The Convention’s achievements in assisting countries and its contribution to water diplomacy

During more than 20 years of work under the UNECE Water Convention, and through the provision of assistance to countries through the UNECE secretariat, rich experience has been accumulated in facilitating transboundary water coopera-tion. The Water Convention and its institutional framework provide an intergov-ernmental platform, contributing to water conflict prevention and resolution, both through broader exchange of experience on diverse themes and through tailored as-sistance in treaty implementation.

The various guidelines and other soft-law instruments, such as model provisions, that have been developed under the Convention transmit substantive experience. This is both because the preparation of these instruments has usually involved expertise from countries of both Western and Eastern Europe, and because in the case of quite a few of them, stock is taken at a later point in time, when some experience has been ac-quired by the Parties about their practical application. For instance, the Guidelines on monitoring and assessment of transboundary rivers,⁴³ first issued in 1996, were

of the Parties, Madrid, 26–28 November 2003. See ‘Amendment to the Water Convention’, UNECE Dec. III/1 (2003).

39 On 7 October 2015, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a law accepting the amendments opening the Convention, thereby lifting the last legal obstacle to countries outside the UNECE region from acceding to the Convention. UNECE, ‘Ukraine paves the way for globalising the Water Convention’, a press release of 13 October 2015, available at <http://www.unece.org/info/media/presscurrent-press-h/

environment/2015/ukraine-paves-the-way-for-globalising-the-water-convention/doc.html> (visited 21 October 2015).

40 ‘Decisions and vision for the future of the Convention’, Report of the Meeting of the Parties on its sixth session, supra note 12, Addendum

41 Malgosia Fitzmaurice and Panos Merkouris, ‘Scope of the UNECE Water Convention’ in Tanzi, et al (eds), The UNECE Convention, supra note 9, 103–115, at 111–115.

42 UNECE, The Global Opening of the 1992 Water Convention, supra note 10.

43 UNECE, ‘Guidelines on Water Quality Monitoring and Assessment of Transboundary Rivers’, UNECE Doc. ECE/CEP/11 (1996).

revised in 1998–2000⁴⁴ – firstly, to incorporate the considerable experience that had been gathered under the Convention during a series of pilot projects implemented in the 1990s; and, secondly, to reflect new strategic and scientific developments.⁴⁵ Sup-port regarding the monitoring and assessment of transboundary waters was a major component of many of the early projects and practical on-the-ground assistance es-tablished under the Convention. The monitoring and assessment guidelines, as well as the capacity-building related thereto, helped Eastern and Central European coun-tries in improving their monitoring of waters, which was a pre-requisite to meeting the EU requirements.⁴⁶

Upon request, the UNECE secretariat generally assists countries in preparing for accession to the Water Convention and in implementing their obligations under the Convention. As the assistance provided in the Chu and Talas, Dniester and the Drin Basins, for instance, demonstrates, the approach of providing support has been adapted to the specificities of the circumstances, including the relationships between the basin countries. With frameworks for cooperation already in place, the support for the Chu and Talas Basins as well as in the Dniester Basin also included practical efforts, such as joint monitoring and exchange of information. On the Drin Basin, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between individual institutions was ne-gotiated and concluded instead of an intergovernmental agreement, allowing some political bottlenecks to be avoided.⁴⁷

The process of developing the programme of work for activities of the Parties in the Convention’s framework provides opportunities for countries to voice their needs, and such opportunities are not limited to the Convention’s Parties but are also avail-able to non-Parties within the UNECE.⁴⁸ Thematic activities organized as part of implementing the programme of work, such as workshops on adaptation to climate change in transboundary basins, also provide countries with opportunities to ex-change views and experiences.

Among the features that characterize the activities under the Convention is the strong participation of non-Parties in the UNECE region and increasingly of coun-tries from other regions of the world. The pan-European assessment on the status of transboundary waters,⁴⁹ which was carried out from 2009 to 2011, for instance,

44 UNECE, ‘Guidelines on Monitoring and Assessment of Transboundary Rivers. First review of the 1996 Guidelines on Water-quality Monitoring and Assessment of Transboundary Rivers’ (UNECE, 2000), available at <http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/env/water/publications/documents/guidelinestransrivers2000.pdf>

(visited 16 September 2015).

45 Annukka Lipponen and Lea Kauppi, ‘Monitoring and Assessment and the Duty of Cooperation under the Water Convention: Exchange of Information Among the Riparian Parties’ in Tanzi, et al (eds), The UNECE Convention, supra note 9, 251–267, at 266.

46 Ibid.

47 Bo Libert, ‘The UNECE Water Convention and the Development of Transboundary Cooperation in the Chu-Talas, Kura, Drin and Dniester River Basins’, 40 Water International (2015) 168–182.

48 Ibid.

49 UNECE, Second Assessment of Transboundary Rivers, supra note 3.

The UNECE Water Convention and the Support it gives to the Management of Shared Waters: From Obligations to Practical Implementation

involved active participation of several countries sharing waters with the UNECE countries, notably Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Mongolia. In re-cent years, a number of requests from countries outside the UNECE region to or-ganize awareness-raising workshops have been responded to, among them requests from Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia.

The work programme themes under the Water Convention have evolved over the years to meet the needs of the Parties and to include a mix of policy work (such as the European Union Water Initiative’s National Policy Dialogues⁵⁰) and technical work (such as assistance to improve dam safety in Central Asia) through supporting the development of model technical norms and regulations.

For the time being, activities such as the above-mentioned regional assessments have served to keep the status of transboundary waters in the pan-European region under scrutiny. A reporting mechanism will be presented for consideration by the seventh Meeting of the Parties (Budapest, 17–19 November 2015), which would provide for regular reporting by Parties on their water cooperation to foster implementation of the Convention. Under a number of global and regional conventions, the Parties have an obligation to report on progress in meeting their commitments. For instance, all multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) of the UNECE, except the Water Convention, use periodic mandatory national reporting. The secretariats of the UN-ECE MEAs confirm the added value of reporting, with synthesis reports contribut-ing, among others, to the design of the programme of work; the review of compli-ance and the refinement of guidcompli-ance; and the targeting of technical assistcompli-ance; just to mention a few of the associated benefits.⁵¹

The analysis conducted on the needs for reporting under the Water Convention shows that the introduction of reporting is expected to contribute to strengthen-ing the effectiveness of the Convention and to enhance its implementation through stimulating concrete measures to address gaps in implementation and enhancing co-operation between Parties in specific transboundary waters and basins. The intro-duction of reporting would complement the compliance mechanism put into place with the establishment of the Implementation Committee. So far, the Parties to the Water Convention have been invited to provide information for specific initiatives, such as the regional assessments of transboundary waters.

Support in preparing for accession to the Convention and in the monitoring and as-sessment of transboundary waters and the negotiation of agreements are among the more traditional areas of work under the Water Convention. An example of a more recent thematic area that involves conflict potential is adaptation to climate change

50 For more information, see UNECE, ‘National Policy Dialogues on Integrated Water Resources Management’, available at <http://www.unece.org/env/water/npd> (visited 16 September 2015).

51 UNECE Committee on Environmental Policy, ‘Multilateral environmental agreements: overview of national implementation’, UNECE Doc. ECE/CEP/2014/16 (2014).

in transboundary basins. Building on the guidance on water and climate⁵² which has been developed within the framework of the Water Convention, cooperation in the development of adaptation strategies and in their implementation in transboundary basins is being promoted. The work on a programme of pilot projects, by the Task Force on Water and Climate, has led to the formation of an increasingly global plat-form and a collection of good practices and lessons learned.⁵³

7 The landscape of cooperation in the pan-European region