Part I — Situation overview

On 5 August the water shortage crossed over from the state in which it looked like a local supply disturbance into the one in which it is a national policy question. On the basis of the data supplied by the territorial defence committees, the government’s report published on Wednesday morning states that first-degree water restrictions are in force in 465 settlements, second-degree in 151 settlements and third-degree in 13 settlements — 629 settlements in total. In the service area of the Danube Regional Waterworks third-degree restrictions had earlier been ordered in 120 settlements; in Szentendre the situation remained critical in the middle of the week too, with the army carrying drinking water day and night. According to the statement of László Gajdos, the minister responsible for the living environment, daily consumption had earlier risen by more than 25 per cent because of the heatwave, supply is assured across the country, and the problems that arise are being remedied continuously in ten to twenty affected settlements. According to the minister, the restoration of normal operation of the Szentendre network requires time because of the low Danube water level and the reduced well extraction.

The most important policy fact of the day, however, is not domestic. The Hungarian government asked the Slovak side to increase substantially the Danube flow arriving in Hungary. Tomáš Taraba, Slovak environment minister, stated at his Wednesday press conference — according to MTI’s report — that this is not possible at present: Hungary receives 400 cubic metres of water per second, with which in his view Slovakia is meeting its international obligations, and this arrangement has been in force since Monday. The minister rejected the claim that Slovakia is holding back water for the purpose of electricity generation: according to his statement, of the eight turbines at the Gabčíkovo plant only one is operating, primarily to ensure the necessary flow. He added that a substantial increase of the flow would solve the situation only for a short time and would cause water shortage on both sides of the border — in the event of ample rainfall, however, Slovakia is ready to let the water surplus through to Hungary first. On Tuesday Taraba consulted by telephone on the situation with Foreign Minister Anita Orbán. On the same day a positive figure also became public: household water consumption fell by 9 per cent over the past days.

By MIAK’s reading the Slovak answer is not a rejection but the statement of a structural truth — and precisely for that reason it is the most valuable piece of information of the day. The domestic debate at present is about whether a barrage is needed on the Hungarian stretch of the Danube: according to shipping expert Botond Szalma the regulation of the river has been neglected for thirty years, and a smaller hydropower plant should first be built at Fajsz to maintain the level needed for the operation of Paks; landscape architect Sándor Bardóczi, by contrast, emphasises the ecological price of the intervention. But this debate is built on a false dilemma. A domestic structure does not create water, it only rearranges the existing water in space and in time — the cubic metre stored on the Hungarian stretch also arrives from upstream. What the Slovak minister said is exactly this: the water stock of the Danube is not a Hungarian sovereign resource but a cross-border common stock, on the upper stretch of which the same shortage prevails. From this it follows that the highest-yielding investment today is not concrete but a treaty.

Part II — Literature foundation

Before turning to MIAK’s proposals it is worth setting out the scientific frame in which a depleting water stock used by several countries can be interpreted. The work The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor Ostrom (American political economy researcher, laureate of the Nobel memorial prize in economics, theorist of the self-organising management of common resources) describes precisely this situation: the management of a common stock — a common-pool resource — can be solved well neither by privatisation nor by a quota imposed from above by an authority. In long-lived, working institutions, however, eight recurring design principles can be identified — from a clearly defined circle of entitled parties to independent monitoring and conflict resolution. The most important part of Ostrom’s work from a Hungarian point of view is not the theory but the case history of the agreements concluded on the Californian groundwater basins: dozens of mutually competing extractors negotiated proportional cutbacks and accepted an independent monitor. The World Bank’s report World Development Report 2015 gives the other side to this: with the toolkit of behavioural economics it shows that changing consumer behaviour is measurable, cheap and — this is the essential point — durable only if the intervention is not a campaign but recurring feedback and a social norm. The detailed treatment of the literature — author by author, with quotations — can be found in the 6.4 Literature in detail section.

📖 Source: Elinor Ostrom: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action; World Bank: World Development Report 2015 — Mind, Society, and Behavior

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures. None of them is a construction decision: the first is a negotiating mandate, the second a public statement, and the third the preservation of a result already achieved.

