Transboundary water-governance systems are emerging to negotiate watersharing policies to promote security, stability and sustainability. Yet transboundary water disputes occur within most major shared water systems, and weak riparians are often coerced to agree to water-sharing policies that adversely affect them. This chapter examines strategies to promote cooperation in seemingly intractable water conflicts. For example, the chapter analyzes power asymmetry and the complex relations between strong and weak riparians in the Nile River system, in which water stress perennially tests the commitment to cooperation. The larger quantitative analysis examines the strategies weak riparians use to assert leverage in the international river basin, and the success of those strategies in achieving cooperation versus conflict.

The decision to resolve water disputes through negotiated settlements or to escalate the disputes into violent conflict is a complicated and contentious calculation. Water-based explanations of conflict and cooperation need to incorporate economy, ecology, technology, security, politics and policy. The multiple conflicting uses and competing users makes hydropolitics “one of the most urgent, complex, and contentious issues that the developing countries and the international community will have to face and resolve in the next century,” as Arun Elhance articulates (1999, 4). Although there are successful water-sharing arrangements and more instances of cooperation than violent conflict (Wolf 1998), the institutionalized cooperative management of international water basins is still extremely rare (Elhance 2000). One substantive impediment to cooperative management is power asymmetry in hydropolitical complexes, which affects the legitimacy, complexity and feasibility of international water-sharing arrangements.

Yet despite the complexity and intensity of water stress in transboundary river systems, there are many examples of cooperation in seemingly intractable water conflicts. The case of the Nile system is compelling because the level of water stress seems insurmountable in the context of extreme food insecurity, burgeoning populations and climate change, while riparians continue to move between times of military threats and military mobilizations on the borders near the river to times of cooperative agreements and collaborative efforts to govern the river system in the interests of political and economic stability.