From academic publications to policy making fora, cooperation is a major theme of contemporary water governance. Suggesting the benefits of working together over pursuing self-interested goals, it is often presented as both a method for achieving the optimal management of water resources and a description of positive collaboration between interested parties (individuals, corporations, and states). Hosted by the National University of Mongolia, this international conference presents research by the University of Cambridge’s Resource Frontiers project members as well as scholars and practitioners from across Inner Asia. In doing so we critically interrogate what cooperation means in everyday life in the Inner Asian region. We ask: what, in practice, is cooperation as a type of social relation? What kind of entities, including non-human ones, does it take place between? And, critically, what are its limitations for describing fraught relations over scarce resources?

Please look conference programme here