3.1 Initiation of a Danube stock-sharing and minimum-flow protocol (the negotiating mandate within 60 days)

The Slovak answer has shown that the present frame does work, but was designed only for an average year: the 400 cubic metres per second is the performance of an existing obligation, not a sharing rule devised for a period of shortage. MIAK proposes that within sixty days the government should adopt a public negotiating mandate for a Danube stock-sharing and minimum-flow protocol with the upstream countries — towards Germany, Austria and Slovakia — making use of the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River and of the EU water framework. The protocol has to contain four things: the minimum flow value for each stretch in normal and in shortage operation; a pre-fixed, proportional cutback formula for the case in which the stock is scarce at every participant; an independent monitoring and data-publication regime accountable to all parties; and finally a fast, low-cost route for dispute settlement. The emphasis is on the second point: today it is not stated what happens if there is little water at everyone at the same time — and the present week is precisely that case. The proposal is the first concrete content of the KP15 preventive diplomacy programme point, fits the KP10 regional resilience building, and builds on the G28 common resource management framework. Ostrom’s Californian case studies (see 6.4.1) show that such an agreement can be bargained out even in a shortage situation, if there is independent measurement to go with it and everyone can see their own alternative.

3.2 Settlement-level water security index — public publication (by the start of the next irrigation season)

The figure of 629 is today a daily news item, not a policy datum: it does not reveal whether in the given settlement the restriction is the consequence of a temporary load peak or of durable structural exposure. MIAK proposes that by the start of the next irrigation season a settlement-level water security index should be prepared and published, made up of four public data points: the share of network water loss, the available reserve capacity as a proportion of daily peak consumption, the type and exposure of the water base — surface, bank-filtered or deep-layer — and the number of restriction days in the previous three years. These data already exist at the service providers and in the water management register; the proposal amounts only to their being available in a single, comparable table, settlement by settlement. The index makes two things possible for which there is no way today: development funding can be directed to where exposure is greatest, not to where tendering capacity is strongest; and the population can see in advance why its own settlement is under restriction at all. The proposal is an extension of the TE1 micro-regional development index, and follows from the K3 status monitoring and the D2 open data programme points.

3.3 Turning the nine per cent saving into a durable measure (by the 2027 season)

The one unambiguously good news of the week is that household water consumption fell by 9 per cent, on a voluntary basis, upon request. The behavioural literature, however, is definite on this: the campaign effect passes if it is not built into durable feedback. MIAK proposes that by the start of the 2027 season three elements should be brought into the system. First: the water bill should show the household’s consumption measured against the average of households of similar size living in the same settlement — this is the strongest, best-evidenced behavioural instrument, and it requires no new meter. Second: service providers should publish annually the development of their network losses, because household saving is taken away by leakage, and on today’s data this is the single largest item. Third: the content of the restriction degrees should be predictable in advance and uniform — today the degrees carry different prohibition lists at settlement level, which makes compliance harder. The proposal is the first large, measurable task of the KI5 behavioural public policy unit, and connects to the TE4 rural public service minimum — the guaranteed drinking water reserve has to be stated so that army delivery remains an exception and does not become routine.

The three proposals can be strung on a single principle: water shortage has to be dealt with not where it is visible but where it arises. It is visible in the water delivery at Szentendre and in the figure of 629; it arises in the upstream flow, in network losses and in consumption habits. The barrage debate is so persistent because it is directed at a single, clearly visible object — in the frame of the World Bank report (see 6.4.2) this is a typical attention bias: with hard-to-see, distributed causes, the single large intervention is always more popular.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Environment A sharing formula for shortage operation makes the ecological minimum predictable and takes flow out of ad hoc annual requests The fixed minimum may turn from a floor into a ceiling if the parties treat the contractual value as performance in drier years too
Society The settlement-level index makes the reason for restriction visible in advance and directs development to the most exposed places Public exposure data may cause a loss of property value in the worst-placed settlements
Foreign policy The negotiating mandate turns the dispute into a question of fact and builds on the common interest of several countries The negotiation is long; if the government expects a short-term result from it, the process will be booked as a political failure

The main question to be weighed lies between publicity and the interest of those concerned. A settlement-level water security index states that there are settlements that are durably exposed — and this statement in itself does harm: it worsens property values and investment appetite precisely where the situation is already worst. This is a real cost, not a negligible one. MIAK nevertheless argues for publicity, because exposure does not arise from publication but from the state of the network; and concealment takes away the evidence of their development need precisely from those who need it most. The solution is not silence, but that at the same time as the index is published the linked development sequence should also start.

