebron were
stalled for almost a decade and the facility
has yet to commence service (Qudsi 2014).
In such a situation, large quantit