Water Rights and Conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa

The essential and complex nature of water is well-known. Contestations over access, use and management of it have given rise to a wide variety of legal and institutional arrangements across the world through time. Whether equitable or inequitable, stable or fractious, deeply embedded or loosely articulated, our arrangements for governing and managing water are everywhere under stress from a combination of natural and human made factors, perhaps the most serious of which is climate change. Serious questions have arisen regarding the capacity of existing ways and means of governing and managing water to cope with these stresses. How robust are our water institutions? Are they capable of channeling emerging conflicts into productive, collective practices? Or is our future likely to be beset by more and more violent water conflicts?

With a growing population of 8 billion people, disputes over potable water sources are familiar, especially in regions where water is scarce. Rightful ownership is often contested whenever a water source such as a lake, a river, or an underground aquifer crosses national borders. Because of the decreasing amount of potable water, it is not uncommon for nations or people groups to have conflict over a shared body of water. Sub-Saharan Africa is not spared the ravages of climate change that have also affected water availability an increasingly conflicts around access to water ranging from the local community scale and escalating to national and regional conflicts are on the fore. This special collection seeks to publish research on this topic in a bid to foster better understanding and also to present resolutions to this issue.

In this collection we aim to draw together a set of papers that interrogate issues and questions of water rights and conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on both surface and groundwater. We are looking for contributions that focus on the following topics:

1. A historical perspective of water rights and conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa

2. Drivers & Dynamics of Water Rights and Conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa

3. A multi-perspective analysis of water rights and conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa

4. Factors underpinning water conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa

5. A legal perspective of water rights and conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa

6. A look at local and national water rights and conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa

7. Transboundary water rights and conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa

8. A gendered perspective of water rights and conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa

Keywords: Water resources, Water rights, Conflicts Sub-Saharan, Africa Sustainable development

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.