Contenu du sommaire : L'or bleu, nouvel enjeu géopolitique ?

The definition of the status of water is an important issue, the implications of which should not be disregarded. In theoretical debates, water can be seen as a public good, or, on the contrary, as an economic good. But those debates also look at the ethics of the issue, and they have a direct consequence for the way in which this resource is actually regulated. In Africa and Latin America, poor people often pay a price four times higher than others for water. To understand this paradox, this article analyses the role of both private operators and public actors, and takes into account criteria of efficiency and equity, as well as related political and social issues. In fragile states, the real question is not the privatisation of water, but the asymmetry of power relations, the respect of contracts and the institutional contexts.

Since the 1990s, water development policies have been in keeping with a bottom-up logic, in which NGOs are very much in the foreground. However, the “good governance” of water requires that the different levels of decision-making should be well-articulated. But discrepancies between discourses and practices make this difficult to achieve: the dogma of empowerment implies that the local dimension remains limited to the application of rules defined at a global level. This idealized approach is built on the injunction to the participation of civil society, but it does not take into account the political games at stake between the actors over the question of the access to water. On the contrary, a real participation requires that rules should be co-constructed, and it must be constantly negotiated as it cannot simply be ordered.

Recent institutional developments have reduced the growing tensions on water resources. In calling for international cooperation, they tend to substitute the principle of absolute territorial sovereignty for that of limited sovereignty. The case of the United States shows that the management of transboundary water is a hard task even for Northern countries, and illustrates the inequality of agreements with the South. Similarly, in West Africa, Central Asia and in the Mekong and Nile regions, institutional organisms have been created and represent a significant step towards the concerted management of water basins, as states are forced to cooperate. These new institutions, however, are confronted with problems related to the inadequacy of the Western model, the existence of unbalanced powers and the relinquishment of sovereignty.

In the current context of changing climatic conditions and growing food needs, the pressure on hydraulic resources is sharply increasing. Water has become a major political issue and both the control and sharing of water, are now potential sources of conflicts. These can be inter-state conflicts or low-intensity internal ones, but in both cases, hydraulic conflicts often only exacerbate existing tensions between states or communities, and they could entail real “water wars” if pushed to the extreme. The potential of conflict increases with the swiftness of the hydraulic rupture, which causes true water scarcity. However, societies appear more or less sensitive to this rupture, depending on their “capacity of social adaptation”.

Water has always been at the core of military strategies (bombing of shipping networks and water distribution sites, flooding of territories to disrupt the enemy's progress, missions of maritime reconnaissance...). But since the end of the Second World War, the expansion of international trade has been accompanied by increasing maritime flows - flows that now represent 90 % of total exchanges. This phenomenon makes it difficult to guarantee the security of those exchanges, which are challenged by terrorist networks or pirates, both of which are able to reach harbour areas and to launch attacks on the coast, even when far away from it. In reaction, great powers now acquire more and more refined maritime and amphibian means of actions.

Inter-states sharing of hydraulic resources often leads to conflicts, but in some situations, the management of water access can take place peacefully. As proof, a consensus has been reached between the United States and Canada on the question of fresh water sharing. The fact that Canada, though its is located upstream, did not intend by any means to impose draconian conditions to its meridian neighbour, paved the way for good relationships between both countries. The United States thus largely benefits from water resources coming from Canada, despite of its downstream position. The creation of a Commission for the arbitration and the resolution of disputes has also played a great role in the sound management of American-Canadian transboundary waters.