The proposal tips over to the risk side if the contractual minimum turns in practice into a ceiling. The present situation is a good example: the delivery of 400 cubic metres per second is formally in order, while on the Hungarian side water restrictions are in force in 629 settlements. If a shortage-operation protocol is likewise simplified into a single number, then in the next drought the answer will again be that the obligation is being met. This is why MIAK proposes a proportional cutback formula and not a fixed value: the formula ties the burden of the parties to the extent of the shortage, whereas the fixed number is independent of the extent of the shortage.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth tracking? (proposed KPIs)

Four performance indicators (KPIs) are worth tracking over the coming two seasons:

  1. The number and degree of settlements under restriction: the number of restriction days per settlement, in annual aggregation — proposed target: a year-on-year decrease in the number of days spent under third-degree restriction, not a one-off improvement in the figure of 629.
  2. Network water loss: the difference between the water supplied and the water billed, as a percentage of the quantity supplied, by service provider — proposed target: a public, annually published, declining path.
  3. The durability of household saving: how much of the present 9 per cent reduction remains six months after the heatwave has passed — proposed target: preservation of at least half of the saving.
  4. The number of settlements affected by army and disaster management water delivery: proposed target: zero settlements where delivery lasts beyond seven days in a season — this is the real test of the TE4 public service minimum.

5.2 Summary

MIAK’s key message in a single sentence: the Slovak answer is not a grievance but information — the water stock of the Danube is shared, and therefore the key to Hungarian water security is not a domestic structure but a measurable stock-sharing arrangement with the upstream countries that extends to shortage operation as well. Concretely, it asks the government to adopt within sixty days a public negotiating mandate for this protocol, to publish the settlement-level water security index by the start of the next irrigation season, and by the 2027 season to build the present nine per cent saving into a durable feedback system. And it asks the public not to regard the barrage debate as the main question of water security: the construction decision is the legitimate subject of professional debate, but it is not what decides the stock.

Two MIAK foundational values are in play in this matter. Universal representation, because water shortage appears most sharply where the network and the reserve capacity are thinnest — that is, in the smallest and poorest settlements — and these communities have no public data of their own on how exposed they are; the settlement-level index makes precisely this mute exposure visible. And openness, because a bargain over a cross-border stock can be sustained only if all parties see the same data: the present debate ran into mutually exclusive claims — whether water is being held back at Gabčíkovo or not — because a public, jointly accepted measurement of flow data and turbine operation is not today part of the frame.

Part VI — Justifications and further sources

6.1 The press framing by spectrum

The left-liberal band emphasised the political edge of the Slovak refusal. HVG put the fact of the announcement in the headline — Slovakia cannot substantially increase the flow at present — while 444.hu set the Hungarian request and the Slovak minister’s answer against each other, highlighting that according to Taraba the increase would cause water shortage on its own side. The same band also gave the two strongest background pieces of the day: HVG presented in a longer analysis the methods — gravel laying, riverbed regulation, reservoirs — by which the water levels of domestic rivers are being raised, while Telex, in a report from the Körös region, recorded that a full year’s precipitation is missing.

The economic and public affairs band went for the structure and the effects. Portfolio carried the Slovak news as a report, and in a separate piece asked whether Hungary really is wasting water, noting that one of the most important field crops is in trouble. 24.hu was the only paper that treated the barrage debate not as a position but as a confrontation: setting the arguments of shipping expert Botond Szalma and landscape architect Sándor Bardóczi against each other, it showed where the real professional fault line lies. The same paper also carried the news of the nine per cent fall in consumption.

The conservative band sharpened the topic towards government data publication and the quality of the handling. Mandiner carried the official breakdown of the figure of 629 — 465, 151 and 13 settlements in the three degrees — and the same paper carried the news of the fall in consumption, as well as two opinion pieces, one attempting a conceptual clarification of the barrage debate and the other putting the deepening of the Danube bed at the centre. Magyar Nemzet, by contrast, made news of a private corporate aid action: the Mészáros Group is distributing twenty lorry-loads of mineral water. One framing was missing from every band: not a single paper asked whether there is any rule at all prescribing the sharing between the Danube countries for a period of shortage — everywhere the debate was about either domestic construction or Slovak intent.

6.2 Facts and data

Datum Value Source
Total number of settlements under water restriction 629 Data of the territorial defence committees, kormany.hu, 5 August 2026
Of which first-degree restriction 465 settlements kormany.hu, Mandiner, 5 August 2026
Of which second-degree restriction 151 settlements kormany.hu, Mandiner, 5 August 2026
Of which third-degree restriction 13 settlements kormany.hu, Mandiner, 5 August 2026
The Danube flow arriving in Hungary 400 m³/s Statement of Tomáš Taraba, MTI, 444.hu, Portfolio, 5 August 2026
Validity of the present flow arrangement since 3 August 2026 (Monday) Statement of Taraba, 444.hu, 5 August 2026
Operating turbines at the Gabčíkovo plant 1 of 8 Statement of Taraba, 444.hu, 5 August 2026
Fall in household water consumption 9% Statement of László Gajdos, 24.hu, Mandiner, 5 August 2026
Earlier rise in daily water consumption in the heatwave more than 25% Statement of László Gajdos, 24.hu, 5 August 2026
Settlements affected by continuous fault remedying 10–20 Statement of László Gajdos, 24.hu, 5 August 2026
Third-degree restriction in the Danube Regional Waterworks area (earlier) 120 settlements 24.hu, 5 August 2026
Validity of the third-degree heat alert until midnight on 7 August 2026 (Friday) kormany.hu, Mandiner, 5 August 2026
Disaster management and army water distribution on motorways and the railway 140,000 litres (over one to two days) Portfolio, 5 August 2026
Voluntary water distribution 2,500 volunteers, 350 locations, 1 million litres Portfolio, 5 August 2026

