Abstract: This article explores how perception of hydro-diplomacy and international water norms affect South Asian countries’ forming cooperation over shared international rivers. Scholarship informs us that different actors’ perception, embedded in different cultural traditions and values, are salient to explain the policy development and negotiation over the governance of shared rivers. By examining individual experts’ views on concept benefit sharing, this study provides evidences on how individuals’ perception is combinedly shaped by contextual factors such as socio-economic and political conditions of the region. Together these conditions shape the judgements toward water use and the practical concerns that arise in profiting from water resources. Such perception represents distinctive regional features of water diplomacy and differs greatly from those found in western Europe or North America. We adopted Q-method to understand individual scholars’ ideas on benefit sharing. Participants are chosen from China, India and Bangladesh. They completed a total sample of 22 valid online Q surveys.

Keywords: Benefit sharing, ecological compensation, international water law, India, China, Q methodology

Biography: Lei Xie, PhD, is Professor at Institute of Governance, Shandong University, China. She is also a Research Fellow at Nottingham University, UK. Her research focuses on global environmental governance and transnational environmental movement with particular interest on the international cooperation of transboundary river basins. She is author of Environmental Activism in China (Routledge, 2009); and China’s International Transboundary Rivers: Politics, Security and Diplomacy of Shared Water Resources (with Shaofeng, Jia, Routledge 2017).