Introduction - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 5

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 on sub-state actors (Norman and Bakker, 2009) and watershed