Conclusion and reflections - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 181

In Part One, I identify links between borders (colonial bordering), water
governance, and the politics of scale. I then outline key transboundary water gov-
ernance mechanisms in the Canada-U.S. context and highlight how one of the
original binational institutions - the International Joint Commission - has imple-
mented changes to address changing environments and political cultures. The
development of IJC's International Watersheds Initiative, for example, reflects a
commitment to greater inclusion of non-State actors in the governance of shared
waters (and a commitment to proactive rather than reactive governance). Despite
these changes, the IJC is still a federally run institution that operates through the
binational Boundary Waters Treaty. The IJC changes are still under the architec-
ture of a binational, federal agency, which alone is not able to fully reflect the
demands for wider participation. For example, there has been no IJC commis-
sioner with First Nations or Native American heritage. Rectifying this deficit by
prioritizing more diverse representation at IJC - particularly, but not solely, in
relation to Indigenous peoples - would undoubtedly enrich the Commission and
contribute to a new vantage point from which to address shared water issues.
The creation of regionally focused state and provincial organizations such as the
British Columbia-Washington Environmental Cooperation Council are also
important factors in the shifting patterns of transboundary governance, but, like
the IJC, are still subject to the framings of nation-state. This became very apparent
when the ECC had a 5-year hiatus in operations largely due to state and provincial
budget cuts.
A key contribution of this volume is to widen the discussion of rescaling to
include the recent surge in Indigenous-led, transboundary mechanisms. As I
explore in Part Two, the development of these organizations is indicative of wider
trends of decolonization and self-determination. A key argument throughout my
analysis is that when the primary mechanism for transboundary water governance
is state or federally controlled, the nation-state boundaries are inherently reified.
Even if the stated purview of the state/federal agency is “transboundary”, they are
defined by systemic nation-state boundaries and associated policies that are colonial
relics. The work towards collaborating with partners on the other side of the border
continues to reinforce national identities and national interpretations of landscape.
They do not (and cannot) genuinely include connected ecosystems, nor traditional
territories for Indigenous communities.
Thus, the increase of Indigenous-led transboundary governance mechan-
isms such as the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Council, the Coast Salish Gatherings,
and the Great Lakes Indian Fisheries Commission are positive examples of rescal-
ing governance to place Indigenous communities at the center of the governance
structure, which reflects core beliefs. This rescaling is poignant particularly along
the border (at the site of the colonial constructions), where Indigenous commun-
ities were fragmented and reorganized in accordance with new nation-building
projects - in this case the construction of Canada and the United States as separate
nations.