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

Spaces of water governance : the case of Israel and its neighbors

This article examines the scale dynamics of water governance. Five generic scales are identified, each associated with a particular ideology and discourse. Hence, scale dynamics are hypothesized to oscillate as a function not only of power and economic factors (although these are central) but as reflections of shifts in dominant ideologies and shifts in sanctioned discourses. The dynamics are examined in the intra-Israeli and the Israeli–Arab cases. In the intra-Israeli case the scale dynamics largely conform with the hypothesis. Once the national level is exceeded, however, the different story lines associated with the generic scales are used only to legitimize negotiating positions and the actual regime scale is a compromise among physical features, power factors and sovereignty considerations. The difference in dynamics between the intranational and international levels is explained by the need of international regimes to address the discrepancy between resource domains and sovereignty rights domains, rather than the discrepancy with property rights domains at the intrastate level

Morphometry and distribution of isolated caves as a guide for phreatic and confined paleohydrological conditions

Isolated caves are a special cave type common in most karst terrains, formed by prolonged slow water flow where aggressivity is locally boosted. The morphometry and distribution of isolated caves are used here to reconstruct the paleohydrology of a karstic mountain range. Within a homogenous karstic rock sequence, two main types of isolated caves are distinguished, and each is associated with a special hydrogeologic setting: maze caves form by rising water in the confined zone of the aquifer, under the Mt. Scopus Group (Israel) confinement, while chamber caves are formed in phreatic conditions, apparently by lateral flow mixing with a vadose input from above

Does Integrated Water Resources Management Support Institutional Change? The Case of Water Policy Reform in Israel

Many international efforts have been made to encourage integrated water resources management through recommendations from both the academic and the aid and development sectors. Recently, it has been argued that integrated water resources management can help foster better adaptation of management and policy responses to emerging water crises. Nevertheless, few empirical studies have assessed how this type of management works in practice and what an integrated water management system implies for institutional adaptation and change. Our assessment of the Israeli water sector provides one view of how they can be shaped by an integrated structure in the water sector. Our analysis of recent efforts to adapt Israel's water management system to new conditions and uncertainties reveals that the interconnectedness of the system and the consensus decision-making process, led by a dominant actor who coordinates and sets the policy agenda, tends to increase the complexity of negotiations. In addition, the physical integration of water management leads to sunk costs of large-scale physical infrastructure. Both these factors create a path dependency that empowers players who receive benefits from maintaining the existing system. This impedes institutional reform of the water management system and suggests that integrated water resources management creates policy and management continuity that may only be amenable to incremental changes. In contrast, real adaptation that requires reversibility and the ability to change management strategies in response to new information or monitoring of specific management outcomes

The role of uncertainties in the design of international water treaties: an historical perspective

Water is one natural resource whose management is especially susceptible to uncertainties, many of which are being exasperated by climate change. Some of these uncertainties originate from knowledge deficits in physical conditions while others relate to behavioral and social variability related to water supply and use. However, to our knowledge no quantitative analysis of how uncertainties have been translated into transboundary water treaty structures exists. The present paper partially fills this gap through an examination of how uncertainty has been reflected in basin specific transboundary treaties and how that reflection has changed over the last century. While we could identify only minor trends in the frequency with which uncertainties are mentioned in treaties, we did find two clear patterns in the strategies adopted to deal with them. First, treaties seem to adopt a portfolio approach that spreads the dangers of uncertainty by concurrently including several management strategies simultaneously. Second, there is a trend towards more open-ended strategies in recent decades, rather than hard codification of rules as had earlier been more common