问答：尼罗河盆地报告的“房间里的大象”

This content is supported by theIHE Delft Institute for Water Education

尼罗河和关于其使用情况的争议通常被视为三个国家之间的一个问题：埃塞俄比亚，苏丹和埃及。但是实际上，水道由11个国家共享，使其水的合作成为一个高度复杂的问题。开放水域外交实验室的项目经理Emanuele Fantini说，由于缺乏信息和遏制，对其银行沿岸的发展的报道都被扼杀了。

The Open Water Diplomacy Lab was set up in 2016 to promote science and media as a catalyst for cooperation and peace amid these tensions. It examines the role of these two sectors in influencing ongoing negotiations over Nile waters, working with researchers and journalists to build mutual understanding and improve collaboration.

“The project provides a space for journalists and water scientists from different Nile Basin countries to participate in the joint learning and production process of knowledge and discuss issues related to the Nile Basin,” says Fantini, a lecturer and researcher at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education who spoke toscidev.net关于研究这个棘手问题的挑战。

开放水外交是一个项目，旨在在尼罗河盆地建立媒体，科学和跨界合作之间的沟通。通常，当我们考虑包括水外交在内的外交时，想到的第一个想法是保密和封闭的图像。外交是在封闭的环境中进行的，不接受公众审查，例如外交官之间的会议。

我们的主要问题是:如何让记者和复位archers work together to open up water diplomacy? Most of the time when it comes to water conflicts the media are considered part of the problem, being accused of negative, sensationalist or inaccurate reporting. So IHE Delft embarked on research with journalists fromAfrica Waterandscidev.netand researchers from the Nile Basin Capacity Building Network and University of WITS, Johannesburg, to better understand how international and national media are talking about the Nile.

Our second goal is to train journalists and researchers on science communication skills, with online and residential training, so that they can join these conversations effectively. And our third goal is to support the co-production by journalists and researchers of original information on Nile issues.

In our work with journalists and researchers we started by focusing on what tears them apart, on differences between the two professions that might lead to lack of collaboration, trying to understand how to bridge them. But as the project proceeded, it also become clear what journalists and researchers have in common. And the question here is: does this imply that we can no longer trust journalism and science? I don’t think so.

In our research on Nile media narratives we decided to focus on the Eastern Nile basin, specifically on Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt, where media debates on the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) are particular lively and also contested. In order to complete the picture and explore how the same issues are reported outside these countries, we added乌干达[news website] and the international media (Al Jazeeraandthe Guardian).

We decided to look at mainstream newspapers and also analyse online comments by readers, since we are interested in both the mainstream or official narratives put forward by national government and institutions, and how these get reproduced or challenged online.

我们目前正在完成研究，并计划在今年晚些时候将其发布在一本书中。这将是埃及，埃塞俄比亚和苏丹的研究人员首次共同研究该主题。

We found that the media remains caught in the nation trap: Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt are presented as unitarian, monolithic actors with one national interest orienting their action in relation to the Nile. There is almost no reference to internal debates within each country about how Nile waters should be distributed and used.

Often Nile issues are narrowed to a bilateral issue between Ethiopia and Egypt, with Sudan barely mentioned and often as a secondary actor, without clear agency and stakes. These bilateral accounts tend to emphasise the conflict dimension, while as soon as Sudan or other basin countries are brought in the picture, there is more room to explore and discuss collaborative solutions.

主要用于数据和科学信息a cosmetic or rhetoric way, to give an impression of information based on evidence, without adequate explanation and contextualisation. Most of the information on the GERD, for instance – about its costs and advancement of construction works – seems to be based on copy and paste from the internet. This is also due to the difficulty of accessing information about the dam and conducting investigative journalism in the region. We found very little reference and links to scientific studies and research on Nile issues.The big elephant in the room is freedom of expression: when analysing and commenting on Nile media debates we should not forget that these debates often take place in a closed political space, with significant limits to freedom of expression of both journalists and researchers. This of course goes beyond the Nile. During our research, for almost one year, Ethiopia was under state of emergency with social media shut down. The same happened in Sudan when the military shut down internet access and it was almost impossible to communicate with our Sudanese colleagues.

作为一个项目，我们有不同的沟通渠道来吸引不同的受众：我们有Infonile.org这是一个地理新闻业的平台，有兴趣绘制世界。我们也有播客尼罗河的来源whose main goal is to elicit a conversation between journalists, researchers and policymakers. And there’s the online campaign #EverydayNile involving photojournalists from Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt who visited each other to picture how the Nile looks in other riparian countries.

在过去的几个月中，我们的项目还引起了尼罗河盆地以外的兴趣，因此我们计划扩大规模，并与来自非洲乍得湖（Chad）和亚洲的婆罗门（Brahmaputra）等其他盆地的记者和研究人员分享我们的经验。我们将尝试在研究，培训和报告赠款方面复制我们在尼罗河盆地所做的事情 - 希望我们还将从这些其他盆地的经验中学到更多。

This piece was produced by SciDev.Net’s Middle East & North Africa desk and edited for brevity and clarity.

The Open Water Diplomacy Lab is run by theIHE Delft Institute for Water Education, the world’s largest international graduate water education facility. The project is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Global Partnership for Water and Development.