# **1.** Introduction

The Sahel region is renowned for its extreme desert climate as well as its frontline exposure to climate variability. The arid environmental conditions in the region wield a strong influence on the livelihoods of its large agropastoral population, many of whom live close to or at subsistence levels. As such, improving agricultural productivity, notably through irrigation investments, has been a central focus of the economic development strategy of the countries in the region and supported accordingly by international partners. Over the past decade, this strategy has also had to contend with an increase in state fragility rooted in geopolitical instability of the broader region. Faced with common economic challenges, the growing threat of terrorism and organized criminal activity, in 2014 five Western Sahel countries (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) joined a framework for regional cooperation known as the G5 Sahel which has led to an unpreceded mobilization of resources for the region.

As noted in a recent World Bank report (World Bank, 2020), despite considerable advances, research has yet to systemically map drivers of fragility and conflict in a way that can support targeted prevention. This paper contributes to this objective by going back to a key locational fundamental: the availability of water. It aims to understand how the management of the resource, particularly through irrigation, interplays with fragility and thus informs policy makers and development practitioners on how to best optimize its use to promote socio-economic development. The topic is all the more relevant in the context of the concerted efforts towards a post-COVID-19 recovery as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation.

This paper documents how the relationship between availability of water resources and conflict has evolved in Sub-Saharan Africa with a focus on the G5 Sahel countries. To the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first to explicitly examine the dynamics between water availability and conflict in the region. The context of the Sahel region provides a unique setting for empirical investigation.<sup>1</sup> First, high baseline water scarcity has historically defined the livelihood strategies employed by the population (pastoralism, rainfed agriculture, etc.) as well as their cultural institutions. The expansion of centralized irrigation in the region is a more recent phenomenon. Second, while the region has known political instability in the past, the rise in extremism seen over the past years is distinct and ostensibly linked to factors external to the region, namely the geopolitical fallout in the aftermath of the Arab Spring to its north and the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria in the south. This arguably provides an avenue for causally exploring the mechanisms that link water and fragility in the region.

We present two empirical approaches to document the relationship between water availability and conflict occurrence in the G5 Sahel countries. First, we build on previous findings of Harari and Ferrara (2018), henceforth referred to as HF, to show that the frontier climate of the G5 Sahel is particularly at threat of conflict caused by climate-induced variation in water availability. HF use gridded data for the continent of Africa to document a strong relationship between conflict occurrence and a drought index referred to as the Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index, or SPEI. Using their data and a simplified version of their empirical model, augmented with interaction effects, we show that a large portion of the

> 1 A larger body of literature can be found on the Sahel on issues related to climate shocks and malnutrition/ food security. An example of such literature is Alfani et al. (2015).

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