Institutional capacity and transboundary water governance in Central America

The governance of transboundary watersheds is challenged by differences in institutional arrangements and global environmental change. We examine how transboundary water cooperation is shaped by institutional capacity to respond to environmental change in Central American basins. We focus on three case studies, where expert interviews reveal similarities in the causes and effects of environmental change and subsequent sociopolitical responses, but key differences in the institutional capacity to channel changes into cooperation. Growing environmental changes and diverse institutional arrangements demonstrate the need to strengthen context-appropriate, local and regional institutional capacity in particular to successfully mitigate conflict in the region.