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

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 openended strategies in recent decades, rather than hard codification of rules as had earlier been more common

Governance mechanisms to address flow variability in water treaties

While the importance of flow variability in water treaties is acknowledged, little work has been done to identify those mechanisms that have actually been employed. The present study uses a content analysis of a large number of water treaties in order to identify approaches used in practice. It was found that flow variability has been governed using a variety of mechanisms. While some mechanisms explicitly address variability, the majority use more subtle, open- ended approaches. Most of the mechanisms adopted deviate from an ''ideal'' state of being both flexible in the face of change but binding in enforcement. Instead, they reflect trade-offs between flexibility and enforcement. These results are used to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of particular variability management strategies