Rescaling water governance - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 85

governments' Reference by identifying a series of environmental and social concerns
that the countries would likely encounter in the coming years. The report also
addressed the institutional challenges associated with managing dynamic environ-
mental issues as well as challenges associated with governmental downsizing and
jurisdictional fragmentation.
The report suggested that International Watershed Boards would “provide much
improved mechanisms for avoiding and resolving transboundary disputes by building
a capacity at the watershed level to anticipate and respond to the range of water-
related and other environmental changes” (IJC, 1997, p. 30). This approach differs
from earlier IJC governance models as it attempts to view borders as hydrological
rather than political; it includes subnational players, and it adopts a “proactive”
rather than “reactive” approach.
Resistance to Watershed Boards
Despite the efforts to have a “ground up” watershed approach, the IJC's IWI
originally received a tremendous amount of resistance across sectors, many query-
ing, “Why fix something that isn't broken? ” 2 T he slow acceptance of the watershed
approach led the IJC to defend the watershed concept and clarify its position with
two additional reports after the 21st Century Report , one on Transboundary
Watersheds (2000) and a discussion paper on the International Watersheds Initiative
(2005). In these ancillary documents, the IJC stressed that the watershed approach
was “in addition to”, rather than “in place of ”, the reference system (IJC, 2000,
2005). Despite these clarifications, the watershed approach remains relatively
narrowly applied.
The resistance to the Watersheds Initiative is particularly salient considering the
larger issues surrounding the “local trap”, which tends to inflate the capacity of
local actors in environmental governance. As discussed in Chapter 2, the
disconnection between institutional capacity and expectations of local actors remain
an under-assessed, yet highly relevant, issue for transboundary water governance.
Furthermore, resistance to the Watersheds Initiative questions the efficacy of the
multijurisdictional model, which, as seen in the increasingly popular Integrated
Water Management Approach, largely receives uncritical acceptance in the
governance literature.
To explore this tension between a broadly reported social demand for “local
participation” in environmental governance and the rejection of the Watersheds
Initiative, I first outline the proposed role of the Watershed Boards and then detail
the changing circumstances within the IJC that led to its inception. I then query
the Watershed Boards' future role within the IJC and transboundary governance
in general, specifically exploring the benefits (and detriments) of situating a regional
watershed model within a federal framework.
Role of the International Watershed Boards
Originally, the IJC designed the Watershed Boards to assume a multidisciplinary,
integrative approach to water governance, which engages both governmental and