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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Water
Sec. Water Resource Management
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frwa.2024.1369002
This article is part of the Research Topic Water Governance Across Management Scales View all 5 articles

The role of third parties in shaping transboundary water cooperation of the Sixaola river basin, an analysis through dependency, technocratic turn and reterritorialization

Provisionally accepted
Christian Bréthaut Christian Bréthaut 1*Tania Rodriguez Echavarria Tania Rodriguez Echavarria 2
  • 1 University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
  • 2 University of Costa Rica, San José, San Jose, Costa Rica

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This study focuses on the historically non-state actors' pivotal role in transboundary water management within the Sixaola basin, a Central American river basin shared by Costa Rica and Panama. We analyse the various interventions of third parties across time, examining the evolution of strategies and priorities and their impact on transboundary basin governance. Our analysis highlights notably that despite attracting attention and financial resources, these initiatives also raise governance questions, revealing changes of paradigms and challenges for continuous basin development coherence. The paper sheds light on a less addressed case and contributes to current literature transboundary basin management by simultaneously looking at three different levels of analysis, challenges related to limited governmental leadership, the implementation of a technocratic turn in development strategies and finally a dynamic of reterritorialization including localized approach aimed at ensuring redefining a functional space aligned with local concerns.

    Keywords: Transboundary basin management, third-party actors, development, International Organizations Writing -review & editing, Conceptualization, methodology, project administration, TER: Writing -review & editing

    Received: 11 Jan 2024; Accepted: 20 Jun 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Bréthaut and Rodriguez Echavarria. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Christian Bréthaut, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

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