A single connection deserves to be highlighted. The 400 cubic metres per second and the 629 settlements are true at the same time: the upstream obligation is formally met, yet domestic supply is under restriction. This means that the present frame is not faulty but incomplete — it was written for an average year, not for shortage operation. As long as the rule states only a minimum value, the same dialogue will take place in every year of drought: the Hungarian side asks for more, the Slovak side invokes the performance of the obligation, and both will be right. The sharing formula would replace precisely this dialogue with a rule decided in advance.

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Environment and climate (programme points) — status monitoring and measurable climate targets give the data base of the water security index, and the climate economy model gives the incorporation of hydrological exposure (programme point ID: K3, K1, K9);
  • Agriculture (programme points) — water abstraction as a common resource, and the joint management of irrigation demand and the Danube water level (programme point ID: MG5, MG1);
  • Territorial inequality and rural policy (programme points) — the extension of the rural public service minimum to a guaranteed drinking water reserve and the incorporation of exposure into the development index (programme point ID: TE4, TE1);
  • Foreign policy (programme points) — the Danube stock-sharing negotiation is the first concrete content of preventive diplomacy and regional resilience building (programme point ID: KP15, KP10);
  • Economy (programme points) — the common resource management framework gives the institutional model of the protocol (programme point ID: G28);
  • Public administration and e-government (programme points) — the institutionalisation of behavioural intervention to make the consumption saving durable (programme point ID: KI5).

6.4 Literature in detail

6.4.1 Elinor Ostrom: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

The starting point of Ostrom’s volume is the professional consensus that she questions: according to the traditional argument, a commonly held resource — pasture, fishery, water base — can be preserved from depletion only by privatisation or by external official compulsion. The author, by contrast, shows that durable self-governing institutions can also come into being if the problems of the provision of the stock, of the credibility of commitments and of mutual monitoring are solved. From the long-lived systems she reads out eight recurring design principles. The most essential from a Hungarian point of view are the first and the fourth; the first she formulates thus —

“Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the common-pool resource must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the common-pool resource itself.”

— while the fourth prescribes that the monitors who examine the state of the stock and the behaviour of the extractors should either be the extractors themselves or be accountable to them.

The most directly applicable part of the volume, however, is a case history. In the water basins around Los Angeles — Raymond, West and Central Basin — in the years around the Second World War extraction exceeded the renewal of the stock. The extractors, among whom there were private companies and municipalities alike, did not choose an official quota: they bargained out a proportional cutback within a judicial frame. In the case of the West Basin the engineers examined what reduction could be carried out without serious economic damage, and established 25–30 per cent; the extractors of the Central Basin — making use of the experience of the previous two cases — agreed on a proportional cutback of 20 per cent, ten months after the litigation was launched. In all three cases the agreement was supervised by an independent monitor, a watermaster appointed by the court, whose costs were shared by the parties and the state, and the water levels began to rise after the agreement.

For the Danube situation this yields three lessons. First: proportional cutback can be bargained out if the calculation of what reduction can be borne without serious damage is carried out in advance — in the present Hungarian–Slovak dialogue this number has not been stated on either side. Second: the durability of the agreement was given not by goodwill but by the independent monitor — this is the direct antidote to the mutually exclusive claims of today’s debate concerning the Gabčíkovo turbines. Third: the Central Basin reached agreement faster because the previous two cases gave it a ready formula — that is, proposal 3.1 does not ask for an institutional innovation without precedent but for the adoption of a pattern that has worked many times.

📖 Source: Elinor Ostrom: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

6.4.2 World Bank: World Development Report 2015

The main claim of the report is that the traditional toolkit of public policy — price, income, rule — is incomplete, because human decision is also shaped by the framing of the situation, by the social environment and by shared mental models. The volume breaks this down into three principles: most decisions are made automatically, not deliberatively; people’s behaviour depends strongly on what those around them do and expect; and finally every society interprets the world through shared mental models. The report devotes a separate case study to the reduction of water consumption in Colombia, and in its climate chapter it also shows that “democratic rules can achieve high levels of resource sustainability” — that is, a rule accepted by the participants is more durable than one imposed from outside.

