Transboundary ecosystem governance and climate resilience in Southern Africa: integrating peacebuilding approaches in shared river basin management

Introduction

Transboundary river basins constitute critical social-ecological systems that support livelihoods, biodiversity, and economic development across multiple sovereign states. In Southern Africa, 15 major river basins are shared amongst countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), serving over 200 million people. These shared water systems face converging pressures from climate change, population growth, agricultural expansion, mining activities, and energy development, creating complex governance challenges that transcend national boundaries (Turton et al., 2003).

The governance of transboundary water resources in Southern Africa operates at the intersection of three critical domains: ecosystem management, climate adaptation, and peace and security. Climate projections indicate temperature increases of 3–4 °C across the region by mid-century, with increased frequency and severity of droughts and floods, fundamentally altering hydrological regimes and water availability (IPCC, 2021). Simultaneously, competition for scarce water resources can generate or exacerbate conflicts amongst riparian states, between sectors, and between upstream and downstream users (Wolf, 1998). However, shared water resources also present opportunities for cooperation, joint benefit-sharing, and regional integration when governed through appropriate institutional frameworks (Sadoff and Grey, 2005).

Despite growing recognition of the interconnections between environmental governance, climate resilience, and peacebuilding, these dimensions are often addressed separately in policy and practice. Transboundary water agreements typically focus on allocation and utilisation rights, with limited attention to climate adaptation or to explicit conflict-prevention mechanisms (Schmeier, 2013). Climate adaptation strategies frequently operate at national scales, missing opportunities for basin-wide coordination and cooperative approaches (IPCC, 2021). Peacebuilding initiatives may overlook the role of natural resource governance in preventing conflicts or building trust between nations (Zeitoun and Warner, 2006).

This systematic review addresses these gaps by examining how transboundary water governance in Southern Africa can be strengthened through the integration of climate resilience and peacebuilding approaches. The SADC region provides an instructive case given its extensive shared river basin infrastructure, existing regional governance frameworks, and acute exposure to climate variability. By synthesising evidence across institutional frameworks, climate adaptation strategies, and conflict-prevention mechanisms, this review contributes to emerging scholarship on climate-resilient transboundary governance. It offers practical recommendations for policymakers and basin authorities.

Research objectives

This research pursues four primary objectives:

• Analyse institutional frameworks and governance mechanisms governing transboundary water resources in Southern Africa, including SADC protocols, bilateral and multilateral agreements, and river basin organisations.
• Examine climate resilience and adaptation strategies implemented or proposed for transboundary basins, including ecosystem-based adaptation, infrastructure approaches, and institutional adaptive capacity.
• Investigate the role of peacebuilding and conflict prevention in transboundary water governance, including water diplomacy, benefit-sharing mechanisms, and trust-building processes.
• Develop an integrated framework for climate-resilient transboundary governance that explicitly incorporates peacebuilding principles and ecosystem-based approaches.

Materials and methods

Study design and scope

This study employs a comprehensive systematic review methodology to examine transboundary water governance, climate resilience, and peacebuilding in Southern Africa. Six major transboundary river basins were selected as the unit of analysis: Zambezi, Limpopo, Orange-Senqu, Okavango, Incomati, and Maputo. These basins were chosen based on their geographic diversity, varying levels of institutional development, and representation of different hydropolitical contexts within the SADC region.

These six basins were selected purposively, following a maximum-variation logic, rather than sampled to represent all fifteen SADC shared watercourses. The aim was to capture the widest feasible variation across four dimensions that the transboundary governance literature identifies as theoretically relevant to climate resilience and conflict sensitivity, while retaining sufficient peer-reviewed evidence per basin to support in-depth analysis. First, the basins span a gradient of water resource development and infrastructure intensity, from the heavily regulated, dam- and hydropower-dependent Zambezi and Orange-Senqu systems to the comparatively undeveloped Okavango. Second, they capture contrasting climatic and hydrological pressures, ranging from the arid, demand-stressed Limpopo and Orange-Senqu basins to the wetter, ecologically sensitive Okavango Delta and the cyclone- and flood-exposed Incomati and Maputo systems. Third, they exhibit markedly different levels of institutional development, from the relatively mature ZAMCOM and ORASECOM arrangements to the more resource-constrained LIMCOM, and they are governed by distinct configurations of bilateral and multilateral agreements that are currently under negotiation or revision, providing a varied evidence base on the treaty mechanisms central to this review. Basins that lacked a formal river basin organisation, or for which peer-reviewed evidence across all three thematic clusters was insufficient, were excluded to preserve analytical depth. This design strengthens the transferability of the resulting framework while acknowledging that the selected basins are not a statistically representative sample of all SADC watercourses.

