The Concordat's Water Review Closes With More Auditors Than Answers

GENEVA — The Global Concordat Council's review of the water corridors adjourned this week having proven, if nothing else, that a question can be sharpened without being solved. Delegates arrived to assess a success — the corridors flowed, the summer was survived, the standpipe riots of years past did not recur — and left having discovered that success has an accounting problem no one prepared for. Who holds the ledger? The financing houses that fronted the pipes, the utilities that meter them, the municipalities that host them, or the households that drink from them and pay the bill? Each review session added an auditor and subtracted a certainty. A proposal for a corridor-wide "rights floor" advanced far enough to be studied and not far enough to be funded. "We came to bless the corridors and stayed to argue about who owns the water in them," Secretary-General Ingrid Halvorsen observed dryly at the close. The relief is real. Its unevenness is real. And the one thing the Council agreed on unanimously was that it had not agreed on who is responsible — which, delegates conceded, is a strange note to end a triumph on.