From supranational to intertribal - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 53

accords have, thus, been put forth by Indigenous communities and coalition
builders.
Boards
Boards appointed by the IJC facilitate the majority of the IJC's work, engaging in
responsibilities around a diverse range of issues (from water allocation to water
pollution) within specific transboundary watercourses, and more recently, trans-
boundary watersheds. Board members have a wide range of responsibilities,
including: preparing technical studies, reports and plans, monitoring various data
networks, and regulating water levels and flows. The Great Lakes Water Quality
Board, established in 1978 pursuant to the Great Lakes Water Quality Act, is an
example of a long-standing board designed to advise the IJC on Great Lakes' water
quality issues. The technical experts are charged to act outside of their national
interest and in their “personal and professional capacity”.
When conceived in 1913, the boards dealt with issues of water quality and
quantity as separate entities. However, concomitant with wider trends in environ-
mental governance that materialized during the Comprehensive Management
Era and Sustainable Development Era (see Table 3.2), the IJC proposed a more
inclusive and integrative approach to water governance in the late nineties, namely
through their proposal to extend the scope of their mandate to include not only
boundary waters , but boundary watersheds . This more integrated approach has been
adopted, albeit initially in a form that focuses on the integration of water quality
and water quantity rather than on the watershed as a whole. These new watershed
boards hold the promise of greater stakeholder and citizen involvement - with
the premise that sustained communication will foster cooperative practice. The
approach adopts a preventive - rather than a reactive - approach to water govern-
ance (Clamen, 2013). However, the watershed approach should not be conflated
with equitable participation of actors and decision-making capacity - a common
conflation in the governance literature (Norman and Bakker, 2009; Cohen and
Davidson, 2011). This is particularly germane for Indigenous communities who
hold different priorities within the watershed and different conceptions of trans-
boundary water governance. In short, the politics of participation should be closely
monitored in the design and implementation of these boards, and the creation of
these spaces of governance does not automatically level the playing field for all
actors, particularly if the framework reifies established, dominant historical legacies.
Adapting to socio-political change: declining role of references
Trends of governmental devolution and increased local participation consistent with
the Participatory Era (see Table 3.2) have influenced the main instruments - the
references and applications - used to enable the Commission, which, over the past
several decades, have experienced notable decline (Figure 3.2) . The declining refer-
ences and overall changes in the IJC governance structure are indicative of wider
trends in environmental governance (Norman and Bakker, 2009).