Literature search and selection

A systematic literature search was conducted covering peer-reviewed publications from 2012 to 2024. The search strategy included multiple databases (Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar) and grey literature sources (including SADC Secretariat reports; river basin organisation publications such as ZAMCOM, OKACOM, ORASECOM, and LIMCOM strategic plans and annual reports; and documents from international organisations active in the region, for example the Global Water Partnership Southern Africa, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the World Bank, and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit). Search terms combined three thematic clusters: (1) transboundary water governance; (2) climate change and adaptation; and (3) conflict prevention and peacebuilding. A total of 200 publications were analysed after applying inclusion and exclusion criteria based on geographic relevance, temporal coverage, and methodological quality. Table 1 summarises the literature selection process and outcomes.

Table 1. Literature selection criteria and results.

The temporal scope (2012–2024) was selected to concentrate the systematic component of the review on the body of scholarship that emerged after the consolidation of the SADC Revised Protocol on Shared Watercourses and the establishment of the principal basin organisations, and that explicitly engages the climate–governance nexus. The lower bound of 2012 reflects the period during which regional climate projections for Southern Africa were substantially refined across the IPCC Fifth and Sixth Assessment cycles, and during which adaptation and peacebuilding became prominent framings in transboundary water scholarship. The authors recognise that a substantial and formative body of work was published between the ratification of the Revised Protocol in 2000 and 2012. To avoid a gap in the analysis, seminal pre-2012 works on Southern African hydropolitics, benefit-sharing, the legal architecture of the Protocol, and the early operation of the river basin organisations were retained as contextual references and are cited throughout the Introduction, Results, and Discussion, even where they fall outside the systematic search window. The systematic synthesis therefore focuses on recent governance developments while remaining anchored in the established theoretical foundations of the field.

The choice of databases was guided by the need to balance disciplinary breadth against adequate coverage of regional and grey literature, and to mitigate the disciplinary biases inherent in each source. Web of Science and Scopus were used as the primary indexed databases because of their wide multidisciplinary coverage of the environmental, political, and legal scholarship relevant to this review; their respective skews—Web of Science towards the natural and environmental sciences and Scopus towards a broader but Northern-weighted social-science corpus—were treated as complementary rather than redundant, so that the disciplinary blind spots of one index were partially offset by the other. Google Scholar was included specifically to reduce the under-representation of African-based journals, policy scholarship, and grey literature in the commercial indices, and to surface regionally published work that is frequently absent from Web of Science and Scopus. The authors acknowledge that all three databases retain known biases towards English-language and Northern-published outputs; this residual bias was partially addressed through targeted searching of SADC and river basin organisation repositories, and is noted explicitly amongst the limitations of the study.

As Table 1 indicates, screening proceeded sequentially: records were first filtered by geographic focus, then by publication period, and then by thematic relevance, yielding 324 thematically relevant records. In the final stage, these 324 records were subjected to full-text review and methodological quality appraisal. Records were excluded at this stage if they did not engage substantively with at least one of the three thematic clusters at the basin or regional scale, duplicated findings already captured by a more comprehensive source, were editorials or opinion pieces lacking an evidentiary or analytical basis, or could not be retrieved in full text. This quality-and-eligibility screening reduced the corpus from 324 to the 200 publications that constitute the final evidence base. The final row of Table 1 therefore reports the outcome of this screening step rather than a free-standing selection criterion.

Analytical framework

Analysis proceeded through three iterative phases. First, institutional mapping identified governance actors, legal frameworks, and coordination mechanisms operating at regional, basin, and national scales. Second, thematic coding of climate resilience strategies examined how adaptation measures are incorporated into transboundary governance arrangements. Third, conflict analysis examined the role of water governance in preventing or managing disputes between riparian states. Synthesis across these three analytical streams produced the integrated framework presented in the Discussion.

Results

Institutional frameworks for transboundary water governance

The analysis identified multiple governance layers operating in Southern African transboundary basins. At the regional level, the SADC Revised Protocol on Shared Watercourses (2000) provides the overarching legal framework, establishing principles of equitable and reasonable utilisation, the obligation not to cause significant harm, and the peaceful settlement of disputes. All SADC member states have ratified this protocol, which serves as the foundation for basin-level cooperation.

