The First Workshop will be organized on 23 and 24 September 2013, back-to-back with the eighth meeting of the Water Convention’s Working Group on Integrated Water Resources Management (25 and 26 September 2013).
The full documentation is available on the workshop website
Objectives
The First Workshop convened in the International Year of Water Cooperation aims to highlight opportunities and inspire effective practices/solutions in advancing the legal and institutional frameworks and tools for transboundary water cooperation through the exchange of experience and cross-fertilization within existing joint bodies, as well as to support the emergence of new joint bodies for transboundary water cooperation.
It is also intended to contribute to the establishment of cooperation and to provide a forum for networking between different joint bodies from across the world, and to build capacity for their effective functioning.
More specifically, the First Workshop aims to achieve the following objectives:
- Present and discuss the experience of legal and institutional arrangements, procedures and working methods of joint bodies for transboundary water cooperation worldwide, to enable identification of challenges and good practices and sharing of experience;
- Discuss past successes and ongoing efforts to establish new agreements and joint bodies, identify challenges and strategies to address them, as well as lessons learned, with a view to guide such efforts in the basins and aquifers not covered by agreements and joint institutions;
- Increase awareness on international water law instruments, in particular the Water Convention and the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention, their compatibility and mutual complementarity, as well as the 2008 ILC Draft articles on the Law of Transboundary Aquifers, and introduce joint bodies outside the UNECE region to the multilateral cooperation framework provided by the Water Convention.