Dr. Lei Xie
Professor, Institute of Governance, Shandong University, China
Lei Xie, PhD, is Professor at Institute of Governance, Shandong University, China. She is also a Research Fellow at Nottingham University, UK. Her research focuses on global environmental governance and transnational environmental movement with particular interest on the international cooperation of transboundary river basins. She is author of Environmental Activism in China (Routledge, 2009); and China’s International Transboundary Rivers: Politics, Security and Diplomacy of Shared Water Resources (with Shaofeng, Jia, Routledge 2017).

Speech Title: Water insecurity and the sharing of international river basins in Asia

Abstract: In Asia, transboundary water courses are abound and are shared among many countries. In the context where water resources are resources for multiple sectors, water sharing represents complex interactions among countries, and there lacks of basin-wide institutional agreements that promote sustainable development. This article investigates the features of institutional mechanism as well as water management that have been established in Asia’s international river basins. It also aims to explain how contextual factors have impacted on countries’ collaborating over the shared water resources.

When investigating the management of shared river basins, this article adopts an inter-disciplinary approach that takes into consideration of not only countries’ foreign relations but also each countries’ natural endowment as determinants of their position when sharing the embedded river basins. Three river basins are adopted as cases, which are Ili river basin between China and Kazakhstan, the Ganges Brahmaputra Meghna river basin between China and India and Bangladesh, and the Mekong river basin between China and the Lower Mekong countries. The author assumes that as an upstream country, China has adopted similar positions when sharing rivers. When the three cases are compared, each river basins’ governance mode is analysed against the following contextual factors, which are: asymmetries in countries’ water insecurity, GDP per capita as well as political regime. The paper concludes that both asymmetries in water insecurity and countries’ GDP per capita are factors that impact on the governance of international river basins in Asia. Policy recommendation is provided for improved river basin management in future.