ABSTRACT
Water diplomacy is at the heart of current debates around disagreements and disputes over shared water resources around the world. Yet, although Europe is a hotspot of the water diplomacy discourse targeted towards other regions of the world, disagreements over European shared water resources are addressed largely by technical means (rather than political and directly diplomatic ones). This happens in the context of a rigid and well-established legal and institutional framework that pre-determines how disagreements are being addressed and thus keeps disagreements at relatively low policy levels. In this context, River Basin Organizations (RBOs) play a very important role as they do not only provide the fora for coordinating individual riparian states’ activities on rivers and lakes and thus bridge between the national and the basin/regional level, but also bridge between every day technical management of shared water resources and higher policy levels that come into play in certain specific cases. Examples from the Danube and the Rhine river basins exemplify this role.
