Water Diplomacy in South Asia: Pakistan’s Strategies and Regional Implications
Abstract
Water security is a critical issue in South Asian regional affairs because rivers, glaciers, hydropower, agriculture, and climate vulnerability are increasingly linked to foreign policy. This article analyses Pakistan’s water diplomacy in relation to the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) and its impact on South Asian regional security. The research adopts a qualitative documentary-historical-institutional approach to examine treaty documents, peer-reviewed sources, institutional documents, and recent developments related to the arbitration. This article seeks to achieve two things: first, it explores Pakistan's legal, technical, bilateral and multilateral diplomacy to secure its lower-riparian interests; and second, it evaluates the impact of water disputes on regional cooperation, conflict management and climate-security diplomacy in South Asia. The study reveals Pakistan's diplomacy has been treaty-sustaining rather than treaty-abandoning, with a focus on continued application of the IWT, technical challenges via institutional channels, dependence on third-party procedures during negotiations standoffs, and growing concern for climate adaptation. But water diplomacy in the region is constrained by defensive strategies, lack of basin-level data, securitization of public discourse, and regional institutions. The paper concludes that Pakistan's future water diplomacy will most likely be successful if it mobilizes a combination of rights-based treaty preservation, climate-sensitive cooperation, transparent hydrological information, professional technical engagement and strategic multilateral diplomacy. The article builds on literature by providing a Pakistan-specific diplomatic approach that links the IWT, bilateral/multilateral diplomacy, regional security, and climate diplomacy.
Keywords: Water Diplomacy; Pakistan; South Asia; Indus Waters Treaty; Hydro-diplomacy; Climate Diplomacy; Regional Security; Transboundary Water Governance.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19895709
