Escaping the “Polluter Pays” Trap - Financing Wastewater Treatment on the Tijuana-San Diego Border

Building and operating wastewater facilities to treat transboundary effluents requires dividing the cost of pollution prevention between the bordering states. When cost-sharing questions arise, the solution often suggested is the “polluter pays principle” (PPP). However, when political and economic relations between neighboring countries are asymmetrical the effectiveness of the PPP to resolve the wastewater problem is not clear. This paper argues that implementing the PPP ignores many of the existing asymmetries between the different sides, including asymmetries in power, willingness and ability to pay for wastewater treatment and operational capacities. As a result, the PPP's ability to provide adequate wastewater treatment is hampered. In response, neighboring countries sometimes replace the PPP with other cost-sharing arrangements that offset, to some degree, the existing asymmetries, thereby creating a more politically feasible and institutionally sustainable water pollution regime. Among these alternative principles are "beneficiary pays the difference" and "equal division of the cost burden" of wastewater treatment. This implies that it is not enough for a cost-sharing principle to be fair; it also has to offset, at least in part, the existing asymmetries otherwise the regime set will not be sustainable and thus economically viable. This is the focus of analysis in this paper, to which is added an historical perspective of the cost-sharing evolution of the pollution prevention regime along the San Diego/Tijuana border over the last century.

the case of transboundary water treaties

Transboundary river basins are of immense economic and environmental importance but their management constitutes a vexing international problem. While supply is constant, human activity and changing environmental conditions lead to the decline of global water availability. Scarcity and changes in resource availability are likely to spur conflict between partners to a shared system. Therefore, international institutions and agreements, able to adapt to changing circumstances will prove to be essential. Regarding the flexibility of international water agreements, mechanisms to address conflict (CRM) have already been defined as particularly important. But despite the fact that a better understanding of CRM-use could provide key insights about costs and benefits, their appearance in international agreements or the conditions that provoke their choice have not been systematically examined. This study analyzes the content of a large number of water agreements and examines which mechanisms are adopted under what conditions. First, we distinguished 4 types of conflict resolution (“negotiation”, “mediation”, “arbitration” and “adjudication”) and identify potential barriers to their adoption. Next, we selected explanatory variables that potentially affect the choice of CRM and carried out a multivariate regression to determine which of them were significant. Our results indicate that, although conflict resolution is considered important, still 45 per cent of the sampled treaties lack such provision. Multilateral agreements, however, are more likely to contain CRM. Most agreements do not specify the activation procedure of the mechanism or how to bear the cost of its use. Through this research we aim to gain insight in the diversity of conflict resolution mechanisms available, while acquiring more knowledge of the circumstances in which they are adopted. Ultimately, this study can offer policy makers a guide for negotiating environmental agreements

the Israeli case

Various studies have pointed to urgency in decision-making as a major catalyst for policy change. Urgency evokes a crisis frame in which emotions and cognitive and institutional biases are more likely to be mobilised in support of the policy preferences of powerful actors. As a result, decision-makers tend to be driven by emotions and opportunity, often with detrimental results for the quality of the planning process. Although urgency has such a profound influence on the quality of decision-making, little is known about how, when, and by whom urgency is constructed in the planning process of public infrastructure. By means of a discourse analysis, this study traces the timing, motives and ways actors discursively construct a sense of urgency in decisionmaking on the building of terminals for the reception and treatment of the natural gas that was recently found off the coast of Israel. The results of this study indicate that mostly government regulators, but also private sector actors, deliberately constructed an urgency discourse at critical moments during the planning process. By framing the planning process as urgent, regulators manipulatively presented the policy issue as a crisis, during which unorthodox planning practices were legitimised while the consideration of alternative planning solutions was precluded. Thus, urgency framing is a means of controlling both the discourse and the agenda - and therefore an exercise in power-maintenance - by entrenched interest groups

The Role of Creative Language in Addressing Political Asymmetries: The Israeli-Arab Water Agreements

International water agreements are often used as mechanisms for fostering and institutionalizing political cooperation. Yet, since water resources in many places are being driven to the edge of their natural limits, a number of international organizations have formulated legal principles and norms aimed at helping states resolve water disputes. While states have been urged to adopt these principles, it seems that they often embrace other less-traditional alternatives that may better address their own political needs. The aim of this study is to examine why states fail or decline to adopt several of the general principles of customary law formulated by these international organizations and to investigate how creative language is often adapted instead. The principles examined include basin-wide development and management; the appropriation of water according to clearly defined water rights; and joint management of shared water resources. The study focuses on three contemporary case studies centering on Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Territories. It concludes that the negotiation over the legal terminology of agreements between these parties exemplifies the power struggle and asymmetries between Israel and its neighbors. Much of the deadlock in the negotiations was resolved when the parties moved from their adversarial positions to address the underlying interests, in which a compromise was forged that captured elements of international law while still addressing the needs of the dominant riparian. These results indicate that under asymmetric settings, there is a need for creative legal discourse rather than an entrenchment of international water law, which has found to be a recipe for failure

