International politics of Russia’s water strategy

The article summarizes the outcomes of the implementation of the Water Strategy of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2020 in its part concerning international politics and assesses the new challenges to international cooperation in the field of protection and use of transboundary waters that Russia is expected to face in the coming decade. 2010s witnessed both the changing situation in the field of water availability in Russia, its neighbor countries and the whole world, and the changing scholarly approaches to the impact of water scarcity on international politics. Most of the approaches agreed that water scarcity more often leads to international cooperation. While agreeing with this approach, the authors critically assess the assumption that water scarcity is more often a source of conflicts, and that multilateral international institutions are the best tool to mitigate these conflicts. The authors find that this approach is based on Hobbesian notion of the natural condition of war of all against all for scarce resources, the only alternative to which are institutions of coercion, albeit not always perfect. The authors also find that other approaches based on Hobbesian political philosophy separate the international political processes caused by fear and by scarcity, the two most important “passions that incline men to peace”, according to Hobbes. Fear, including fear of scarcity, tends to drive conflicts, but scarcity as such is more likely to generate cooperation. While multilateral institutions are sometimes capable of mitigating conflicts, in conditions of water scarcity bilateral and minilateral, i.e., created by a small number of parties, institutions of cooperation turn out to be more effective. The experience of Russia’s interaction with its neighbors in the field of protection and use of transboundary water resources considered in the article provides with yet another evidence of that. The authors conclude that the international politics component of Russia’s water strategy for the coming period is more consistent with the approach that assumes that water scarcity generates cooperation rather than conflicts. They also conclude that bilateral and minilateral institutions of cooperation offer countries destined to share a common river basin instruments of interaction that are more suitable for the conditions of a particular basin than multilateral institutions can offer.

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