Transboundary cooperation

Lake Titicaca exists within a fragile high altitude ecosystem shared between Bolivia and Peru. Since 2011, BRIDGE has been working in Lake Titicaca basin taking a non-conventional approach to water diplomacy promoting better cooperation. The region has a long history of technical expertise and water resource management with a transboundary institution established in 1993 on Lake Titicaca.

The Sesan, Sre Pok, and Sekong rivers, referred to as the 3S river basin, are shared by three countries and constitute a significant part of the Lower Mekong river basin. The BRIDGE project implements water diplomacy in transboundary basins, and is working in the 3S to build and strengthen water governance capacity. The 3S river basin contains the only transboundary tributaries of the Mekong covering over 78,650 square kilometres.

The waters of the Goascorán River are shared between Honduras and El Salvador. Since 2011, BRIDGE has worked to promote better cooperation over transboundary waters, taking a non-conventional approach to water diplomacy. One of the challenges was the level of involvement in the institutional arrangement existing in the basin.

This publication aims to further raise awareness about the value of transboundary conservation, highlighting the many benefits transboundary cooperation generates, while not neglecting the challenges and problems parties encounter when they engage in transboundary initiatives.

This publication reflects on and reinforces the lessons and experience of undertaking transboundary conservation programmes and sets out some existing and new guidance for those involved. It proposes a diagnostic approach to determining what the underlying purpose is for the transboundary initiative, and to guide the practitioner to respond to this purpose and need when the programme is designed and implemented.

Beginning with a grassroots approach to water management, increased knowledge and information and the improvement of environmental health and livelihoods, the region around the Tacaná volcano on the border of Guatemala and Mexico has shown the way forward in scaling up local level approaches to national level initiatives.

In the Volta basin, WANI and partners have worked with riparian states to improve water governance and water management practices. This has resulted in multi-scale participatory governance frameworks for joint management of water resources and improvement of livelihoods through riverbank protection schemes. This has complemented and helped to facilitate large scale government and donor initiatives that have supported the establishment the Volta Basin Authority.

The Water and Nature Initiate’s (WANI) activities in the Mekong followed a strategy of mobilizing grass-roots engagement of local stakeholders in decision making, while facilitating high-level dialogues. This helped to build networked, multi-stakeholder processes which could begin to bridge local to national and regional decision making in the basin to support improved transboundary basin management.