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This paper focuses on water variability which is predicted to increase due to climate change. It highlights that such environmental changes may aggravate political tensions, especially in regions that are not equipped with an appropriate institutional apparatus.
This paper argues that the best attempts to assess the ability of states to deal with water variability in the future rest with considering how agreements have fared in the past. The paper investigates to what extent particular mechanisms and institutional designs help mitigate inter-country tensions over shared water. The study’s findings suggest that country dyads governed by treaties with water allocation mechanisms exhibiting both flexibility and specificity evince more co-operative behaviour. Country dyads governed by treaties with a larger sum of institutional mechanisms likewise evince a higher level of cooperation, although certain institutional mechanisms are more important than others.
