Transboundary governance of the Nile River Basin: Past, present and future

•Transboundary waters face a multiplicity of governance challenges.•There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to transboundary waters governance.•We present a case study documenting transboundary governance ineffectiveness.•Negotiation of the Nile Basin Cooperative Framework has been slow and seemingly unsuccessful.•The Basin requires a comprehensive governance regime marked by cooperation and joint management.

Transboundary waters face a multiplicity of governance challenges. Transboundary waters are water resources that are shared by two or more sovereign states, and include international freshwater, international groundwater and international Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs).In crafting effective institutional design to govern transboundary waters, there can be no one-size-fits-all approach. Differences in approach are necessarily dependent on various political, social, economic and ecological drivers. These drivers provide the context against which the institutional architecture can be assessed and the environment within which institutional architecture should function.This note is a case study documenting the effectiveness of transboundary governance of the Nile River Basin. It comments on the approaches to and drivers of the Basin's institutional design, and concludes with a discussion on the challenges to effective transboundary governance in the region moving forward.