The governance of interstate rivers, which flow across multiple states within a country, largely depends on the capacity of its water management institutions in coordinating state and federal actions across various water-related activities. This paper presents a quantitative method to evaluate the robustness of legal arrangements for interstate rivers in supporting coordination and facilitating collaboration among governmental actors across borders and administrative levels in managing shared water resources. Specifically, we analyze the coverage of diverse water governance affairs (measured by rule counts across action situations) and activities (indicated by the diversity of rule types) within interstate water agreements/legislation governing the rivers. Furthermore, we employ metrics of social network analysis to assess the number and content of aggregation rules from the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework within these agreements, evaluating the completeness of interstate coordination channels in engaging key actors across various water management situations. By integrating these analyses, we are able to rate the degree of coordination in interstate water institutions. We demonstrate the application of this method using the case of the water governance institutions in the Yellow River Basin (YRB), China. Data, including the number and types of rules, were generated by parsing the basin’s water legislations using the Institutional Grammar (IG) and the rule concepts of the IAD framework. The findings indicate that the YRB’s degree of institutional coordination is ranked at a high level in the governance affairs of appropriation and basin planning but at a medium-low level in the affairs of administration, provision, and monitoring.
