Actors in water diplomacy: The good, the bad, and the ugly
- State actors have primarily driven water diplomacy, but nonstate actors are gaining increasing importance
- Actors other than states shaping water diplomacy include civil society representatives, local communities, nongovernmental organizations, private businesses, investors, and illicit or criminal groups
- The way nontraditional actors shape water diplomacy varies greatly as does the impact of their actions on water conflict and cooperation
This is a chapter from the book 'Routledge Handbook of Water Diplomacy', which was published on 20 October 2025.
Water diplomacy can be succinctly defined as the “use of diplomatic instruments to existing or emerging disagreements and conflicts over shared water resources” (Schmeier, 2018) and “applying foreign policy means, embedded in bi- and/or multilateral relations” (Sehring et al., 2022), thus referring to relations traditionally limited to state-to-state interaction. While succinct definitions are useful for communicating high-level ideas, they necessarily exclude or leave implicit important details. This also relates to the question who actually does water diplomacy. In recent years, water diplomacy has seen an increasing engagement of nonstate actors such as nongovernmental and civil society organizations, private businesses and investors, researchers, and water users but also armed opposition and illicit, criminal, extremist or terrorist groups.
Examples of actors other than states engaging in conflict and cooperation over shared water resources have become plentiful. In the Colorado River Basin, for instance, environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have not only lobbied successfully for addressing low flows in the lower part of the basin but significantly contributed to the drafting of Minute 319, the formal intergovernmental decision-making instrument that commits both countries to ensuring that the river’s water reaches the delta again (Buono & Eckstein, 2014; Wilder et al., 2020). In the Euphrates–Tigris Basin, terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS) acted as self-declared or de facto authorities over certain territories and, as such, entered negotiations with neighboring states, namely, Turkey, over water allocation and dam operation (von Lossow, 2020; HSToday, 2019). In 2017, the Holy See engaged in the international water conflict discourse through a dedicated summit and issued a statement calling for cooperation over shared waters (Holy See, 2017).
This multitude of highly diverse actors shaping conflict and cooperation dynamics raises the question of which actors actually engage in water diplomacy, how they do so, and what effects such an engagement has on the governance systems in addressing key challenges relating to the transboundary nature of more than 300 rivers and lakes (Turgul et al., 2024), more than 600 aquifers (IGRAC, 2021) and more than 300 wetlands (Rosenblum & Schmeier, 2022).
These questions are not unique to the study of transboundary waters: Over the past decades, international law and relations theories have debated whether the state was indeed the main and an independent actor in the international system or whether other nonstate actors would at least shape state behavior in the international system or even become actors themselves and what consequences this has for the international system as well as the study of it (Fearon, 1998; Hobson, 2000; Betsill/Corell, 2001; Biersteker, 2007; Bianchi, 2011; d’Aspremont et al., 2015). While this chapter does not attempt to go into the details of this debate, it acknowledges that the water-specific international system – that is, the system of interactions over internationally shared water
resources and the legal and institutional arrangements governing it – has also increased in complexity over the years with regard to the number and the diversity of actors involved as well as with regard to their objectives and intentions of engagement, their means of engagement, and the implications of such engagements for conflict and cooperation.
In this chapter, we clarify the types of actors involved in water diplomacy processes, their influence on such processes, and their outcomes for conflict and cooperation over shared water resources. This chapter sets out to identify the different actors involved in water diplomacy and to unpack their specific roles and functions. By reviewing the variety of actors potentially engaged in conflicts and cooperation over shared water resources and assessing their specific characteristics, the chapter concludes that while water diplomacy in the more narrow sense (defined in Sehring et al., 2022) is still largely a state-shaped process, a wide variety of other actors attempt and sometimes also succeed to shape conflict and cooperation outcomes between states over their shared water resources, in manners that can be perceived as “good”, “bad”, or sometimes even “ugly”.
