Intrastate Water-Related Conflict and Cooperation: A New Event Dataset.

A change in water availability is frequently cited as a primary mechanism linking climate change to conflict. Despite the need for more systematic research on the factors that enable societies to mitigate such patterns, however, there is little comparative empirical evidence for water-related conflict or cooperation at a domestic level. From an empirical lens, one major obstacle on this issue is the lack of systematically compiled data - in particular event data on water-related intrastate conflict and cooperation. This paper reports on the construction of such a dataset for 35 Mediterranean, Middle East, and Sahel countries for the period 1997-2009. The authors offer an overview of the data collection process and the coding procedures. They discuss key challenges as well as advantages and disadvantages of particular solutions to these, which pertain to information source analyses, sampling, and intercoder reliability. The paper also presents a new scale, the Water Events Scale (WES), which records the intensity of water-related conflictive and cooperative events, and, finally, provides descriptive statistics demonstrating the utility of the new data for the study of intrastate conflict and cooperation over water resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]