Abstract:The Caspian Sea is currently a subject of one of the world’s most intractable disputes, involving five coastal states of Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan. The conflict over the legal status of this multinational water body emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then the parties have been negotiating without reaching an agreement on the ownerships of waters, and the oil and natural gas beneath them. Although different division methods have been suggested so far for sharing the Caspian Sea, the gains of the countries from sea area and valuable resources remain unclear as the proposed methods are either focused on the areal shares or on the oil and gas shares. In order to assist the negotiators with reaching a compromise the Caspian Sea Negotiation Support System is developed which allows for simultaneous estimation of countries’ areal and utility shares under different legal methods. The developed model is run for different division scenarios to evaluate the sensitivity of the results to the proposed division rules and the Caspian Sea resources values. The results show a high sensitivity of outputs to the proposed division rules and an absence of a direct relationship between the allocated areal and utility shares, suggesting a need for clarification of the countries’ utility and areal shares under any suggested legal regime for governing the Caspian Sea.

Keywords: negotiation support system, decision support system, allocation model, Caspian Sea, conflict resolution