Water is the resource that will determine the wealth, welfare, and stability of many countries in the twenty-first century. This book offers a new approach to managing water that will overcome the conflicts that emerge when the interactions among natural, societal, and political forces are overlooked. At the heart of these conflicts are complex water networks. In managing them, science alone is insufficient and so is policy-making that doesn't take science into account. Solutions will only emerge if a negotiated or diplomatic approach that blends science, policy, and politics is used to manage water networks.
The authors show how open and constantly changing water networks can be managed successfully using collaborative adaptive techniques to build informed agreements among disciplinary experts, water users with conflicting interests, and governmental bodies with countervailing claims.
Shafiqul Islam is an engineer with over twenty-five years of practical experience in addressing water issues. Lawrence Susskind is founder of MIT's Environmental Policy and Planning Program and a leader of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Together they have developed a text that is relevant for students and experienced professionals working in a variety of engineering, science, and applied social science fields. They show how new thinking about water conflict can replace the zero-sum battles that pit experts, politicians, and stakeholders against each other in counter-productive ways. Their volume not only presents the key elements of a theory of water diplomacy; it includes excerpts and commentary from more than two dozen seminal readings as well as practice exercises that challenge readers to apply what they have learned.
Reviews
"Water Diplomacy is a great addition to the existing literature on water negotiations and conflict management." - W. Todd Jarvis, Oregon State University, in Ground Water (2012).
"This book offers a water diplomacy frthat challenges conventional wisdom in water resources research and practice. It focuses on networks rather than systems and value creation rather than zero-sum thinking. The selected readings, commentaries, and simulations provide essential grounding that is invaluable to water resources students, researchers and professionals." – Helen Ingram, University of Arizona and Founding Warmington Endowed Chair, University of California at Irvine.
"Water management, both in terms of quantity and quality, leaves much to be desired in nearly all countries of the world. Thus, all over the world we see tensions developing between various stakeholders of different water uses. An important question is how these tensions can be diffused peacefully and in a timely manner? In this must read book, Islam and Susskind address this complex question and discuss the processes and alternatives that can be successfully used in a logical and easily understandable manner" – Asit K. Biswas, founder and pres...
