Does data lead to cooperation? Lessons from Water Accounting Plus in the Cauvery basin, India

ABSTRACT

As the number of studies on remote sensing data for water management and governance increases, few articles reflect on their application in practice. This article shares learnings from the application of Water Accounting Plus (WA+) in a federal river basin in India. WA+ was applied to the Cauvery basin to contribute to solving transboundary water-sharing issues by providing a source of transparent data obtained through reproducible methods. By analysing how WA+ results and methodology were received, we show how data and models are also political and question the assumption that more data automatically lead to more equitable decision-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Political life of models
• Water Accounting Plus
• transboundary water cooperation and conflict

Acknowledgements

This research is executed with funding from the Water and Development Partnership Programme (DUPC2) between the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education and the Directorate-General for International Cooperation (DGIS) of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as with in-kind support from IISc Bangalore, the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE).

Data availability

The participants of this study did not give written consent for their data to be shared publicly, and due to the sensitive nature of the research supporting data are sparingly available. We remain available for questions and will try to answer within the limitations provided to us.

Disclosure statement

All authors have take part as organizers or participants in the project under review in this paper. This has not influenced the independent preparation or publishing of a manuscript. Chaitanya KS is employed by the Government of India. Views expressed by him are his own.

Notes

1. Cauvery is the anglicized name for the Kaveri River used by the Central Government of India and in the scholarly literature, which is why we have opted for this spelling.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Water Accounting Phase II Project, funded by the IHE Delft Water and Development Partnership Programme (DUPC2) under programmatic cooperation between the Directorate General for International Cooperation (DGIS) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and IHE Delft (ID DGIS Activity [grant no. DME0121369]).