The Himalayan region and Mauritius could not seem more different at first glance. One is a vast mountain range spanning eight countries; the other is a small island of 1.3 million people in the Indian Ocean. Yet, both face strikingly similar structural dynamics that produce cascading failures across interconnected systems. Understanding these patterns is essential for the Mauritian United Nations (UN) Conference of the Parties (COP)31 delegation to Turkey to propose workable long-term solutions.

■ Parul Sharma, Designer and Artist (USA). ■ Taniya D’silva, Impact Advisor (India). ■ Balmoi Abe, Cultural Futurist (Kenya). ■ Poulomi Dave, Partnerships Professional (India). ■ Snigdha Pandit, Energy Professional (Canada). ■ Jovin Hurry, Sustainability Strategist (Mauritius).

We are a team of six experts from around the world who came together online last April 2026 through the Regeneration Intelligence Fellowship (USA), conducting deep systems analysis of the Hindu Kush Himalayan region. Our research examined five interlocking crises: water, livelihoods, governance, waste, and energy across eight countries serving 1.9 billion people in the lower reaches (source: International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development – ICIMOD).

Our findings of this bioregion reveal a pattern that extends far beyond the mountains themselves, even to Mauritius. For example, the structural failure of water scarcity is driven not primarily by the lack of rainfall, but by how societies allocate the water they have, and whether they listen to those who understand it best.

Information asymmetry & institutional blindness: A legibility problem

Formal governance institutions operate through specific information channels and decision-making hierarchies. They can “read” and act upon data that flows through official systems: hydropower output (measured in megawatts), agricultural production (measured in tons of commercial crops), water consumption (measured in cubic meters allocated through formal permits), and economic contribution (measured in GDP growth).

However, these institutions are structurally blind and hold information that exists in alternate paradigms, like that of indigenous, cultural and tacit knowledge held by farmers, fishing communities, conservationists, traditional medicine systems, practitioners, and those with lived experience outside the register of formal and acceptable systems of knowledge and official channels.

Traditional knowledge about seasonal water availability developed through generations of observation; ecological understanding held by communities managing specific landscapes; adaptive practices developed through lived experience; and informal economic activities that sustain populations don’t appear in formal employment statistics.

According to ICIMOD’s framework, ecosystem services are “not fully captured in markets or adequately valued in monetary terms, so they are taken for granted and do not receive due importance in policy decisions”. This is not a knowledge failure, because the knowledge exists. It is an institutional filtering failure perhaps. In fact, this may be a dissonance in understanding the value of certain forms of knowledge and services. The system cannot compute information that doesn’t fit its designed input channels and paradigm of knowledge, metrics, and means of verification.

In Mauritius, the water governance system can read urban water demand (through meters), commercial agricultural demand (through irrigation permits), and tourismsector demand (through number of tourists, business registrations etc.). It cannot read the adaptive water management practices of smallholder farmers or the ecological knowledge of fishing communities about waterdependent ecosystems all around the island.

Smallholders constitute “the vast majority of local agricultural producers” yet are “often under-recognised in national policies and frameworks” (Assises de l’Agriculture, 2026). Research indicates that “policies that restrict water supply to agriculture during shortages further discourage farmers” (Brizmohun, 2025, Frontiers in Agriculture). This policy design reflects institutional blindness: the system can see that agriculture uses water and can measure that usage, but cannot see or measure the knowledge that smallholders possess about water-efficient cultivation, soil moisture management, or livelihood-scale water needs.

Take Nathalie Venis-Randabel’s regenerative farming at Just Natural nestled in the north of the island. She demonstrates this dynamic concretely. She practices water conservation, ecological restoration, and climate adaptation, an expertise directly relevant to Mauritius’ stated climate goals. Yet formal institutions cannot “read” her model. Agroforestry land access restrictions, inadequate policy support for alternative farming models, and exclusion from formal agricultural credit channels reflect institutional blindness. She remains statistically invisible despite demonstrating solutions that formal policy seeks.

The Mauritian fishing communities similarly operate outside institutional visibility. The 2022 Fisheries Transparency Initiative report notes that “no government studies on the informal fisheries sector have been produced since the early 2000s”. These communities possess detailed ecological knowledge about changing fish populations and ocean conditions. Yet, they have no formal channel to input this knowledge into higher marine governance decisions made by the Indian Ocean Commission, of which Mauritius is a member.

Consequently, information asymmetry is producing resource misallocation. Currently, Mauritius is about to deploy AI systems for smart irrigation, ocean monitoring, and water management. These systems will be designed by technologists, government ministries, and private companies.

Unless AI systems are co-designed with smallholders, fisherwomen, and informal workers from the start and accord meaningful decision-making power to communities in decisions that affect them, it will replicate the legibility failure. AI will optimise for what it can “read” (commercial yield, export value, standardised metrics) and miss what communities know (ecological adaptation, traditional water management, livelihood resilience), thus resulting in a system that may be technically “efficient”, but also incomplete and blind to these tacit forms of knowledge, difficult to translate into practice at the grassroots, widening rather than bridging the gap between technological systems and lived realities, and potentially reproducing socially unjust policies and systems.

Power asymmetry: structural inequality in decision-making

In the Himalayas, upstream nations control the source of critical shared resources (water originating in the Tibetan Plateau). Downstream nations depend on these resources but lack decision-making authority over them. This creates a structural asymmetry: upstream actors can unilaterally change resource flows; downstream actors can only absorb consequences. Unfortunately, these are conditions for not a bilateral negotiation, but a power hierarchy, one embedded in geography and infrastructure.

