ABSTRACT

Political will remains an abstract concept. Academic literature mostly mentions it as an ex post facto and a latent factor. It is deemed a cause of many public policy failures, but mostly without any tangible assessment. The literature on Pakistan-Afghanistan transboundary water governance manifests the same gap. This research attempts to fill the gap by developing a framework of political will while benefitting from literature on the subject as well as contributing to it. The literature on political will frameworks does not account for the foreign policy explicitly. This thesis contributes to the existing literature by introducing the foreign policy aspect into the political will framework. Using the framework, it assesses the political will for transboundary water cooperation on Kabul River in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It further explores the avenues for generating political will on the subject between the two countries and linking it with water diplomacy.