Assessing International Transboundary Water Management Practices to Extract Contextual Lessons for the Nile River Basin

Abstract

Transboundary waters account for a significant portion of global freshwater resources, yet their management is often challenging. The Nile River basin faces significant challenges owing to the complex history and unique context of the basin. Examining the experience of other transboundary basins can offer insights for the effective management of the Nile waters. This paper aims to extract contextual lessons for the Nile from global transboundary water management practices. To that end, we performed a scoping literature search to identify well-researched transboundary water management practices from across the world, selected key case studies, and analyzed their management practices. We discussed the context of the Nile and organized the unique challenges of the basin in five themes, and we discussed how global experiences could provide valuable insights for the Nile basin within each theme. Trust building, the need for equitable water use frameworks, a strong river basin organization, the nuanced role of external actors, and the impact of broader political context were major themes that emerged from the analysis of the Nile context. Within each theme, we presented experiences from multiple basins to inform transboundary water management in the Nile basin.