From supranational to intertribal - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 56

Washington, followed by the infamous 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska), the
British Columbia-Washington Environmental Cooperation Council (ECC) was
created in 1992 to address the myriad issues shared between British Columbia and
Washington.
The ECC provides a forum where officials, mostly representing regional or
state/provincial governments, can bring initiatives forward and share information.
It also provides a process for formally established task forces, work groups, and
committees to address identified priority areas.
The rescaling of environmental governance is not necessarily a linear process;
rather, it is a process of informal diffusion of responsibility in which different scales
can reassert authority at critical moments. Both strong leadership and the presence
of crisis are likely agents of change. In the British Columbia and Washington
example, strong leaders play an important part in shaping transboundary governance,
regardless of scale (Alper, 1997). Key leaders, from the governor and premier to
local mayors and NGO (non-governmental organization) directors, provide critical
roles in shaping transboundary environmental governance agendas (Van Rooy,
1997, 2004; Norman and Melious, 2008). This is true also in the Indigenous-led
mechanisms for change, where sustained relationships between Tribal and First
Nation leaders helped establish intertribal Councils.
The friendship and shared commitment to environmental issues of then-
governor Booth Gardner and then-premier Mike Harcourt was instrumental for
the creation of the ECC (Jolly, 1998). Harcourt himself reflected in an interview
that the political similarities between himself and Gardner were instrumental in
moving the idea from conception to reality (personal communication with
Harcourt, 2007). Thus, in many ways, their political will and shared vision drove
the conception of a binational institution - an example of how informal governance
mechanisms beget mechanisms that are more formal.
Like strong leadership and existing relationships, crisis consistently serves as an
impetus for political change. Kaika (2003), for example, shows how the natural-
ization of water as a “scarce resource” drove political change in the 1989-1991
Athens drought. Similarly, Nevarez (1996) shows how an “environmental crisis”
- a drought in Santa Barbara, California - helped to streamline political agendas.
In the case of the British Columbia-Washington Environmental Cooperation
Council, a crisis served to transition dialogue into action. The leaders of the day
conceived the ECC; however, in order for the vision of transnational environmental
governance to transition into action a concrete impetus was required.
Genesis of the British Columbia-Washington Environmental Cooperation
Council: a story of oil and water
On 22 December 1988, 230,000 gallons of high-grade gasoline oil spilled into the
ocean near Grays Harbor, Washington. The spill affected more than 110 miles of
scenic coastline on the Olympic Peninsula and the coast of Vancouver Island
(Jolly, 1998). The thick oil covered the wings and feathers of wintering shorebirds
such as the black-bellied plover and the western sandpiper. Scores of volunteers