At the basin level, river basin organisations (RBOs) constitute the primary institutional mechanism for operationalising regional principles. Table 2 summarises the major RBOs operating across the study basins. These organisations differ substantially in their institutional maturity, secretariat capacity, financial resources, and mandate scope. ZAMCOM (Zambezi Watercourse Commission) operates across eight riparian states and has developed the most comprehensive legal and institutional architecture. In comparison, OKACOM (Permanent Okavango River Basin Water Commission) functions across three states with a stronger focus on ecosystem conservation alongside water management.

Table 2. Major river basin organisations in Southern Africa.

Governance effectiveness and adaptive capacity

Systematic review of basin governance performance reveals significant variation in adaptive capacity across the studied RBOs (Green et al., 2013; Schmeier et al., 2016). OKACOM demonstrates relatively high adaptive capacity, attributable to third-party facilitation, a well-resourced secretariat, and sustained engagement from international conservation partners. ORASECOM has developed robust data-sharing mechanisms and joint monitoring protocols across its four member states. By contrast, LIMCOM faces persistent capacity constraints, with limited secretariat resources and variable political commitment from member states.

Stakeholder participation emerged as a consistent predictor of governance effectiveness across the reviewed literature (Ashton, 2002; Green et al., 2013). Basins where governance arrangements incorporate civil society organisations, local communities, and the private sector alongside state actors demonstrate stronger adaptive responses to hydrological variability. The OKACOM model of integrated basin management, which explicitly includes non-governmental stakeholders in its governance architecture, is frequently cited as a regional reference point (Green et al., 2013).

Climate resilience and adaptation strategies

Climate change fundamentally challenges traditional approaches to transboundary water management by introducing non-stationarity into hydrological systems. Historical flow patterns can no longer reliably predict future availability, necessitating adaptive management approaches that can respond to uncertainty. Analysis of the reviewed literature reveals that climate adaptation in transboundary contexts operates through three distinct pathways: (1) technical and infrastructure-based interventions; (2) ecosystem-based adaptation; and (3) institutional adaptive capacity (Earle et al., 2015; De Stefano et al., 2017).

Technical interventions, including storage infrastructure, irrigation efficiency improvements, and demand management systems, constitute the most commonly documented adaptation responses across the study basins. However, these interventions frequently operate at national scales without coordination between riparian states, limiting their effectiveness and potentially creating upstream-downstream conflicts over flow modification.

Ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) approaches—which harness the water regulation and buffering functions of wetlands, floodplains, and riparian vegetation—are receiving growing attention in the reviewed literature (Munang et al., 2013). EbA measures offer particular advantages in transboundary contexts because they generate shared ecological benefits across basin boundaries, creating natural incentives for cooperative management. The reviewed literature documents successful EbA applications in the Okavango Delta system and the Maputaland Coastal Plain, where wetland conservation programmes have delivered both climate adaptation and biodiversity co-benefits (Munang et al., 2013; Russi et al., 2013).

Institutional adaptive capacity—the ability of governance arrangements to revise rules, procedures, and allocation mechanisms in response to changing conditions—represents the least developed dimension of climate resilience in the reviewed literature (De Stefano et al., 2017; Cooley and Gleick, 2011). Most existing transboundary agreements were designed under assumptions of hydrological stationarity and lack explicit provisions for adaptive revision of water allocations or management rules in response to climate-induced changes (Cooley and Gleick, 2011).

Peacebuilding and conflict prevention in transboundary water governance

The relationship between water governance and peace in Southern Africa is multidimensional. The reviewed literature documents both historical examples of water-related tensions—particularly over upstream development activities affecting downstream flows—and numerous instances of successful water diplomacy that have transformed potential conflicts into cooperative arrangements (Wolf, 1998; Wolf et al., 2003). The SADC region’s “water for peace” discourse, operationalised through the 2000 Revised Protocol, frames shared water resources as instruments of regional integration rather than sources of competition.

Benefit-sharing mechanisms represent a critical design feature of conflict-preventive water governance. The reviewed literature consistently identifies arrangements that distribute benefits beyond water allocation—including energy revenues, fisheries, tourism income, and ecosystem services—as more durable and conflict-resistant than purely allocation-based agreements (Sadoff and Grey, 2002, 2005). The Lesotho Highlands Water Project, while not strictly an RBO arrangement, illustrates how structured benefit-sharing can transform a potentially contentious water transfer into a stable bilateral cooperation framework.

