From supranational to intertribal - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 77

standing Treaty institution, the International Joint Commission, particularly in
relation to greater participation of citizen groups and Indigenous communities.
Partly in response to this call, the Commission developed the International Water-
shed Boards concept and then subsequently initiated the International Watersheds
Initiative to help implement it, which I discuss in the next chapter.
NAFTA was the first major international trade agreement to include a separate
accord for environmental protection. The creation of the CEC marks a significant
shift in transboundary environmental governance, with the creation of a public
arm to help monitor the potential adverse environmental impacts of the NAFTA
trade system. NAFTA's CEC, however, has been criticized for its lack of enforce-
ment ability, as well as its inability to move beyond the individual countries'
environmental standards. As the process relies on individual countries to adhere to
domestic environmental law, its utility is limited. Critics suggest that for the CEC
to be effective it would require raising international standards, instilling enforcement
mechanisms, and reinstating the small grants program.
The British Columbia-Washington Environmental Cooperation Council
provides an example of a regional approach to transboundary governance of water.
The ECC is part of a growing cohort of provincial-state organizations designed
to address transboundary environmental issues at a regional scale. The ECC and
its contemporaries aim to deal with shared environmental issues with relative auton-
omy from the federal governments. The increased presence of subnational actors
in transboundary governance, however, does not suggest necessarily increased
institutional capacity. Furthermore, the capacity for continuous governance is largely
at the whim of the provincial and state governments, which, for the British
Columbia-Washington ECC, meant a 5-year hiatus from their activities.
Lastly, the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council provides an example
of an Indigenous-led grassroots environmental organization whose purview spans
the Canada-U.S. border and Indigenous Nations. With seventy member tribes
and First Nations as signatories to the initial Treaty, the Council provides an example
of a watershed approach that strives for representation up and down the river. The
mandate is also linked to ecosystem health (protection of water quality) as it provides
a framework for cultural preservation. Similar to the Coast Salish Gathering, the
YRITWC prioritizes equitable representation and consensus-based decision-
making. The newly conceived Yukon River Watershed Plan, which is being con-
sidered for adoption both in Alaska and the Yukon Territory, reflects this ongoing
commitment to collaborative, Indigenous-led governance.
Each of these mechanisms provides windows to understand how governance
mechanisms develop and operate. It is important to recognize that the first three
mechanisms are conceived through a binational framing, whereas the last mechanism
is multinational framing. The YRITWC has made great progress in conceiving
transboundary water governance in a postcolonial context, which continues to be
explored in Part Two with the stories of water bodies and governance activities
intermixed with the themes of water, governance, borders, and power. In the next
chapter, I continue to explore the tensions and opportunities of the IJC's Inter-
national Watersheds Initiative in operating in a postcolonial governance framework.