Cooperative and adaptive transboundary water governance in Canada’s Mackenzie River Basin: status and prospects

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Canada's Mackenzie River Basin (MRB) is one of the largest relatively pristine ecosystems in North America. Home to indigenous peoples for millennia, the basin is also the site of increasing resource development, notably fossil fuels, hydroelectric power resources, minerals, and forests. Three provinces, three territories, the Canadian federal government, and Aboriginal governments (under Canada's constitution, indigenous peoples are referred to as "Aboriginal") have responsibilities for water in the basin, making the MRB a significant setting for cooperative, transboundary water governance. A framework agreement that provides broad principles and establishes a river basin organization, the MRB Board, has been in place since 1997. However, significant progress on completing bilateral agreements under the 1997 Mackenzie River Basin Transboundary Waters Master Agreement has only occurred since 2010. We considered the performance of the MRB Board relative to its coordination function, accountability, legitimacy, and overall environmental effectiveness. This allowed us to address the extent to which governance based on river basin boundaries, a bioregional approach, could contribute to adaptive governance in the MRB. Insights were based on analysis of key documents and published studies, 19 key informant interviews, and additional interactions with parties involved in basin governance. We found that the MRB Board's composition, its lack of funding and staffing, and the unwillingness of the governments to empower it to play the role envisioned in the Master Agreement mean that as constituted, the board faces challenges in implementing a basin-wide vision. This appears to be by design. The MRB governments have instead used the bilateral agreements under the Master Agreement as the primary mechanism through which transboundary governance will occur. A commitment to coordinating across the bilateral agreements is needed to enhance the prospects for adaptive governance in the basin.

The institutional design, politics, and effects of a bioregional approach: observations and lessons from 11 case studies of river basin organizations

“…When comparing the geographical boundaries of the RBOs, the difference in scale of the basins studied stands out. The surface area of the basins studied ranges from the small Mae Kuang watershed in Thailand (1661 km²; Ganjanapan and Lebel 2014) to the massive Mackenzie River basin (18 million km²; Morris and de Loë 2016). We find that scale does matter: it actually appears to have an effect on the available options in terms of institutional design.…”

“…Interestingly, we find that for such cases, consensus is also frequently used as an aggregation rule (Table 2; e.g., Westcountry Rivers Trust, a partnership type of RBO [Cook et al 2016], as well as most coordinating RBOs). However, other aggregation rules are also applied; majority voting was found in a number of cases, e.g., Mackenzie River Basin Board (Morris and de Loë 2016), Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board (Lach and Calvert 2014), and Western Bug River Basin Council (Hagemann and Leidel 2014). In the German Erftverband case, we find majority voting linked to a principle that assigns greater voting powers to those that pay more to the RBO (see Hüesker and Bernhardt 2014).…”

“…Thus, even if there is a willingness to take natural relations into account, the information on what those are may simply not be available. In other cases such as the Mackenzie River Basin Board, the definition of the basin boundaries has not been an issue (Morris and de Loë 2016). This may be because of the low population density and the lack of political controversies in the border areas of the basin (and perhaps the fact that the RBO there is without much real clout).…”

“…The only autonomous RBO we encountered in our study (in Portugal) derived its authority directly from legislation adopted by Parliament. In the case of coordinating RBOs, the mandate depends on the willingness of the contracting parties to transfer power to the RBO (in the case of the Mackenzie River Basin Board [Morris and de Loë 2016], these are the Canadian provinces that founded it). For agency type RBOs, the mandate depends on the willingness of the "principal" (see Waterman and Meier 1998) to delegate a certain number of authorities (for examples, see the Ukrainian [Hagemann and Leidel 2014] and Mongolian [Dombrowsky et al 2014] River Basin Administrations and the Murray-Darling basin organization [Ross and Connell 2016]).…”

“…Here, we use this typology to characterize RBOs in 11 river basins across the globe. We include in-depth studies of four of these RBOs in this special feature: the Westcountry Rivers Trust in the UK (Cook et al 2016), the Breede-Overberg Catchment Management Agency in South Africa (Meissner et al 2016), the Mackenzie River Basin Board in Canada (Morris and de Loë 2016), and the Murray-Daring Basin Authority in Australia (Ross and Connell 2016). Information on the other RBOs can be found in Huitema and Meijerink (2014).…”