Water Diplomacy: A Negotiated Approach to Manage Complex Water Problems

Abstract

Many water management decisions have evolved from addressing simple problems, such as accessing water near its source, to complex problems of managing and allocating water in the face of multiple and competing demands in the natural, societal and political domains. The Water Diplomacy Framework (WDF) is emerging as an alternative to traditional techno‐ or values‐focused approaches to water management. The WDF is an approach that diagnoses water problems, identifies intervention points, and proposes sustainable resolutions that incorporate diverse viewpoints and uncertainty as well as changing and competing demands. As such, WDF rests upon diverse forms of contextual inquiry of and intervention in complex water problems, with negotiation functioning as the fulcrum of diagnosis and intervention. Several case studies from this volume are used to highlight the utility of this framework for understanding and managing complexity, uncertainty and contingency when addressing complex water problems. We invite the reflective water community to identify and analyze water case studies ‐ from different places, settings, and scales ‐ that will contribute to our collective effort of developing actionable approaches to manage complex water problems in our AquaPedia database.