Trust in Trans-boundary Water Governance: The Case of Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Negotiations

Abstract

This paper examines the negotiations surrounding the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance
Dam (GERD) through the lens of trust and confidence-building within the water
security nexus among Nile Basin co-riparian states. Drawing on primary data
collected through in-depth interviews with officials from the Federal Ministry of
Water and Energy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the GERD Project Office,
scholars at Addis Ababa University working on Nile issues, and the Institute of
Foreign Affairs, the study is further supported by relevant legal documents, draft
agreements on GERD filling and operation, official reports, and secondary sources.
The paper advances the hypothesis that increased frequency of negotiations did not
translate into enhanced confidence-building measures (CBMs). While conventional
negotiation theory suggests that repeated interactions reduce mistrust and foster
mutual understanding, the GERD case presents a paradox: the more the parties met,
the more agendas were recycled, entrenching existing positions and complicating
the prospects for consensus. To explain this anomaly, the study revisits pre-GERD
water security discourses in the Nile Basin and analyzes their influence on post
GERD negotiation dynamics. It also finds that the decade-long negotiations failed to
produce agreement, inter alia, due to disparities in negotiating strategies and
behaviors, the securitized framing of drought as a tool of pressure against upstream
states rather than a shared hydrological risk, the involvement of regional and extra
regional powers, and the absence of substantive confidence-building measures. The
paper suggests that trust in trans-boundary water governance cannot be assumed to
emerge from repeated interaction alone but must be institutionally embedded and
strategically cultivated.