Abstract
One way of analyzing different forms of managing freshwater is to consider it an economic good (Menzel 2014). This is because it passes along its lifecycle through a group of economic processes: collection, production, drainage, sanitation, treatment and reuse. These processes require a set of policies that define priorities of supplies, regulate pricing, and control expected impacts on society and environment. Cornes and Sandler (1986) classified economic goods into four groups, based on the factors of “exclusion” and “rivalry”: private, public, club and common goods (Table 2.1). The factor of “exclusion” refers to who can get the service, while “rivalry” indicates how the usage of someone affects the ability of others to use the service. According to this classification, freshwater can take one of those four forms: a bottle of water in supermarket (private); water pipelines constructed by public authorities to supply houses (public); a well in the desert drilled by a tribe (club); or rivers and lakes (common). The most complicated problems are related to the fourth type, since leaving common water resources unregulated and unmanaged, regarded as the “gift of nature,” entails severe threats to both the resources and communities dependent on them. In contrast, each of the other types usually has solid mechanisms of regulation and control, even if with different levels of effectiveness and efficiency.
The framework is broad enough to encompass not only people but also nations and bacteria. Nations certainly take actions which can be interpreted as choices in a Prisoner’s Dilemma …
Robert Axelrod (1984: 18)
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Notes
- 1.
The Stag Hunt game: “Two hunters can either jointly hunt a stag (an adult deer and a rather large meal) or individually hunt a rabbit (tasty, but substantially less feeling). Hunting stags in quite challenging and requires cooperation. If either hunts a stag alone, the chance of success is minimal. Hunting stags is collectively most beneficial but requires a lot of trust among the hunters.” The game is named after a famous passage in Rousseau, as reviewed in Chwaszcza (2008: 154–155).
- 2.
The Chicken game: “Two adolescents decide to resolve a dispute by riding towards each other down the middle of a road. The first to turn away loses. If both continue straight ahead, they will crash and risk serious injury,” as illustrated by Hargreaves Heap et al. (1992) reviewed in Chwaszcza (2008: 160).
- 3.
This means that if players “X” and “Y” are playing together, the payoffs TX, RX, PX and TX need not be equal to TY, RY, PY and SY.
- 4.
The Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (TFDD), provided by the Oregon State University, is one of the most important projects addressing empirical data about cooperation and conflict in international basins. The TFDD comprises, among others, massive collections of international freshwater-related events and treaties, in addition to studies analyzing both datasets. All related datasets published by the TFDD are available at http://www.transboundarywaters.orst.edu/
- 5.
Refer to Khaled Abusamhadaneh, (2012). Transboundary water management in the Western part of Jordan: Challenges and solutions – M.A. thesis, Institute of Social Sciences, TU-Braunschweig, which was funded by the EXCEED project that is also sponsoring this doctoral dissertation.
- 6.
A strategy is “collectively stable,” if “no strategy can invade it,” where a new strategy “A”—employed by an incoming player—is said to “invade” a native strategy “B,” if “the newcomer gets a higher score with a native than a native gets with another native” (Axelrod 1984: 56). This condition of “invasion” can be written in the following inequality: V(A/B) > V (B/B), whereas V(A/B) is the accumulated payoffs gained by player using strategy “A” when playing with another using strategy “B,” and the same for V(B/B) for two players using strategy “B.” In addition, a collectively-stable strategy is said to be in Nash equilibrium with itself (Axelrod and Dion 1988: 1388).
- 7.
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Samaan, M.M. (2019). The Analytic Framework: Modeling the Dilemma of Transboundary River Basins as an Iterated PD Game. In: The Nile Development Game. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02665-3_2
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