Transborder Governance Of Forests Rivers And Seas

Natural resources often stretch across borders that separate modern nation states. This can create conflict and limit opportunities for regulated consumption of their goods and services, but also provide opportunities for joint multinational efforts that exceed single country capabilities. This book illustrates the diversity of transborder natural resources, the pressures that they experience or the opportunities that exist for multinational regulatory regimes, monitoring and enforcement. It presents ten case studies of transborder natural resources that are of interest to two or more neighboring countries, and that are subject to, or in need of bilateral or multinational coordinated management. The case studies include the exploitation of specific marine resources in international waters, rivers that travel through several countries and contiguous tropical forests across national borders, and where commodities, nature conservation or even territorial integrity are at stake. They are drawn from across the globe, including flood management in Western Europe, tropical forests in the Western Amazon, hydropower development in the Mekong region of South-east Asia, forest conservation in Central Africa and marine resource and fisheries exploitation in the waters of Japan, South-east Asia and Australia. Together the chapters provide a review of a wide range of transborder natural resource examples, and the diverse regulatory regimes that need to be devised to achieve successful management. An introductory chapter provides a conceptual and theoretical underpinning that can guide future research efforts on similar cases and a concluding chapter draws major conclusions and implications for related concepts and theories.

Natural resources often stretch across borders that separate modern nation states. This can create conflict and limit opportunities for regulated consumption of their goods and services, but also provide opportunities for joint multinational efforts that exceed single country capabilities. This book illustrates the diversity of transborder natural resources, the pressures that they experience or the opportunities that exist for multinational regulatory regimes, monitoring and enforcement. It presents ten case studies of transborder natural resources that are of interest to two or more neighboring countries, and that are subject to, or in need of bilateral or multinational coordinated management. The case studies include the exploitation of specific marine resources in international waters, rivers that travel through several countries and contiguous tropical forests across national borders, and where commodities, nature conservation or even territorial integrity are at stake. They are drawn from across the globe, including flood management in Western Europe, tropical forests in the Western Amazon, hydropower development in the Mekong region of South-east Asia, forest conservation in Central Africa and marine resource and fisheries exploitation in the waters of Japan, South-east Asia and Australia. Together the chapters provide a review of a wide range of transborder natural resource examples, and the diverse regulatory regimes that need to be devised to achieve successful management. An introductory chapter provides a conceptual and theoretical underpinning that can guide future research efforts on similar cases and a concluding chapter draws major conclusions and implications for related concepts and theories.

Attending water security is an important challenge and a major systemic risk humanity faces in the years to come. This is due to population increase, over-consumption of water, especially in agriculture, climate change and various forms of water pollution. The issue becomes more complicated in transboundary water catchments that cover almost half of the world’s land surface, with about 60% of global river flow and 40% of the world’s population. Also, in many parts of the planet, like Saharan Africa, population depends on groundwater resources located in transboundary aquifer systems. These facts illustrate the importance of the book's subject, which is the governance of transboundary waters, both surface and groundwater. The book is written by two distinguished scientists, who, having worked in various international institutions, like UNESCO, GEF, UNEP and at the European Commission, have both an extended expertise on how to bridge the gap between science and political decision-making, which is the main factor for an effective governance of water resources. What is new in the book is the integrated analysis of transboundary governance of both surface water and groundwater, as it occurs in reality. In current literature, groundwater is still often missing for the benefit of surface water or, on the contrary, it is treated separately from surface water. The most important feature of the book is to distinguish between the real and a "good" or an effective transboundary water governance and to provide practical tools, methodologies and examples for its implementation in the field. Published timely during 2018, the book will contribute to address successfully practical problems of governance of transboundary waters that represent a very important part of our precious fresh water resources.

This book focuses on River Basin Organizations as the key institutions for managing internationally shared water resources. This includes a comparative analysis of all River Basin Organizations worldwide and three in-depth case studies from three different continents. The detailed case studies are the Senegal (West Africa), Mekong (South-east Asia) and Danube (Europe) rivers. The book contributes to the academic debate on how shared natural and environmental resources can be managed in a sustainable way and which institutional and legal mechanisms actually matter for doing so. It adopts the neo-institutionalist approach, according to which international environmental institutions do make a difference. The analysis not only confirms this argument for the specific case of shared water resources, but also refines existing hypotheses on the influence of different independent variables, namely the nature of the collective action problem, the constellation of actors and the institutional design of an international environmental institution. The work also contributes to the policy debate on how to better govern internationally shared natural resources and the environment. It provides policy makers with advice on which exogenous conditions to be aware of when managing water resources they share with co-riparians and which institutional design features and governance mechanisms to set up in order to increase effectiveness in management.

This working paper set out to examine the links between migration and forests through a case study of Malinau District in North Kalimantan, Indonesia. The findings indicate that there has been a generational shift in migration patterns: educational migrat

This paper provides an overview of the current state of knowledge about migration and its relation to forests in Indonesia. An evaluation of current patterns and trends of migration finds that while mobility is increasing nationally and internati

This book analyses the Habitats Directive; one of the most prominent piece of EU environmental legislation of the past decades. Seen by some as the cornerstone of Europe’s nature conservation policy, among other measures the Directive established the so-called "Natura 2000" ecological network, which covers more than 18% of the surface of the EU. However, despite the fact the Directive was adopted over twenty years ago only 17% of the protected habitats and species in Europe are being adequately protected while 10-60 % of animal species remain under threat. In light of the limited success and the contested nature of the Habitats Directive so far this book examines the successes and failures of the Habitats Directive from a legal and political angle. The book brings together international experts to consider the application, implementation and future of the Habitats Directive in order to assess whether the Habitats Directive is resilient enough to tackle biodiversity loss in the twenty- first century. Particular emphasis is put on the legal regime attached to the Natura 2000 network and its possible impact on land development and the relationship between the Habitats Directive and other topics including liability for ecological damage and transboundary nature conservation.

Shifting cultivation supports around 200 million people in the Asia-Pacific region alone. It is often regarded as a primitive and inefficient form of agriculture that destroys forests, causes soil erosion and robs lowland areas of water. These misconceptions and their policy implications need to be challenged. Swidden farming could support carbon sequestration and conservation of land, biodiversity and cultural heritage. This comprehensive analysis of past and present policy highlights successes and failures and emphasizes the importance of getting it right for the future. This book is enhanced with supplementary resources. The addendum chapters can be found at: www.cabi.org/openresources/91797