Trust-building processes, including joint scientific monitoring, shared data platforms, and regular ministerial-level dialogues, contribute substantially to conflict prevention by reducing information asymmetries between riparian states. The reviewed literature highlights the role of neutral third-party facilitators in catalysing trust-building processes, particularly in contexts where historical grievances or political tensions exist between basin states (Green et al., 2013; Schmeier, 2013).

Discussion

Integration of climate resilience and peacebuilding in transboundary governance

The findings of this systematic review demonstrate that effective transboundary water governance in Southern Africa requires simultaneous attention to three interconnected dimensions: institutional capacity, climate adaptation, and conflict prevention. This tripartite framing extends existing scholarship—which has typically treated these dimensions in isolation—by demonstrating their empirical interdependence and proposing an integrated framework for their joint operationalisation.

The most successful governance arrangements identified in the reviewed literature exhibit several common characteristics: flexible institutional structures that can adapt to changing conditions; mechanisms for equitable benefit-sharing that extend beyond water allocation; robust stakeholder participation at multiple scales; and explicit provisions for dispute resolution and trust-building (Green et al., 2013; Schmeier et al., 2016). These characteristics align with emerging theoretical frameworks for adaptive governance of social-ecological systems (Folke et al., 2010), while extending them to address the specific challenges of climate-stressed, multi-jurisdictional water systems.

However, the review found that climate adaptation is inadequately mainstreamed in existing transboundary agreements, with most treaties lacking explicit provisions for climate-induced changes in water availability or mechanisms for adjusting allocations in response to long-term trends. This gap constitutes one of the most significant institutional vulnerabilities facing Southern African water governance.

The nexus between climate stress and conflict risk in transboundary basins deserves particular attention. While the reviewed literature does not support deterministic claims that climate change directly causes violent conflict, multiple studies document pathways through which climate-induced water scarcity can exacerbate existing political tensions, particularly in contexts of high hydropolitical sensitivity and limited institutional capacity for joint problem-solving (Wolf et al., 2003; Gleditsch et al., 2006; Conway et al., 2015). Proactively integrating conflict-prevention mechanisms into climate adaptation planning is an important risk-mitigation strategy for basin states and RBOs.

Proposed framework for climate-resilient transboundary governance

Drawing on the systematic review findings, this study proposes an integrated framework for climate-resilient transboundary governance organised around four pillars. First, adaptive institutional design: governance arrangements should incorporate explicit sunset clauses, periodic review mechanisms, and adaptive allocation provisions that allow agreements to evolve in response to changing hydrological conditions without requiring full treaty renegotiation. Second, integrated benefit-sharing: agreements should distribute a diversified portfolio of basin benefits—including water, energy, ecosystem services, and economic revenues—to create multiple stakeholder constituencies with interests in governance stability. Third, climate-conflict risk monitoring: RBOs should develop joint early warning systems that integrate hydrological monitoring data with conflict risk indicators, enabling proactive governance responses to emerging stress. Fourth, multi-stakeholder peacebuilding infrastructure: governance arrangements should institutionalise formal roles for civil society, local communities, and non-state actors in basin governance, recognising their contribution to social legitimacy and conflict prevention.

To address the concern that the term “governance arrangements” can remain abstract, the framework specifies, for each pillar, the governance level at which it should be embedded, the concrete instrument or entry point through which it can be operationalised, and the actors responsible (Table 3). The framework is intended to be implemented primarily through three existing vehicles rather than through the creation of new institutions: (i) the review and revision clauses of existing basin treaties and RBO agreements; (ii) the rolling basin-wide strategic and integrated water resources management plans prepared by RBO secretariats; and (iii) the SADC Water Division’s regional policy, financing, and monitoring instruments, which can incentivise harmonisation across basins. Working through established legal and organisational structures is a deliberate design choice intended to improve political feasibility and reduce the transaction costs of reform.

Table 3. Operationalising the framework: governance level, entry points, and lead actors for each pillar.

At the same time, the framework must be situated against the well-documented limitations of multilateral shared watercourse agreements, which constrain what any framework can realistically achieve. Such agreements are frequently characterised by ambiguous or aspirational provisions, the absence of binding dispute-resolution and enforcement mechanisms, and a reliance on consensus that allows the most reluctant or most powerful riparian to slow collective action. Asymmetries of power and capacity amongst riparian states—a recurrent theme in the hydro-hegemony literature—mean that formal legal equality often coexists with substantive inequality in agenda-setting and benefit capture. Implementation is further constrained by the chronic under-funding of RBO secretariats, dependence on external donor support that can compromise long-term ownership, weak coupling between basin-level commitments and national budgetary and regulatory processes, and the slow pace of treaty renegotiation relative to the speed of climatic and demographic change. The SADC Revised Protocol itself, although widely ratified, lacks robust compliance and enforcement machinery. Recognising these real-world constraints, the proposed framework is deliberately designed to operate incrementally through existing review mechanisms and benefit-based incentives, rather than to assume the political feasibility of comprehensive treaty renegotiation; its value lies in making the integration of climate resilience and peacebuilding a low-cost, procedurally achievable enhancement of arrangements that already exist.

