Conclusion and reflections - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 180

10 Conclusion and reflections
What makes a good upstream
neighbor?
In this topic, I asked 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, em-
powerment, and decolonization?” and, simply, “What makes a good upstream
neighbor?”
To help answer these questions, I investigated how the mechanisms in place to
govern the transboundary waters between Canada and the United States have
changed over the last century. Specifically, I analyzed how Indigenous communities
have become increasingly involved in redefining transboundary water governance.
In the following pages, I reflect on these questions, offer a summary of my key
theoretical contribution, and query “where do we go from here?”
How are governance mechanisms changing to address
the social, political, and ecological aspects of
transboundary water?
In the topic's first Part, I identified changing patterns of transboundary water
governance along the Canada-U.S. border. Notably, I showed a shift from federally
controlled and mandated institutions - including a devolution of responsibility to
state/provincial governmental entities - to increased stakeholder participation
of environmental issues on the rise since the 1960s. These trends are widely cited
in environmental governance literature (e.g. Bulkeley, 2005) and are applicable to
trends in transboundary water governance along the Canada-U.S. border (Norman
and Bakker, 2009).
What is less studied - and a major contribution of this topic - is how changing
patterns of governance reflect wider social and political trends related to pro-
cesses of decolonization in the North American borderland. In order to connect
processes of environmental governance with decolonization, I first provide an
overview of representational institutional mechanisms for transboundary water
governance along the Canada-U.S. borderland (Part One) and then explore the
contributions of Indigenous-led mechanisms to transboundary water governance
(Part Two).