ABSTRACT
Two hundred and sixty-one of the world’s river basins are shared by more than one country. Some 45 per cent of the world’s land territory lies within international river basins, and 40 per cent of the world’s population shares water across borders by living in such basins. Sixty per cent of the world’s freshwater surface flow is within basins that are used in common between two or more countries (Wolf et al. 2003). Transboundary water management is thus one of the key areas in which there is a need to find common approaches to dealing with what may be considered the transnational commons. Unlike the global commons of the oceans, the atmosphere, Antarctica or biodiversity, transboundary rivers involve management by a set number of geographically contiguous states, and this means that management occurs within a much wider set of neighbourly political relations. Further, the often unequal levels of power, commonalities and differences of culture, shared histories, economic interaction, demographic movements and so on that shape such relations have superimposed on them the geographies of upstream and downstream position, geographically differentiated vulnerabilities to water use and development elsewhere in the basin, and other specific conditions that make shared management anything but a level playing field.
