Serious gaming is an emerging approach to conflict resolution. Serious games provide a structured environment in which learning, research, and joint fact finding occur. Several serious games focus on water and groundwater. The Unitization Simulation Game, included here, provides a tool for mediators to show how collective governance of an aquifer can create win-win scenarios for players. This game includes resource management decisions, transresource effects, divergent interests, and collaboration components. These aspects of the game are intended to simulate how groundwater issues develop and how aquifer unitization could provide a solution.

Unitization agreements have several common components and principles that enable them to effectively govern collective resources. These agreements represent a governance system with several phases of development. Several key components work to separate the rights to extract from the right to a benefit, protecting private rights yet enabling collective governance. Private interests are protected as equity shares in the unitization agreement. A unit operator makes resource management decisions for the collectively held resource. As more information is gathered about resource conditions, private interests, represented as shares, are redetermined regularly to ensure accuracy and improve resource management over time. Thus, the methods of determining private shares in the unitization agreement are critical to the unit’s success.

Groundwater extraction has emerged as a major concern at a global scale. The race to the bottom refers to the practice of drilling deeper to reach ever-deepening water tables. Much attention is given to the threat of reduced access to groundwater, but less attention is given to the irreparable damage to the aquifer due to excessive development. There are several international agreements regarding aquifers, but none refer to storage volumes available in the aquifer. But the potential storage available in aquifer systems could have great value in the future. Unitization explicitly includes governance of storage spaces. By design, unitization seeks to conserve collectively held resources. Elinor Ostrom’s work on common pool resources sought similar outcomes and has similar theoretical foundations. Many of the same policies adopted or proposed for groundwater have similar allegories in the history of oil and gas regulation. These regulations proved ineffective for oil and gas, and unitization closed the policy gap. Because of these similarities, the issues that the oil and gas industry resolved historically with unitization agreements could also address the issues facing today’s aquifers.

This chapter investigates the way in which international law treats reallocated private rights post delimitation. In doing so, it examines the various mechanisms which are available in international law for the accommodation of such rights on land and at sea, respectively. Firstly, the study compares the conventional mechanisms which are employed by states. Next, it compares the mechanisms which are employed in delimitation case law. A synthesis of the findings reached shows that the accommodation of reallocated private rights is more systematic and effective on land than in the ocean. This demonstrates that reallocated private rights have a greater chance of surviving on land than at sea.