Towards Sustainability in Transboundary Water Resources: The Role of Inter-State Solidarity

While cooperation regarding the management of transboundary water resources continues to improve in terms of the extent and intensity of inter-State engagement, watercourse States will increasingly need to employ flexible arrangements to facilitate the adaptive management of shared waters in response to the likely impacts of climate change. The legal challenges involved in crafting and applying such arrangements will require greater focus upon the community of interest understood to exist amongst co-basin States, and greater reliance upon the principle of solidarity underlying this concept. Though long a feature of international law, solidarity plays a particularly important role in the continuing development and functioning of international water law, and today offers a set of cooperative values to assist international water law in adapting to the looming global water crisis.