Renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty: Transboundary Governance and Indigenous Rights

Alice Cohen,Emma S Norman

doi:10.1162/glep_a_00477

Abstract

This article builds on regional environmental governance (REG) scholarship to explore alternatives to conventional transboundary agreements. Specifically, we use two narratives to tell the story of one river variously known as Wimahl, Nich’i-Wàna, or Swah’netk’qhu, and, more recently, the Columbia River. We suggest that the state-led narrative of the signing and implementation of the 1964 Columbia River Treaty has obscured Indigenous narratives of the river—a trend replicated in most scholarship on transboundary environmental agreements more broadly. In exploring these narratives, we: situate the silencing of Indigeneity in the 1964 Columbia River Treaty; highlight the reproduction and amplification of that silence in the relevant literature in the context of strengthened Indigenous rights; and explore what a multilateral—as opposed to binational—approach to environmental agreements might offer practitioners and scholars of REG.

Highlights

This article builds on regional environmental governance (REG) scholarship to explore alternatives to conventional transboundary agreements
In that issue, focused on regional environmental governance (REG), the issue’s editors, Balsiger and VanDeveer, wrote that much of the scholarship on global environmental agreements draws on regime theory
The third axis is the territoriality of the REG initiative under examination: is a given initiative focused on nation-state borders, or does it correspond more closely with the increasingly popular ecological boundaries (Cohen and McCarthy 2015)? This latter axis is emphasized in this article, which focuses on the opportunities presented in the renegotiation of the 1964 Columbia River Treaty (CRT)