This collaboration is built upon previous independent initiatives on transboundary water policy by Professors Helen Ingram and Joseph DiMento.

One focus of Professor Helen Ingram's recent work (since coming to UCI as the Warmington Chair) began as a MacArthur Foundation initiative under the auspices of IGCC.  This was a mentorship program for Ph.D. candidates system wide on the development of their dissertations.  The project provided the nucleus for the edited volume Reflections on Water: New Approaches to Transboundary Conflicts and Cooperation, to be published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press. 

Reflections on Water concentrates on approaches that promise to enhance the understanding of cultural influences upon transboundary water policy. Conceptual approaches applied in the case studies of this book include network analysis, discourse analysis, historical analysis, ethnographic case studies, and social ecological analysis. The case studies within this book illustrate not only new approaches but the multi-disciplinary, complementary and collaborative kinds of research the authors consider essential to guide a mature public policy.

Collectively, the authors assert that the scope of the conceptual frameworks exported from the developed nations and dominating scholarly  work on transboundary water issues in the past did not contain the perspectives needed to capture community - and institution building, democracy, and public participation -- key elements of the world context in which transboundary water resources are governed today.   Changing conceptions of rationality and the changing world order demand the creation and adoption of more powerful tools to understand and implement actions to  resolve or reduce pressing water-related problems.

Professor DiMento's work on transboundary water issues focused initially on challenges in the Middle East.  He participated in The UCLA Forum on Practical Peacemaking in the Middle East.  Professor DiMento continues to work on transboundary issues in the Middle East. He was a participant in the December of 1998 meeting on "Middle East Environmental Diplomacy" co-sponsored by IGCC and the new Edmund S. Muskie Foundation. Subsequently, he expanded his focus to the Black Sea region, again addressing cooperation on environmental issues as a possible vehicle for promoting peacemaking, specifically in the Caucasus. 

In February 1999, Professor Ingram organized a Ford Foundation funded conference on shared groundwater resources between the United States and Mexico.  Participants from both U. S. and Mexican academic institutions joined government officials in both countries and journalists to discuss serious problems of groundwater overdraft in urban areas and in areas of unique cultural and environmental value including the Imperial and Mexicali Valleys. The papers from the conference are being published in the Natural Resources Journal.