Limitations

This systematic review has several limitations. The search was restricted to publications in English, potentially excluding relevant literature in Portuguese, French, and other regional languages. The systematic search window (2012–2024) concentrates the formal synthesis on recent governance developments; although seminal pre-2012 scholarship was retained as contextual reference material (see Materials and Methods), the systematic coding did not extend to that earlier period, which may understate longer-run institutional dynamics. The basin-level focus may understate the importance of national-level governance factors that shape RBO effectiveness. The reliance on Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar also carries a residual bias towards English-language and Northern-published outputs, only partially offset by targeted grey-literature searching. Finally, the review synthesises existing published evidence rather than generating new empirical data, and its conclusions are therefore contingent on the quality and coverage of the reviewed literature.

Conclusion

This study demonstrates that effective transboundary ecosystem governance in climate-stressed regions requires explicit integration of peacebuilding principles within institutional frameworks. The three dimensions of governance—institutional capacity, climate resilience, and conflict prevention—are fundamentally interconnected and must be addressed holistically rather than separately.

Key findings indicate that successful transboundary governance depends on: (1) adaptive institutional frameworks with flexibility to respond to changing conditions while maintaining legitimacy; (2) multi-level governance structures that connect basin-scale coordination with local implementation; (3) equitable benefit-sharing mechanisms that extend beyond water allocation to encompass economic, social, and environmental benefits; and (4) explicit provisions for conflict prevention, including trust-building processes, joint monitoring systems, and dispute resolution mechanisms.

Moving forward, transboundary governance arrangements in Southern Africa must explicitly address climate uncertainty through adaptive management provisions, incorporate ecosystem-based adaptation strategies, and strengthen participatory processes that include historically marginalised stakeholders. The proposed framework for climate-resilient transboundary governance provides a roadmap for integrating these elements into coherent institutional arrangements at both the basin and regional levels.

The central analytical contribution of this review—and its answer to the “so what?” question for policy—is that in climate-stressed transboundary basins, institutional capacity, climate adaptation, and conflict prevention cannot be sequenced or pursued in isolation without each undermining the others, yet prevailing policy continues to treat them as separate workstreams housed in different ministries, donor portfolios, and RBO units. The practical implication is consequential: the marginal returns to investment in Southern African water governance are likely to be highest not from new dams or wholly new treaties, but from re-engineering existing agreements and river basin organisations so that adaptation and peacebuilding functions are embedded within, rather than bolted onto, their core water-allocation mandates. Concretely, this implies that SADC and basin states should prioritise three actions: inserting adaptive-revision and climate-contingency clauses into the next scheduled review of each basin treaty; ring-fencing predictable, pooled financing for RBO secretariats to reduce donor dependence and capacity volatility; and mandating joint climate–conflict early-warning functions within existing RBO technical structures. The corollary is equally important for decision-makers: a failure to integrate these dimensions risks locking the region into agreements that drift progressively out of alignment with hydrological reality, raising the future costs of both renegotiation and conflict. For policymakers, the cost of integration is modest and largely procedural, whereas the cost of continued fragmentation is systemic and rising—a trade-off that reframes integrated governance not as an aspiration but as a prudent risk-management investment.

These findings carry policy implications that extend beyond Southern Africa. As climate pressures intensify globally and shared water systems come under increasing stress, integrating climate resilience and peacebuilding into transboundary water governance represents a critical frontier for sustainable water diplomacy and regional cooperation.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that Generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. During the revision of this manuscript, the author used a generative AI technology—Claude (Anthropic; Claude Opus model; https://claude.ai)—to assist with structuring the proposed framework and its accompanying table, and proposing literature citations. All was subsequently reviewed, edited, and verified by the author, who takes full responsibility for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of the manuscript, including the validity and completeness of all references.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Hanseok Jeong, Seoul National University of Science & Technology, Republic of Korea

Reviewed by: Jurie Moolman, North-West University, South Africa

Mujib Azizi, University of Siegen, Germany