Problematiseringen av samarbete i gränsöverskridande vattenområden - En kritisk granskning av Nilen-samarbetets Cooperative Framework Agreement

Sammanfattning

Cooperation over shared water resources is often emphasised as something desirable. At the same time research show how a collaborative discourse can hide harmful effects of cooperation. Thus, the aim of this study is to show how water cooperation is problematized within the Nile Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement and the effects of this in the form of political implications. This is done with a discourse analysis based on Carol Bacchi’s What’s the problem represented to be? (WPR), which is complemented by a critical geopolitical perspective, as well as different concepts, reworked into discourses, relating to international water law and conflict and cooperation. The analysis shows how water cooperation is produced as a security problem, where water and cooperation mutually constitute each other through a securitized conflict discourse and an affinitive cooperation discourse. The Nile is produced as a watercourse and states are produced as the only legitimate actors in governing the Nile’s water resources, prompting an institutional structure where the solution to the produced problem is postponed, resulting in the underlying problem remaining. The thesis thus also illustrates the usefulness of a poststructuralist perspective and a WPR-approach within the field of hydropolitics, by demonstrating how water cooperation agreements can have hidden and harmful effects.