A new report argues cross-border waterways in the Columbia Basin need more coordinated governance; officials believe that work is already being done.
The need for careful management of waterways to control pollution and flooding, and to satisfy hydropower needs, doesn’t magically stop at an international border.
The Columbia River Basin includes a chunk of British Columbia and territory in seven U.S. states including Washington. A new report from Western Washington University’s Border Policy Research Institute and the University of Victoria argues that while agencies already work to protect the basin, the groups involved need stronger coordination to manage the environmental threats that move with the water.
For Jamie Ferrill, author of Connected Waters, Connected Threats: Border Governance and Environmental Security in the Columbia River Basin, whose past research has largely focused on cross-border crime, the paper started as an idea to look into cross-border governance issues in the Cascadia region and slowly formed into a cross-border river governance issue.
“I started thinking about this more from this networked problem,” Ferrill said. “Pollution doesn’t stop at border crossing points, so we can’t manage them like they are. It was really about trying to understand how networked threats operate in these hydrological systems.”
The same connectivity that makes the basin prosperous is also the channel through which a threat can travel, according to Ferrill.
One instance used in her paper is of the Copper Mountain Mine, located in British Columbia not far from the international border. On numerous occasions, more copper than is permitted has entered the Similkameen River, flowed into Washington and into the Columbia River before a response could be generated. Metals released into these tributaries and rivers directly impact the surrounding environment through water contamination, threatening both wildlife and people. The mine has been repeatedly fined for these actions over the last several years.
Ferrill illustrates that the issue allowing for this sort of contamination to occur is not a lack of accountability or enforcement, but the lack of a coordinating framework that allows action to occur faster and larger, tending to issues before they spread internationally.
Governance
The report argues that the Columbia River Basin is not suffering from a lack of governance, but from a fragmented one. Numerous federal, state, provincial, tribal and other organizations already oversee the various issues in this water, yet many operate independently rather than through a shared framework. Ferrill describes the collaboration as polycentric governance.
“What it came down to is that all the necessary bodies, policies, frameworks, entities, they’re all there,” Ferrill said. “They’re all operating. But a lot of it is operating in parallel as opposed to being coordinated by this common narrative.”
Scarlet Tang, Washington Department of Ecology communications manager for the Northwest Region, said that having many government agencies involved is necessary due to different types of legal authority and representation.
“Cross-border efforts often need to involve many organizations because lack of participation or representation during policy development can cause problems with implementing solutions,” Tang wrote in an email.
Ferrill argues most of the main groups are organized around territorial or political boundaries, even though the environmental threats they are addressing move beyond those boundaries. She said that industrial spills in British Columbia, for example, can move downstream and into Washington before formal coordination mechanisms are able to fully activate.
Security
All types of threats posed on the river basin — hydropower impacts, salmon restoration, flooding or pollution — boil down to the same issue.
Ferrill argues that environmental issues with cross-border relations in the Columbia River Basin should be viewed through a lens of environmental security. Pollution is not only a threat to ecosystems but can also threaten the public in terms of health, culture, infrastructure, economic security and more.
Rather than treating these issues as separate, Ferrill argues they should be understood as interconnected threats affecting the security of the basin as a whole.
“Whether it’s public health or economic security or the cultural side,” Ferrill said. “We have a lot of competing narratives here, but ultimately it all comes down to a security issue.”
Ferrill describes competing narratives from many groups as being overshadowing, causing the real issue of security for the river basin as a whole to be missed. She said environmental security goes hand in hand with regional security.
Jennifer Bettis, research manager at Border Policy Research Institute, echoes this. “What we do doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” she said. “The things that we do on our side of the border have an impact on people on the other side of the border and vice versa.”
She suggests that there is a bi-national responsibility to care for the region and that it is not a separate Washington problem with Canadian externalities — it is one and the same. The way everyone can benefit is by looking at it in a way that incorporates perspectives from a variety of different stakeholders, according to Bettis.
“It’s not so much we have these entities that are fragmented and they’re not working together,” Bettis said. “It’s just there could be a little more cohesion in terms of the way they function and operate that would make everyone’s lives easier I think.”
Looking ahead
Ferrill recommends:
- Establish a basin-wide International Joint Commission to help coordinate efforts along the Columbia River Basin
- Develop basin-wide knowledge networks and professional education
- Establishing sanctions for pollution violations
According to Tang, there are already agencies who coordinate extensively on many transboundary challenges. She agrees that cross-border environmental issues are inherently more complex because of the multiple legal systems and different groups involved, but questions whether creating another formal governance framework would improve already existing collaboration.
“I think a lot of cross-border coordination happens through interagency relationships that maybe aren’t that visible,” Tang wrote in an email. “Creating a brand-new framework to formalize these relationships doesn’t seem necessary and could make things even more cumbersome.”
Tang argues many cross-border partnerships are already functioning effectively and have longstanding relationships, while Ferrill believes those efforts would benefit from a common framework.
Despite those differences, both agree that protecting the Columbia River Basin cannot be accomplished by either country alone.
“There are so many people who care a lot and want to protect so many aspects of the basin,” Ferrill said. “If we can bring that together and have that shared passion I think as a coordinating mechanism, I think there is a lot of hope in that.”
—By Margaret Baumgartner
