The study, conducted by Daniel Chigudu of the University of South Africa, synthesised 200 peer-reviewed publications and grey literature sources published between 2012 and 2024, drawn from Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and institutional repositories including SADC Secretariat reports and river basin organisation strategic plans. Six major transboundary basins served as the unit of analysis: the Zambezi, Limpopo, Orange-Senqu, Okavango, Incomati, and Maputo. These were selected purposively rather than sampled, following a maximum-variation logic designed to capture the widest feasible spread across four dimensions: infrastructure intensity, climatic and hydrological pressure, institutional maturity, and treaty configuration.

The basins span a remarkable gradient. The Zambezi and Orange-Senqu are heavily regulated, dam- and hydropower-dependent systems; the Okavango remains comparatively undeveloped and ecologically sensitive. The Limpopo and Orange-Senqu face arid, demand-stressed conditions, while the Incomati and Maputo are exposed to cyclones and flooding. Institutional development varies just as widely, from the relatively mature ZAMCOM and ORASECOM arrangements to the more resource-constrained LIMCOM. Basins lacking a formal river basin organisation, or with insufficient peer-reviewed evidence across the review’s three thematic clusters, were excluded to preserve analytical depth.

Screening proceeded sequentially: 852 records were first filtered by geographic focus, then by publication period, then by thematic relevance, yielding 324 thematically relevant records. Full-text review and methodological quality appraisal — removing duplicates, editorials, and items not substantively engaging at least one of the three thematic clusters at basin or regional scale — reduced the corpus to the final 200 publications. The temporal window was deliberately chosen to concentrate the synthesis on scholarship that emerged after the consolidation of the SADC Revised Protocol on Shared Watercourses and the establishment of the principal basin organisations, while seminal pre-2012 works on Southern African hydropolitics and benefit-sharing were retained as contextual references throughout.

The review’s central finding is that successful transboundary governance integrates three critical dimensions that prevailing policy continues to treat as separate workstreams. First, adaptive institutional frameworks enable flexibility while maintaining legitimacy. Second, multi-level governance structures connect basin-scale coordination with local implementation. Third, explicit mechanisms for conflict prevention and cooperative benefit-sharing create durable incentives for stability. River basin organisations such as OKACOM, LIMCOM, and ORASECOM demonstrate varying effectiveness, with adaptive governance capacity strongly correlated with stakeholder participation, third-party facilitation, and ecosystem-based approaches.

OKACOM, the Permanent Okavango River Basin Water Commission established in 1994 across Angola, Botswana, and Namibia, demonstrates relatively high adaptive capacity, attributable to third-party facilitation, a well-resourced secretariat, and sustained engagement from international conservation partners. ORASECOM, spanning Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and South Africa since 2000, 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. ZAMCOM, operating across eight riparian states since 2004, has developed the most comprehensive legal and institutional architecture of any basin organisation in the region.

Climate resilience strategies remain inadequately mainstreamed in most transboundary agreements despite projected temperature increases of 3–4 °C across the region by mid-century and increased drought frequency. Most existing treaties were designed under assumptions of hydrological stationarity — the idea that historical flow patterns can reliably predict future availability — and lack explicit provisions for adaptive revision of water allocations or management rules in response to climate-induced changes. This gap constitutes one of the most significant institutional vulnerabilities facing Southern African water governance, because it means agreements are progressively drifting out of alignment with the hydrological systems they are meant to govern.

Climate adaptation in transboundary contexts operates through three distinct pathways identified in the reviewed literature: technical and infrastructure-based interventions, ecosystem-based adaptation, and institutional adaptive capacity. 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 approaches — harnessing the water regulation and buffering functions of wetlands, floodplains, and riparian vegetation — offer particular advantages in transboundary contexts because they generate shared ecological benefits across basin boundaries, creating natural incentives for cooperative management. Successful applications are documented in the Okavango Delta system and the Maputaland Coastal Plain, where wetland conservation programmes have delivered both climate adaptation and biodiversity co-benefits.

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. 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: arrangements that distribute benefits beyond water allocation — including energy revenues, fisheries, tourism income, and ecosystem services — are consistently identified as more durable and conflict-resistant than purely allocation-based agreements. The Lesotho Highlands Water Project 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. While the 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.

Drawing on these findings, the 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 — water, energy, ecosystem services, and economic revenues — to create multiple stakeholder constituencies with interests in governance stability. Third, climate-conflict risk monitoring: river basin organisations 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.

The framework is deliberately designed to be implemented primarily through three existing vehicles rather than through the creation of new institutions: the review and revision clauses of existing basin treaties and river basin organisation agreements; the rolling basin-wide strategic and integrated water resources management plans prepared by RBO secretariats; and 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.

At the same time, the framework must be situated against the well-documented limitations of multilateral shared watercourse agreements. 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 state to slow collective action. Asymmetries of power and capacity amongst riparian states 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 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 operates incrementally through existing review mechanisms and benefit-based incentives rather than assuming 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. The review acknowledges several limitations: the search was restricted to English-language publications, potentially excluding relevant literature in Portuguese, French, and other regional languages; the basin-level focus may understate the importance of national-level governance factors; and the reliance on commercial databases carries a residual bias towards English-language and Northern-published outputs, only partially offset by targeted grey-literature searching.

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, the review 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 well 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. The Southern African experience suggests that the tools needed to build climate-resilient peace over shared waters already exist in most basins — they simply need to be connected, funded, and mandated within the institutions that already govern the flow.

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

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

Article References: Chigudu, D. (2026). Transboundary ecosystem governance and climate resilience in Southern Africa: integrating peacebuilding approaches in shared river basin management. Frontiers in Water, 8, Article 1836005. https://doi.org/10.3389/frwa.2026.1836005

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frwa.2026.1836005

Keywords: climate resilience, ecosystem-based adaptation, hydropolitics, peacebuilding, river basin organisations, SADC, Southern Africa, transboundary water governance, Transboundary, ecosystem, governance, climate