Governing Transboundary Waters

Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities

Emma S. Norman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138706484
• eBook ISBN: 9781135040192
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Winner of the Political Geography Specialty Group's 2015 Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award!

With almost the entire world's water basins crossing political borders of some kind, understanding how to cooperate with one's neighbor is of global relevance. For Indigenous communities, whose traditional homelands may predate and challenge the current borders, and whose relationship to water sources are linked to the protection of traditional lifeways (or 'ways of life'), transboundary water governance is deeply political.

This book explores the nuances of transboundary water governance through an in-depth examination of the Canada-US border, with an emphasis on the leadership of Indigenous actors (First Nations and Native Americans). The inclusion of this "third sovereign" in the discussion of Canada-U.S. relations provides an important avenue to challenge borders as fixed, both in terms of natural resource governance and citizenship, and highlights the role of non-state actors in charting new territory in water governance. The volume widens the conversation to provide a rich analysis of the cultural politics of transboundary water governance.

In this context, the book explores the issue of what makes a good up-stream neighbor and analyzes the rescaling of transboundary water governance. Through narrative, the book explores how these governance mechanisms are linked to wider issues of environmental justice, decolonization, and self-determination. To highlight the changing patterns of water governance, it focuses on six case studies that grapple with transboundary water issues at different scales and with different constructions of border politics, from the Pacific coastline to the Great Lakes.

1 Introduction

Water, borders, scale, and power

Our relationship to water is intimate. It is one of the few things in this world that connects all human beings. In many cultures, water is revered as a gift from the Creator, to be protected and sustained for generations. Given the universal need for survival, one could easily argue that water is simply too important to politicize. Yet, the very nature of water – changing states and crossing boundaries of all kinds – makes this vital substance inherently political.

Nowhere is water more political than at the site of an international border, where sets of laws, regulations, and rules terminate abruptly and where notions of “insiders” and “outsiders” are delineated. As an interloper between jurisdictions, water provides a challenge for governance systems that are delineated by fixed political boundaries.

Looking at water governance from the site of the international border is a telling exercise. Like a roadside geologist you can see the nested scales of governance: federal, tribal, provincial, state, and municipal, each operating within (seemingly) neatly defined responsibilities and purviews. Yet, looking closely at these borders (and the process of border-making) one often sees entrenched colonial legacies, which fosters both exclusion and privileging (Said, 1979; Harris, 2002; Braun, 2002; Gregory, 2004). The act of drawing a line bounds territory and ultimately sets a trajectory for a relationship between people and their environment. As water transgresses in and out and through jurisdictions, it becomes integrated into wider social–political contexts that are wrought with power dynamics, historical legacies, and asymmetries. This line, in turn, can be revealed as scale, power, and justice.

Thus, the governance challenge is a “hydrosocial” one – that is, it relates both to the physical and the material processes of water, as well as the social and the political context around which it is governed (Swyngedouw, 1999; Bakker, 2003a, 2003b; Harris, 2006; Loftus, 2007; Budds, 2008). When the communities and the resources in question span political borders, these processes become further complicated. For Indigenous communities, whose traditional homelands often span and pre-date contemporary nation-state borders and whose relationship to water sources are linked to the protection of traditional lifeways (or “ways of life”), transboundary water governance is deeply political.¹ In fact, even the word “transboundary” implies a colonial legacy. For many Indigenous communities that live within borderlands, transboundary water governance, therefore, is linked to issues of environmental justice, decolonization, and self-determination.

This leads us to a dilemma: how are we to govern water resources that span political borders when our institutions and frameworks are bound within fixed jurisdictions and nation-state frameworks? Furthermore, how are these governance systems able to equitably represent (and protect) diverse populations when the systems themselves are wrought with power-dynamics and colonial legacies, and the impacts of degraded environments are unevenly felt across populations?

This book grapples with these dilemmas by analyzing the social and political contexts of transboundary water governance, and highlighting the rescaling of governance mechanisms and emerging strategies of Indigenous communities to address transboundary water issues. It asks three interrelated questions: “How are governance mechanisms changing to address the social, political, and ecological aspects of transboundary water?”, “How are the Indigenous-led governance mechanisms linked to the twinned goals of ecosystem protection and processes of self-determination, empowerment, and decolonization?”, and the last question, which is generalizable across populations and asks, simply “What makes a good upstream neighbor?”

To answer the first question, I look into institutional changes related to transboundary water governance. To answer the second question, I look at the different tools and methods Indigenous communities have adopted to address water issues of shared concern. To answer the last question, I seek to identify universal principles that foster equitability and justice as it relates to governing transboundary – or shared – waters.