The most important methodological finding of the volume from the point of view of the present Hungarian situation is the effect of neighbourly comparison: citing the literature, the report records that information given about neighbours’ energy consumption measurably induces people to economise. The same applies to water, and this is the intervention that requires no new meter, only a new bill format.

The Hungarian lesson is twofold. The present 9 per cent fall is, within the report’s frame, no accident: during the heatwave economising became at once a social norm and a public request, that is, both mechanisms pointed the same way. And precisely for that reason it is also fragile: once the heat passes the social norm dissolves, the request ceases, and behaviour reverts. The three elements of proposal 3.3 — the comparison appearing on the bill, the annual publication of network losses and the predictable content of the restriction degrees — do exactly what the report names as the condition of durability: not a campaign, but recurring feedback and a stable rule.

📖 Source: World Bank: World Development Report 2015 — Mind, Society, and Behavior

6.5 International comparison

The Danube water shortage is in this week no Hungarian speciality, and this is precisely what gives the negotiating basis. In Serbia the river stands at a historic low on some stretches: according to the Wednesday evening statement of the Serbian hydrometeorological service the level had still fallen slightly or stagnated, and for the next four days a slight rise or stagnation was expected. The low water level has held back the generation of the Đerdap hydropower plants and is also obstructing fuel imports arriving by the river route — according to the head of the public utility company near Apatin the situation is “far from harmless”, with pontoons and stranded vessels alike causing trouble. In Romania the government declared a national energy alert on 31 July for the whole of August, and one reactor of the Cernavodă nuclear plant had to be shut down; with a Monday intervention the navy blew up a huge rock formation that was obstructing the water flow of the Danube arm feeding the plant.

This parallelism is the strongest instrument of the Hungarian negotiating position. A stock-sharing protocol is usually difficult because one party’s gain is the other’s loss; now, however, all four or five Danube systems are suffering from the same physical cause, and all of them have the same missing information: what happens if the neighbour is short as well. In the Californian cases described by Ostrom it was precisely this common vulnerability — the danger of saltwater intrusion — that brought the rival extractors to the negotiating table. Regional simultaneity is therefore not only a risk but also the driving force of agreement, provided someone takes the initiative.

Environment and climate

  • K3 — Pollution monitoring
  • K1 — Measurable climate targets
  • K9 — Domestic integrated climate economy model (DICE-HUNGARY)

Agriculture

  • MG5 — Community resource management framework (commons 2.0)
  • MG1 — Precision agriculture programme

Territorial inequality and rural policy

  • TE4 — Rural public service minimum
  • TE1 — Micro-regional development index

Foreign policy

  • KP15 — Institutionalisation of preventive diplomacy
  • KP10 — Regional resilience building

Economy

  • G28 — Common resource management framework (Ostrom-CPR)

Public administration and e-government

  • KI5 — Behavioural public policy unit (Nudge Unit)

Digitalisation and AI regulation

  • D2 — Open data programme

Proposed new programme point: Settlement-level water security index and shortage-operation Danube stock-sharing protocol — for the Environment and climate area, as the linking of the K3 status monitoring and the G28 common resource framework.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK press monitor, 6 August 2026 — topic 2):

Knowledge-base references (books):

  • 📖 Elinor Ostrom: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
  • 📖 World Bank: World Development Report 2015 — Mind, Society, and Behavior

Note: the local file path of the books does NOT appear in the visible text of the blog — only the author and the title. The file path is an internal matter of the generation process, not the reader’s.

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Environment and climate (programme points; programme point ID: K3, K1, K9)
  • MIAK policy area: Agriculture (programme points; programme point ID: MG5, MG1)
  • MIAK policy area: Territorial inequality and rural policy (programme points; programme point ID: TE4, TE1)
  • MIAK policy area: Foreign policy (programme points; programme point ID: KP15, KP10)
  • MIAK policy area: Economy (programme points; programme point ID: G28)
  • MIAK press monitor, 6 August 2026 — topic 2, score: 92/100

Additional public data sources:

  • National Directorate of Water Management — Danube water level and flow time series
  • International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR) — river basin management reports
  • EU Copernicus Drought Observatory — combined drought indicator
  • KSH (Hungarian Central Statistical Office) — water management and agricultural yield estimate data
  • European Environment Agency — water stock indicators

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