Keeping Your Head above the Water: Examining the Progress of the Nile Basin Initiative and Multi-Lateral Development

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2015
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Haverford College. Department of Political Science
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only until 2017-01-01, afterwards Open Access.
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Abstract
Managing how rivers are shared and developed by users is a difficult task, particularly international rivers that run through several different countries like the Nile River. Diplomatic efforts in the 20th century at Nile management unfortunately led to Egypt becoming the river's hegemonic power and unfairly limiting upstream nation's access to the river. Because of this in 1999 the nations of the Nile Basin attempted to make Nile River usage and development more multilateral and cooperative by founding the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI). The NBI's primary focuses is managing member states' Nile operations, funding riparian infrastructure whose benefits help the entire basin, and acting as a forum to negotiate for a permanent Nile management framework. While in its 15 years the NBI has made some progress towards making Nile management more cooperative and multilateral, it has unfortunately not made much progress transitioning the basin state's away from the older status quo. In many aspects the NBI 's resources and structure has allowed individual nations like Egypt and Ethiopia to protect their self-interests and continue to pursue projects that solely benefits themselves. The NBI's inability to prevent these unilateral projects from happening exemplifies key weaknesses in its cooperative and regulatory style of riparian management. Such weaknesses can be attributed to its inability to hold its members accountable for their actions as well as the presence of non-basin third parties, like the World bank and China, in the management and development of the basin. It is because of these weaknesses and the continuation of Nile states' unilateral usage that the NBI's chances of success are lowered, leading to the likelihood the initiative will cease to exist, thereby nullifying any progress made towards making the Nile states becoming more cooperative with one another on Nile use and development. If the NBI wishes to succeed then, the NBI has to reform itself to become less regulatory and convince each nation to make their unilateral Nile plans benefit the entire basin as well.
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