These questions are of global relevance. With almost the entire world’s water basins crossing political borders of some kind, and almost all major water basins crossing nation-state boundaries, understanding the hydrosocial complexities of transboundary water is of universal importance (Wolf, 1999; Conca, 2006; Norman et al,. 2013). The issue becomes an urgent one in the face of declining water supplies, failing infrastructure, increased pollution, stressed ecosystems, and global climate change. Despite the ongoing international campaign to make access to clean water a fundamental human right, the United Nations estimates that 768 million people do not have access to clean drinking water and 2.5 billion have inadequate sanitation services (Brichieri-Colombi, 2009; Mirosa and Harris, 2012; United Nations, 2013). Indigenous communities are particularly vulnerable to water-related issues. In Canada, for example, both rural and remote Indigenous communities as well as those in urban settings face higher incidence of health issues related to inadequate drinking water than the rest of the population (Phare, 2009, 2013; White et al,. 2012). However, the issues go beyond drinking water.

For many Indigenous communities throughout the world, protecting water sources is foundational to preserving and protecting traditional lifeways (La Duke, 1999; Holifield et al,. 2009; Holifield, 2010). Yet these water sources are threatened due to extraterritorial pollution, and are exacerbated by fixed geographic spaces located on historically marginalized lands (Harris, 2002). The environmental stressors are particularly pronounced for Indigenous communities whose traditional lifeways are intricately linked to the protection of intact ecosystems for food sources. In the Arctic, for example, Indigenous communities are exposed to significantly higher concentrations of pollutants, due to atmospheric deposition of pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) (AMAP, 2011; Perlinger et al,. 2014). These chemicals biointensify in marine mammals such as seals and coldwater fish that are integral to the diet of many Northern communities (El-Hayek, 2007; AMAP, 2011; Selin, 2011). As a result of the extraterritorial pollutants, Indigenous populations are experiencing devastating health impacts, including increased cancer rates, stunted growth, miscarriages, and deformities (Epstein, 1978; Visser, 2007; Langston, 2010a, 2010b; Selin, 2010; AMAP, 2011). In addition, many of the health impacts are proving to be multigenerational – appearing as disorders, cancers, and diseases in the daughters, granddaughters, sons, and grandsons of the exposed person (Langston, 2010a, 2010b).

As discussed in the chapters that follow, populations in the coastal Pacific of North America (Salish Sea Basin) and the Great Lakes Basins are experiencing similar issues related to degraded environments and health concerns. Because of the mismatch of governance mechanisms to address extraterritorial pollutants, and the lack of adequate frameworks to address these issues that asymmetrically impact communities, many of these issues become environmental and social justice issues.

To this aim, this book explores the changing dynamics of transboundary water governance. In Part One, I document how formal governance mechanisms are changing, and, in Part Two, how Indigenous communities, who have previously been outside of the purview of formal governance mechanisms, are increasingly becoming involved in leadership roles in transboundary waters. I employ a political ecology approach, in which the issues of governance are intricately linked to power dynamics, colonial legacies, and environmental justice. I seek to find solutions that are meaningful and applicable to diverse populations by identifying qualities of “good upstream neighbors”.

Conceptual approach

Exploring transboundary water governance in the context of Indigenous communities is an important contribution to the scholarship on transboundary water governance because it: 1) fills a gap in the existing transboundary water governance literature; 2) brings the politics of colonial boundary-making into the discussions of transboundary water governance; 3) highlights the Indigenous-led work to address water issues of shared concern; and 4) opens up space to insert discussions of environmental justice into discussions of transboundary water governance. These points provide the rationale and guiding framework for this book.

Filling a gap/key theoretical contribution

While a growing body of literature has made great strides in understanding, predicting, and explaining the nuances of transboundary water governance – particularly in relation to water scarcity and water wars,² transboundary river basins,³ integrated water resources management,⁴ and international water courses,⁵ little attention has been paid to Indigenous-led transboundary movements and impacts of colonial borders on water resources (which are central themes found throughout this volume). Zietoun et al. (2013) is a notable exception, with their work on the Jordan River Basin.