When India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty in April 2025, this asymmetry became visible: Pakistan’s water guarantees disappeared within days. The suspension was a unilateral decision by an upstream actor with no binding constraint preventing it.

Downstream nations face “existential threats they cannot defend against militarily, only through diplomacy, which is eroding,” according to our research analysis.

Mauritius is an island nation without these geographic upstream-downstream relationships. However, it has developed what we may term institutional and sectoral power asymmetries that operate through similar mechanisms. During water scarcity, irrigation to sugar cane, which provided 40% of employment in earlier decades of the 1970s, is suspended, while urban water supply and tourism-sector demand maintain priority.

This reflects a governance hierarchy: sectors with greater political voice (urban constituencies, tourism operators) maintain access; sectors with limited political representation (rural agriculture, particularly smallholders) absorb scarcity first, without the platforms to effectively represent and negotiate these concerns and translate them into policy programming. These “enfants pauvres” absorb the incoming unwarranted consequences: sugar industry collapse (GDP contribution fell to 0.23% by 2023; cultivation contracted from 79,000 to 35,000 hectares), agricultural livelihoods under pressure, rural unemployment (Faculty of Agriculture, Mauritius, 2025).

The structural pattern reveals that resource allocation mirrors power distribution in governance institutions, not the needs of affected populations. The systemic consequence of this power asymmetry produces two deep-seated cascading effects. First, it creates incentives for upstream/privileged actors to maximise their resource capture, knowing downstream/ vulnerable populations have limited recourse and as leverage during conflicts. Second, it reduces adaptive capacity among downstream/ vulnerable populations because they cannot secure resources needed for adaptation even when they possess knowledge about how to use them sustainably.

Technology deployment: Infrastructure as system reinforcement

The Himalayan region invested substantially in water infrastructure: dams, irrigation systems, reservoirs, water diversion projects. However, infrastructure deployment occurred within existing governance structures rather than reshaping them. Dams were built by upstream nations or corporations, operated by upstream authorities, and designed to optimise for upstream benefits (hydropower revenue, upstream irrigation). Downstream populations absorbed infrastructure consequences (flood risks from rapid reservoir filling, altered water flows, ecosystem disruption) without having shaped the design.

Mauritius is planning significant infrastructure deployment, e.g. desalination plants. Desalination infrastructure will be capital-intensive and energy-intensive. Its benefits will accrue primarily to urban areas and commercial sectors that can afford the service. Rural populations with limited purchasing power will continue to absorb scarcity. The infrastructure solves a technical problem (water scarcity) while reinforcing a governance problem (unequal access).

Smart irrigation systems present identical risks. AI algorithms will optimise for parameters defined during system design. If design occurs without smallholder farmer participation, optimisation will likely target commercial-scale efficiency rather than livelihood-scale sustainability. The system will be technically sophisticated and governanceblind, precisely reproducing the Himalayan pattern where infrastructure was optimised for upstream benefits.

According to the National AI Strategy 2025-2029 and FAIR Guidelines launched April 10, 2026, Mauritius emphasises “people-centred approach” and “inclusiveness” (Government Information Service, April 2026). However, these are design principles, not structural guarantees. Our critical question is: will community voice reshape governance structures before technology scales, or will communities be consulted after systems are deployed and embedded?

The Mauritian UN COP31 delegation must realise that these three issues outlined above are systemic as they arise from structural features of how Mauritian governance institutions operate, not from individual errors or insufficient effort. Addressing them in multilateral negotiations requires prior institutional reconfiguration, not technical fixes alone. Below are three concrete suggestions for Turkey.

Restructure gover nance to incorporate outside official channels

People are brought in as actors and decision-makers at the centre of governance and policy. Propose that the Loss and Damage Fund allocation include funding for governance mechanisms that systematically incorporate community knowledge into decision-making: formal advisory bodies where smallholder farmers co-design water allocation protocols; fishing communities’ participation in marine governance at the Indian Ocean Commission level; and institutional recognition of informalsector workers in climate planning. This addresses information asymmetry directly, thereby enhancing institutional visibility for knowledge currently outside official channels.

Redistribute decision-making authority toward affected populations

Rather than asking upstream/privileged actors to voluntarily limit resource capture, establish binding governance mechanisms where downstream/vulnerable populations have co-decision authority over resource allocation and avenues to contest these in cases of dispute. For Mauritius, this means that water allocation decisions include smallholder farmer representation; marine governance includes fishing community voice; infrastructure deployment requires consent from affected populations. Place-based citizen assemblies that advocate for the needs of those directly impacted rather than assuming consensus across “homogeneous” groups will be critical.

Mandate governance reconfiguration before technology deployment

Courageously suggest as a COP31 principle for SIDS Indian Ocean to start with, that new infrastructure systems (AI, water systems, agricultural technology, marine monitoring) cannot receive climate finance unless governance reconfiguration precedes deployment. Community voice in design is a prerequisite, not a post-hoc consultation. For Mauritius, this means that its new AI systems for agriculture, water, and fisheries are honestly co-designed with affected communities before implementation.

These actions address systemic failure modes structurally rather than technically. They reconfigure institutions to process information they currently filter out. They redistribute decision-making authority to include those currently excluded. They ensure that technology reinforces adaptive capacity for vulnerable populations rather than concentrating it among privileged actors.

Mauritius can show a different path.