The traditional approach to managing conflict risks in transboundary river basins stresses better design of cooperative institutions such as treaties, basin commissions, and processes for data sharing, monitoring, and joint management activities. These efforts seek to enhance cooperative engagement, increase adaptive capacity, and build capabilities for conflict resolution.

SIS Professor Ken Conca's chapter "Climate change, adaptation, and risk of conflict in international river basins" in the newly published book New Perspectives on Transboundary Water Governance discusses important “blind spots” in this perspective.

One such blind spot is related to the new political economy of water, which involves complex and decentralized financing mechanisms that move authority away from national governments and basin-collaboration settings. A second blind spot emerges from various forms of climate-driven water conflict that tend to be invisible to prevailing institutional arrangements, such as allocation conflicts between farmers and cities or other tensions over competing uses at the subnational level in transnational basins. Finally, inadequate attention has been paid to forms of conflict that emerge from efforts to adapt to climate change, which often bear important and contentious distributive consequences.

To address these emergent risks, a revised “formula” for managing conflict in transboundary basins will require more holistic approaches to monitoring and assessment, broader forms of stakeholder engagement and dialog, and a strengthened commitment to rights-based approaches.