Sustainable transboundary water governance is often challenged by conflicts between agents, which necessitates the design of cooperative and self‐enforcing alternatives to facilitate equitable water distribution. A pervasive and critical problem related to many transboundary rivers is that the total allocation or demand of riparian states is usually much more than that of the total available water. This problem is a major cause of disputes, both nationally and internationally. A key challenge concerns how to allocate the available water among riparian states with competing and often conflicting needs under an uncertain supply–demand gap. To address this pervasive allocation problem related to transboundary rivers, the bankruptcy method is used. The bankruptcy method distributes water among riparian states when their total demand exceeds the total available water. We investigate the utility of this method in the Indus River – a river that is shared among the four provinces of Pakistan, namely, Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) – using five commonly used bankruptcy rules and the Shapely value. Two new bankruptcy rules namely the “groundwater‐based rule” and “the proposed rule” are also proposed to address the usage of groundwater: the land affected by salinity and the gross domestic product (GDP) of each province. Additionally, this paper introduces a new method to compare and contrast the bankruptcy rules, the Shapely value and the two proposed rules. The findings suggest that the groundwater‐based rule has the lowest dispersion and is the preferred method for water allocation in the Indus River Basin. The use of the bankruptcy rules, the Shapely value and the two proposed methods has the potential to address the supply–demand mismatches of shared rivers. The proposed framework for selecting the best rule is recommended as an effective tool to facilitate negotiation over practical water allocation within transboundary river basins.

中文翻译：

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运用破产法解决跨界河之间的省际水冲突：以巴基斯坦印度河为例

可持续的跨界水治理经常受到代理人之间冲突的挑战，这需要设计合作和自我执行的替代方案以促进公平的水分配。与许多跨界河流有关的普遍和关键问题是，沿岸国家的总分配或需求通常远远大于总可用水的分配或需求。这个问题是引起国内和国际争端的主要原因。一个关键的挑战涉及在不确定的供需缺口下，如何在竞争激烈且经常相互矛盾的需求的河岸国家之间分配可用水。为了解决与跨界河流有关的普遍分配问题，使用了破产方法。当河岸国家的总需求超过总可用水量时，破产法将其分配给河岸国家。我们使用五种常用破产规则和Shapely值，对印度河（巴基斯坦旁遮普省，信德省，Bal路支斯坦省和开伯尔·普赫图赫瓦省（KPK）四个省之间共享的河流）的这种方法的实用性进行了调查。还提出了两个新的破产规则，即“基于地下水的规则”和“拟议规则”，以解决地下水的使用问题：受盐碱化影响的土地和每个省的国内生产总值。此外，本文介绍了一种比较和对比破产规则，Shapely值和两个提议规则的新方法。研究结果表明，以地下水为基础的规则具有最低的分散性，是印度河河流域水分配的首选方法。破产规则，Shapely值和两种拟议方法的使用有可能解决共享河流的供需不匹配问题。建议将建议的最佳规则选择框架作为促进跨界流域内实际水资源分配谈判的有效工具。