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Bridges Over Water: Understanding Transboundary Water Conflict, Negotiation and Cooperation By Ariel Dinar, Shlomi Dinar, Stephen McCaffrey, and Daene McKinney Singapore: World Scientific, 2007. 468 pages.
Reviewed by ANNIKA KRAMER
Two riparian states, A and B, share one trans- boundary aquifer. The countries' economies are based only on the aquifer's water: They pump water to sell it on the international market as bottled water. Assume, for simplicity's sake, that the capacity of the international market to con- sume water is limited, and the price per unit of water is a decreasing function of the quantity. Unfortunately, A and B decide how much water to pump without consulting the other. Each country then pumps as much water as possible and sells it on the market; however, this floods the international market and lowers the price for water. If the two countries instead commu- nicated and cooperated, they could maintain high market prices for water and realize the highest joint payoff.
With this transboundary groundwater version of the famous "prisoner's dilemma," the authors of Bridges Over Water: Understanding Transboundary Water Conflict, Negotiation and Cooperation demonstrate how a transboundary water situation could be expressed using game theory. Game theory is only one of the approaches employed by this textbook, which seeks to introduce the multidisciplinary facets of freshwater management by considering its political, economic, legal, environmental, and hydrological aspects. Representing a crosssection of disciplines, authors Ariel Dinar, Shlomi Dinar, Stephen McCaffrey, and Daene McKinney seek to fill the void by producing a single textbook that covers all aspects of negotiations over transboundary water, an everexpanding field...