The critical geopolitics of water conflicts in school textbooks: The case of Germany

A considerable body of critical literature has analysed how scientific discussions on water-conflict links are picked up in the political, academic, economic, civil society and media domains. By contrast, there are almost no such studies for the domain of education. This void is crucial as school attendance rates and the prevalence of environmental education are on the rise, while school education has privileged access to young people during their political socialisation. We address this void by analysing the depiction of water conflicts in school textbooks from a critical geopolitics perspective. More specifically, we use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse the visual and textual content of German geography textbooks published between 2000 and 2017. Our findings reveal that the analysed school textbooks securitise water and overstate the risk of water conflicts, which could yield a range of negative societal effects. The textbooks further reproduce Orientalist stereotypes about the Global South, and about the Middle East in particular, and often promote an uncritical green economy stance towards the privatisation of water. Water conflicts are hence discussed in the context of a crisis discourse and reproduce powerful knowledge that privileges certain political interests at the expense of others

Why did Better Place fail?: Range anxiety, interpretive flexibility, and electric vehicle promotion in Denmark and Israel

With almost $1 billion in funding, Better Place was poised to become one of the most innovative companies in the electric mobility market. The system Better Place proposed had two novel prongs; first, to reduce the cost of batteries, and second, to reduce range anxiety, public infrastructure concerns, and long charging times. Yet, despite this seemingly strong combination, Better Place failed to make any progress in Denmark and Israel, the first two markets it operated in, and subsequently declared bankruptcy, selling off its collective assets for less than$500,000. Drawing from science and technology studies and the notion of “interpretive flexibility,” this paper posits several reasons to explain the failure of Better Place, including that Denmark is not as “green” as it seems nor is the Israeli market as attractive as believed, and that Better Place's solution to charging time and range anxiety resolved a psychological, not a functional, barrier of the general public to adopt electric vehicles. Before investigating these two reasons, the paper presents a short history of Better Place and explores the contours of its operations in Denmark and Israel. It then discusses why Better Place “failed” across both countries before concluding with implications for energy planning, policy, and analysis

Distinctive features of spatial planning nearby estuaries – an exploratory analysis of water-related rules in municipal master plans in Portugal

Land-use types and related intensities are often associated with pressures and disturbances on estuarine envi- ronmental values and ecosystem services provided by water. Although with varied legal frameworks across countries, broadly, spatial planning has been expected to contribute to the protection of environmentally sen- sitive areas, such as estuaries. Among the various planning tools are the plan’s land-use control rules. This article studies the incorporation of water-related terms in the regulations of municipal master plans to assess if land-use rules established on estuarine areas are significantly different from others, such as in upstream areas. It does so by developing a content analysis of a set of plans’ regulations located in estuarine and upstream areas of two river basins of Mainland Portugal. The results show greater incorporation of water-related terms in plans’ reg- ulations located in estuarine areas. Moreover, they show a greater diversity of water-related topics, types, and focus of rules on estuarine areas, whereas on upstream areas the regulatory approaches look poorer. Although the incorporation of water-related terms is globally higher in younger plans, and to a certain extent, in more arti- ficialized and dense territories, a clear distinctiveness of water-related concerns in land-use regulations of municipal plans on estuarine areas remains visible. Surprisingly, the results bring to the fore fragilities of land- use regulations on upstream areas worthy of attention in future studies. The methodology used for content analysis disclosed a valuable path for future research as it is easily expandable to take into consideration different land-uses or to be applied to different regions, to further refine if the distinctive features are explicitly related with estuarine areas or with other types of water problems.publishe

Water quality and its interlinkages with the Sustainable Development Goals

Interlinkages among the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) lead to important trade-offs and synergies among the goals and their underlying targets. The aim of this paper is to review the role of water quality as an agent of interlinkages among the SDGs. It was found that there are a small number of explicit interconnections, but many more inferred interlinkages between water quality and various targets. A review of case studies showed that interlinkages operate from the municipal to near global scales, that their importance is likely to increase in developing countries, and that new SDG indicators are needed to monitor them. The analysis identifies many different SDG target areas where a combined effort between the water quality community and other sectors would bring mutual benefits in achieving the water quality and other targets