Cooperative management and development of Africa’s international rivers holds real promise for greater sustainability and productivity of the continent’s increasingly scarce water resources and fragile environment. Moreover, the potential benefits of cooperative water resources management can serve as catalysts for broader regional cooperation, economic integration and development—and even conflict prevention. But riparians will pursue joint action only when they expect to receive greater benefits through cooperation than through unilateral action.

This paper presents a typology of international rivers based on asymmetries in economic and political power among riparian states. This typology is then used, along with other factors such as the spatial location of riparians on the river, to explore the question of why some riparians on international rivers have been able to successfully negotiate treaties and others have not. The findings lend support to both economic and political economy explanations of cooperative action on international rivers.

Increasing world demands for water call for new institutions and rules to minimize economic and political conflicts. Growing water quality problems from industry and agriculture only further exacerbate supply problems. Such conflicts can jeopardize economic and, in some parts of the world, even social order.

How Egypt and Ethiopia will defend or promote their interests in the Nile basin has recently become clearer. Egypt will
again seek to create “facts on the ground,” this time a large new land reclamation and settlement scheme called the
New Valley Project. Ethiopia too will create facts by proceeding with water resources development in the Blue Nile
basin, including the construction of low-cost microdams. If Egypt and Ethiopia pursue these two unilateral initiatives, they

Since 1999 a multilateral effort termed the Nile Basin Initiative has been underway among the Nile riparians to explore opportunities for maximizing the benefits of the river's waters through cooperative development and management of the basin. However, to date there has been virtually no explicit discussion of the economic value of cooperative water resources development.

This paper examines the implications for Egypt and Sudan of the development of Blue Nile water resources by Ethiopia. The long-term development program produced between 1958 and 1963 by the Ethiopian government in collaboration with the US Bureau of Reclamation is summarized.

A linear programming model is used to examine the
effects on Egypt and Sudan of implementing this program. It is found
that water for agricultural use in Egypt and Sudan would actually
increase, though there would be some adverse consequences for Egypt.

This paper describes five alternative visions for cooperative Nile development in the hope that they will assist the Nile riparian countries in their search for both a consensus vision and sound development projects. These five alternate visions [(1) Century Storage Plus, (2) Water for Peace, (3) Southern Lights, (4) The Green Nile, and (5) Economic Partners on the Nile] are intentionally stylized to make them easy to understand and remember.

Nation-states rarely go to war over water, but it is equally rare that water conflicts in an international river basin are resolved through cooperation among the riparian countries that use the shared resources. Gains from cooperation will mean little to individual riparians unless the required cooperative behaviors are incentive compatible.

The purpose of this paper is to create and discuss a measure of water hyacinth abundance in Lake Victoria. Water hyacinths have dramatic effects on other activities such as fisheries. However, understanding their spread and effects is hampered by the lack of reliable information.

There has long been a great deal of interest in methods for analyzing energy use and energy use intensities. Many methods developed within energy studies are also applicable in other areas where materials use is of interest, but in several cases these methods have not been applied to other materials.