Water: A Source of Conflict and Cooperation

Early in her career, Melissa McCracken found a breath of fresh air in an unexpected place: fresh water. 

As an undergraduate, McCracken studied geological engineering. When a summer internship did not provide her with what she was looking for, however, she began to pivot towards geography, fascinated by the interactions between people and the environment. Subsequently, during her master’s in environment and international development at the University of East Anglia, a class she took ignited her interest in water. She switched to a program in water security and international development so she could investigate the intersections of water, development, and the environment. 

After graduating, she worked as an environmental researcher for a defense contracting firm before pursuing her doctoral studies, where she studied her primary area of interest: conflict and cooperation over freshwater. 

“Water is such a cool resource,” said McCracken. “It’s essentially the only thing that is ubiquitous across any person, any individual, anywhere in the world. If there's one element that we can think of as being binding to humanity, it's water.”

“Some of the first laws, governance, and policy started around water. Civilization started around water. Humanity is a water society,” she added. “That juxtaposition of how vitally important this unique, yet commonplace resource that is often overlooked – that was really intriguing.” 

Conflict and Cooperation Over a Critical Resource

In her research, McCracken examines how states share, cooperate, and disagree over water. 

“Within the public media, rhetoric persists that the next war is going to be over water, but we know from our interstate conflict and cooperation events data  that that's not true,” she said. “Yet it is still a commonly perpetuated myth.” 

“My interest lies in digging into why there is historically more cooperation than conflict of internationally shared freshwater – why is that the case? Does this still hold with climate change? Does this hold at the subnational scale versus international scale? What are the mechanisms that enable transboundary water cooperation to be effective? What does effectiveness look like in these institutions, and how we design them to share resources?”

To investigate these questions, McCracken and a team of collaborators from The University of Alabama’s Global Water Security Center and Oregon State University were awarded a $2.4 million grant from the United States Department of Defense’s Minerva Research Initiative. 

The funding will be used to expand data on water conflict and cooperation events and evaluate which potential elements of resilience could most effectively buffer societies from shocks to the water system. Improved insight into societal resilience will improve the ability to anticipate when any type of biophysical shock might develop into unrest, allowing data-driven insights to inform policies for managing instability.

McCracken is eager to dive into both the study’s theoretical research questions and its applied methodological questions. 

“Do some of our theoretical conclusions and foundational ideas hold in the face of the changing climate, rapid economic development, and population growth at the international scale?” she asked. “Is cooperation at the international scale still more common than conflict, and can we better understand what's driving our ability to cooperate and how societies might be resilient in the face of some sort of disturbance over a shared natural resource that could then lead to conflict between those groups?”

The study will employ the theoretical framings learned from the international scale to understand these questions on the subnational scale. To support their investigation, the team will leverage powerful data science tools, such as web scraping, machine learning, and large language models to collect the data, identify, and code it, all with the mission of creating a monitoring and early warning system for water conflict. 

Data science advances, such as generative AI, have already proven to support research in this area. McCracken often works with treaties and other legal arrangements over freshwaters. These are commonly written in languages not available to the research team, which previously required professional translation. Large language models can now provide a decent translation of the document, which a native or fluent speaker can then review. She sees a large advantage to employing these tools to collect and analyze data at the subnational scale.

“We will be collecting and coding millions of news articles at both the subnational and international scales,” said McCracken. “You feasibly cannot do this manually. Advancements in data science will hopefully allow us to finally answer some of these questions.”

Researching Freshwater with Fletcher Students

At the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy (CIERP) McCracken leads the Shared Waters Lab, which includes a partnership with Dr. Aaron T. Wolf at Oregon State University and Dr. Susanne Schmeier at IHE-Delft. The team is organized around the mission of “strengthening international water diplomacy by providing critical data and analysis on transboundary freshwater resources.” 

Together, they research transboundary water conflict and cooperation data at a global scale and leverage their findings to inspire action. Through the Transboundary Freshwater Diplomacy Database (TFDD), they offer the TFDD Explorer, which is a spatial platform launched this August, to “support policymakers and researchers in navigating and mitigating water-related conflicts while promoting cooperation.” 

This fall, McCracken is stepping into a new role as co-director of CIERP. She will continue to work closely with Kelly Sims Gallagher, who was appointed Dean of the school, and she looks forward to raising CIERP’s profile and continuing its tradition of excellence in research, advocacy, and education. 

“Through CIERP, we can focus on emerging, novel, and innovative environmental research at Fletcher and look at these global environmental challenges through the intersections between the different areas in which our faculty have expertise,” she said. 

In partnership with the center’s renowned faculty and remarkable staff, McCracken is eager to involve students in novel research, and she anticipates additional opportunities to do so with her latest endeavors. 

“Helping to create a space where those interdisciplinary connections can happen is something I'm looking forward to in this role, while also facilitating that same process for students.”

Read more about Fletcher’s International Development and Environmental Policy field of study.