International River Basin Negotiations: Building a Database of Illustrative Successes

McDonald, A. (1988). International River Basin Negotiations: Building a Database of Illustrative Successes. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-88-096

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Abstract

Within IIASA's Environment Program, one of the objectives of the Project on Decision Support Systems for Managing Large International River Basins is to improve the exploitation of increasingly cheap and powerful computer analyses in international river basin negotiations and management. For hardware, the focus is on personal computers, as they may be the only technology reliably available in some parts of the world. For software, the emphasis is on graphics and menu-driven routines that are easy to use and interpret.

The computer work at IIASA is being done in connection with two case studies of international negotiations and joint management. One concerns the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros barrage and hydroelectric project on the Danube River. The other has been initiated in the context of the Zambezi Action Plan (ZACPLAN), signed by five of the eight Zambezi River Basin states in May 1987. One purpose is to assure that IIASA's software development is directly relevant and useful to specific issues and institutions in these two river basins.

But good comparative analysis of alternative projects and management arrangements is only part of negotiating mutually beneficial international agreements. And often it is harder to generate promising creative alternatives to be considered, than it is to analyze them subsequently. This paper describes work in progress to develop a simple personal computer package to help with the task of generating creative alternatives tailored to specific problems of international river basin negotiations and joint management.

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