Mobilizing theory - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 26

environmental protection. This topic engages with the cultural and political aspects
of transnational water governance by highlighting the counter-hegemonic activities
that are emerging throughout Indigenous communities. In the sections below, I
outline key literature that helps inform the central questions of this volume.
Drawing on literature from postcolonial theory, Indigenous studies, border
studies, environmental governance, and the politics of scale help to usefully inform
discussions of the cultural and political aspects of transboundary water governance.
Thus, in the volume, I propose three original and key conceptual claims.
First, I suggest that looking at the colonial legacies of border-making can help refine
critical assessments of transboundary water governance. Specifically, I suggest that
all borders (even seemingly “natural” ones) are part of cultural construction and
wider politics of power that help define and redefine the landscape. Pursuant to
this, I argue that studying transboundary water governance at the site of the border
helps to move discussions beyond a nation-state framework, challenging what
Agnew (1994, 2010) famously refers to as the territorial trap. Agnew suggests that
the territorial trap is how “conventional thinking relies on three geographical
assumptions: states as fixed units of sovereign space, the domestic/foreign polarity,
and states as 'containers' of societies” (1994, p. 53). This is important given the
nation-state focus of a significant proportion of the literature on environmental
governance, an obvious oversight considering the tendency of flow issues such as
water to transcend national borders.
Second, I argue that the application of the hydrohegemonic framework usefully being
employed by scholars to understand the underlying power dynamics and social and
political constructions of water governance - particularly in the Global South (Harris
et al. , 2013) and the Middle East (Zeitoun and Warner, 2006; Zeitoun and Allan,
2008; Abukhatar, 2013) can be applied to North America. These discussions are
particularly poignant for Indigenous communities whose traditional territory spans
and pre-dates the colonial constructions of the nation-state.
Third, I explore how discursive strategies (counter-narratives) are currently being
used to untrench these colonial borders through performative techniques and
cartographic strategies. These strategies, thus, contribute to a rescaling of water
governance, which contributes to wider goals of decolonization and self-
determination. Understanding transboundary governance of water, in other words,
requires close attention to the cultural politics of the border.
Whose border? The colonial legacies of b/ordering in
water governance
A critical investigation of “the border” and an inquiry into border politics is
fundamental, yet rarely applied, to inquiries into transboundary environmental
governance. At first brush, this might seem a redundant exercise. How can one
talk of transborder issues without talking of the border? Observations in the field
and through literature reviews reveal that, in fact, it is quite common to omit
discussions of the border , border politics, or the process of b/ordering in discussions
of transboundary environmental governance. In fact, the naturalization of borders