Water Policy 6 Number 1 (2004) 1-24

Visions of Nile basin development

Dale Whittington

Departments of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, City and Regional Planning and Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA. Email: Dale_Whittington@unc.edu.

This paper describes five alternative visions for cooperative Nile development in the hope that they will assist the Nile riparian countries in their search for both a consensus vision and sound development projects. These five alternate visions [(1) Century Storage Plus, (2) Water for Peace, (3) Southern Lights, (4) The Green Nile, and (5) Economic Partners on the Nile] are intentionally stylized to make them easy to understand and remember. There is a common thread tying all five of these alternative visions together: the desire of all riparian countries for peace and economic development. Each of the five visions describes a peaceful future in which its proponents believe economic prosperity will flourish. One of the advantages of thinking explicitly about these alternative visions is that comparisons can reveal surprising compromises - or coalitions - that may become possible between Nile riparian countries even though some members of the political leadership in the riparian countries may still hold quite different ideas about the way to achieve cooperative development.

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