Taking Water Hostage? The impact of Global Environmental Norms on Joint Water Resource Management in the Orange and Nile River basins. Inga Jacobs Introduction International rivers are social constructs of the numerous stakeholders in- volved in transboundary water resource management. According to the Social Learning for the Integrated Management and Sustainable Use of Water at Catchment Scale (SLIM), stakeholding (and in some cases, con- tention) arises when each stakeholding group sees a different system of in- terest i.e. economic proprietorship, residency, scientific involvement, or enthusiasm for particular species (SLIM Policy Briefing 2004). Based on the varying perceptions held of water; global, regional and domestic norms have developed over time dictating appropriate behaviour in water re- source management, among the most prominent being norms of trans- boundary co-operation. The question then begs: has water (and therefore water resource management), because of its multiplicity of social construc- tions and subsequent stakeholders, been taken hostage in a normative sense? It can certainly be argued that the need to accommodate multiplicity both of meaning and actors, has led to an ‘institutionalised’ way of know- ing and dealing with water (Lach, Ingram and Rayner 2005) that is consid- ered to be normatively ‘good’. However, despite this sphere of transboundary co-operation, the effectiveness of international environmental agreements has been called into question. New types of conflicts have been identified in recent dec- ades, some, over the water resources themselves, others, caused by the very means societies employ in order to adapt to water scarcity, such as conflicts that emerge as decisions by one authority impact other authorities and the users they govern (Turton and Ohlsson 2000; Scholz and Stiftel 2005). Indeed this illuminates the current differentiation in hydropolitics between first-order and second-order collective action conflicts (Scholz and Stiftel 2005). While first order conflicts are the ‘simpler’ tensions, and possibly open conflict, between states related to supply side management i.e. the upstream-downstream game (Turon and Ohlsson 2000), second- order conflicts are a result of collective action gone awry, for example, agencies and institutions that are created to manage first-order conflicts of- ten bring about tensions when they fail to agree to sustainable solutions.