In the last decade, more attention to power dynamics and environmental justice has been included in discussions of water governance. Muehlmann’s (2013) recent ethnography related to the cultural-social-economic impacts of upstream diversion on the Indigenous populations of the Colorado River Delta is also a notable contribution to the transboundary environmental justice literature. In addition, the rich literature on the politics of scale has helped to connect issues of power, decision-making, and jurisdictional scale.⁶ The politics-of-scale literature has helped to refine thinking about human-environmental and hydrosocial relations.⁷ In addition, issues related to Indigenous communities and environmental justice (Holifield, 2010; Ranco et al,. 2011), hydrohegemony (Zeitoun et al,. 2013) and conceptual tools such as waterscapes (Budds and Hinojosa, 2012), hydrosocial networks (Swyngedouw 2004), political economy (Bakker, 2003a, 2003b; Furlong and Bakker, 2010), and performativity (Harris and Alatout, 2010; Cohen and Harris, 2014) all provide important contributions to understanding the complexities of water politics and governance.

In particular, a waterscape approach, which sees water and society as co-producing, is a useful tool for this analysis. A waterscape, as Molle (2009, p. 2) defines it, is an “expression of the interaction between humans and their environment and encompasses all of the social, economic and political processes through which water in nature is conceived of and manipulated by societies”. Thus, to help link water and social power relations, Budds and Hinojosa suggest that the waterscape approach usefully allows you to “explore the ways in which flows of water, power, and capital converge to produce uneven socio-ecological arrangements over space and time, the particular characteristics of which reflect the power relations that shaped their production” (2012, p. 124).

While these previous studies have helped understand the dynamics associated with hydrosocial networks, a dearth in research remains where these processes are explored through the lens of Indigenous communities impacted by and involved in transboundary water governance.

My theoretical contribution, in my mind, relates to reframing the dominant narrative related to transboundary water governance. This reframing helps to unpack the “border” in transborder as an active colonizing act, which continues to shape and influence water policy and decision-making. Reframing the narrative so that Indigenous communities are in the center of the discussion (rather than the periphery or not in the dialogue at all) provides an avenue to explore how governance of water (a lifesource) can lead to wider projects such as decolonization and self-determination. Mainstream dialogue reinforces colonial borders as fixed, ahistorical, and unproblematized, while Indigenous spaces are often seen as a historical relic. Thus, I use narrative to gently re-center the dialogue and open up conceptual space for a more critical look at transborder water governance.

Thus, it is the goal of this volume to explicitly engage with the cultural and political aspects of transborder water governance by highlighting the counter-hegemonic activities that are emerging throughout Indigenous communities. This is happening the world over; however, this work engages with the borderland I am most familiar with – the Canada–U.S. border.

Canada–U.S. transboundary water governance

To fill these gaps, I turn to a border that has been part of the backdrop of my life for the last 15 years. The Canada–U.S. border provides a useful platform to analyze transboundary water governance. Because of the length of the border (the largest continuous international border spanning 5,525 miles/8,891 kilometers including Alaska and the Yukon Territory), it has hundreds of rivers, lakes, and aquifers that flow across, under or serve as the political border.

In addition, the Canada–U.S. border is often celebrated as having the most robust transboundary water mechanisms (often linked to the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty and the subsequent creation of the binational International Joint Commission (IJC)). Over the last 30 years, however, there has been a shift – a rescaling – of water governance (Norman et al,. 2013). Under this new paradigm, subnational, regional, and local actors are more involved in transnational environmental governance activities (Norman and Bakker, 2009). This process occurs through processes of decentralization, in which the State is downloading much of its responsibility to the subnational actors (at the provincial, state, or local level). However, these processes often do not include support or infrastructure. Initially, the shift in responsibility downwards to the local was celebrated as empowering for community members and local actors; however, without proper support this devolution of responsibility and “hollowing out of the state” can leave the communities less protected than with State control (Jessop, 2004). Thus, to understand fully the complex rescaling of water governance, it is important to look at the wider trends. For transboundary water governance, it is also important to look at the politics and colonial legacies of the border itself, as well as the border-making process. Thus, looking at the waterscape as complex relationships between scale, power, and justice (or, environmental politics, colonial legacies, and environmental justice) helps to provide nuance to the discussions on transboundary water governance.

Thus, I attempt to widen the conversation away from the notion that borders of sovereign nations are fixed and naturalized (a “Westphalian” view that dominates much of the International Relations literature) to an understanding that borders are actively produced and wrought with power dynamics. Thus, although nation-state borders are “fixed” in one sense (as they relate to legal structures and policies), they are also “fluid” in another sense (as they relate to the permeability of the border for both people and nature) – both of which are linked to power dynamics.

For transboundary governance of water, the literature has largely focused on the formal legal mechanisms established through treaty processes (Wolf, 1999), with a growing attention ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: water, borders, scale, and power
• Part One Rescaling transboundary water governance
• Part Two Indigenous water governance: re/ordering transnational space
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index