Compliance and performance in international water agreements: the case of the Naryn/Syr Darya basin.

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Compliance and performance in international water agreements: the case of the Naryn/Syr Darya basin.

Many case studies and some large-N research have shown that upstream-downstream cooperation in international river basins occurs quite frequently. The same holds for global water governance efforts more generally. Yet such findings are blind in one eye because they focus primarily on political commitments or compliance with international agreements. A policy performance metric (PER) allows for a more substantive assessment of success or failure in international water governance. To test its usefulness, this article applies this metric to the Naryn/Syr Darya basin, a major international river system in Central Asia. Management of the Toktogul reservoir, the main reservoir in the Naryn/Syr Darya basin, was internationalized in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Compliance with an international agreement, concluded in 1998, has been quite high. This agreement establishes an international trade-off between water releases for upstream hydropower production in winter and water releases for downstream irrigation in summer. However, performance of this agreement over time has been very low and highly variable. The management system in place is therefore in urgent need of reform. Studies of international and global water governance should pay more attention to the degree to which political commitments actually further de facto problem solving. Keywords: international cooperation, governance, compliance, performance, water management, Naryn/Syr Darya, Toktogul dam.

The scientific literature on water governance issues has experienced a boom in recent years. (1) It has produced innovative concepts and theories that help make sense of hundreds if not thousands of collaborative efforts that are under way in water systems around the world at various levels, from the local to the global. Yet one weakness in the existing literature is its heavy focus on legal arrangements and institutional processes. Scant attention is given to the nexus between policy measures and changes in hydrological systems. Studying these connections is necessary to determine whether water governance efforts are effective not only in a discursive, legal, or institutional sense, but also in terms of solving concrete problems on the ground. Research on this issue creates exciting opportunities for collaboration across the social, natural, and engineering sciences, as is evident in this article, which has been coauthored by a political scientist and an environmental engineer.

The article speaks to the special issue theme of global water governance primarily by offering an analytical tool that helps to assess the performance of particular water governance efforts based on explicit and transparent standards. This performance assessment tool is useful for diagnos...

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