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The world's transboundary environmental institutions typically are driven from the top, function behind closed doors, disregard sustainability, and rely on technical fixes or regulatory mechanisms. This article compares those approaches, as manifested in various river basin commissions, to a new, more democratic model being tested in the U.S.-Mexico border region. Water factors into many transboundary environmental problems. More than 300 river basins are shared by two or more countries. The authors examine seven international river basin compacts, sketch four common conceptual paradigms, and argue that these models mostly ignore local needs and public inputs and sometimes also fail in their explicit objectives. The border between the United States and Mexico offers a more promising design. There, as a result of the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, a new, innovative authority, the Border Environmental Cooperation Commission (BECC), has emerged. This institution has been fashioned to protect local interests and to sustain its activities environmentally and financially. We examine how well the BECC has fulfilled its promise of openness, transparency, and binationality, and conclude that properly adapted, the model's roots—openness, transparency, capacity building, bottom-up design, and sustainability—could take hold in other transboundary areas.

This collection of papers examines water management in two of the world's prominent, arid transboundary areas facing similar challenges. In the Middle East, the chronically water-short Israeli-Palestinian region has recognized the need both to conserve and supplement its traditional water sources. Across the globe on the North American continent, Arizona-a state in the southwestern United States bordering Mexico-relies significantly on the overallocated Colorado River, as well as on non-renewable groundwater supplies. For both regions, sustainable and cost-effective solutions clearly require i.

In the first decade of the 21st century, 'hydrosolidarity,' the notion that water management should include considerations of ethics and equity, has influenced international approaches to conducting environmental research and formulating water policy. Since its inception in the 1990s, the term appears frequently across a spectrum of water-related research. It has accordingly permeated discourses and publications on water management. Such rapid proliferation of the concept has helped usher in a wave of transition from conflict management to cooperative efforts between upstream and downstream basin users, as well as a complex paradigm that links both human and environmental welfare. In this paper, we trace the intellectual origins and changing conceptions of hydrosolidarity. We outline some of its applications as well as various reactions to the concept. We close by discussing how the concept can help frame negotiations between riparian states and influence treaty-making and institution-building in river basin settings. Adapted from the source document.

Increased awareness of shortcomings in both provision and maintenance of public services is triggering new approaches to policymaking and service delivery. Conventional debates over public versus private service provision obscure the multiple configurations possible. We consider the effectiveness and desirability of an alternative approach to public-service provision of water and wastewater services, specifically the Border Waterworks program, which has helped deliver water-related services to economically disadvantaged communities ( colonias) along the US – Mexico border. We explore some issues that emerge when nonprofit organizations take on functions of governments and service providers, and examine the conditions under which the provision of water and wastewater infrastructure can be advanced by nonprofit organizations. We conclude that the general effectiveness of Border Waterworks was thanks to its ability to adapt to local circumstances and respond to situations as they arose in the context of the numerous problems in colonias. We also conclude that nonprofit providers are most effective when they serve as catalysts that assist the public sector rather than when they provide public-service infrastructure on their own.