This chapter outlines the significance and urgency of the current global water crisis and demonstrates that the existing international legal architecture for transboundary freshwater ecosystems requires significant improvement to meet current and predicted transboundary water challenges, resolve conflict and strengthen cooperation. The chapter sets out the three overarching objectives of the book. First, to understand the rising impact of regional approaches to international law on transboundary freshwater ecosystems. This includes identifying the contribution of the UNECE Water Convention and other relevant UNECE environmental instruments as a coherent legal regime. Second, to provide a more coherent understanding of the relationship between the UNECE environmental regime, international water law, international environmental law and general international law. This includes examining the contribution of the UNECE regime to cornerstone rules and principles of international water law and emerging or missing concepts such an ecosystem approach or public participation. Third, to understand how the UNECE regime adds to or interacts (on a normative and an institutional level) with river basin agreements, river basin commissions, European Union water law and national law. The introduction highlights the timely nature of the enquiry against the contemporary context and frames the book’s place against existing writing on this subject.

This chapter concludes this book by exploring the success, limitations and future global outlook of the pan-European UNECE environmental regime including challenges for future non-UNECE accession, drawing upon an unparalleled seventy years of experience supporting international law on transboundary watercourses and freshwater ecosystems. From the key findings, this book draws a series of overarching and cross-cutting insights into the rising impact and contribution of the UNECE regime to the clarification and development of international law, which also raises outstanding areas for future research. It explores questions of legitimacy as the UNECE regime moves towards its new global role. This research bears in mind the importance of distinguishing policy arguments for signing up to the UNECE regime with legal arguments. The problem arising from a legal perspective is to ask whether it is good legally when international courts or international institutions endorse a regionally specific detailed regime as global law? This analysis demonstrates that the UNECE environmental instruments were never intended to be geographically exclusive and have also already been co-developed by non-UNECE countries for some time. This research supports the UNECE’s endeavour to embrace a global role but cautions that a strong mandate from non-UNECE countries must drive this process.

This chapter examines Western infiltration into maritime Asia over the seventeenth century. I focus on three questions. First, how did Westerners establish territorial toeholds in maritime Asia? Second, why did Westerners find it so much easier to insinuate themselves into the Mughal Empire and other south and southeast Asian polities, compared to the Qing Empire? Third, how did this process of uneven insinuation pave the way for the West’s subsequent rise to at least partial dominance in Asia from the late eighteenth century? The chapter is organized as follows. The first section traces the gravitational pull of Asian prosperity for Europeans during the sixteenth century. The second section concentrates on the company-state as the main institution through which Europeans forged their Asian maritime empires. The third and fourth sections then contrast the varied success of European company-states in infiltrating the Mughal and Qing empires. I conclude by revisiting the larger parallels uniting the European maritime empires with their Asian terrestrial counterparts, and the legacies of their differential integration into South versus East Asia for the West’s later rise to global pre-eminence.

There is a pressing need to strengthen systemic integration and mutually supportive interpretation of norms and institutional coordination between the UNECE environmental agreements with a view to understanding their collective contribution to clarifying and further developing international water, environmental and general international law. This chapter identifies the contribution of the UNECE regime to established ‘central or cornerstone rules and principles’ of international water law, including the due diligence rule to avoid or mitigate transboundary harm, the duty to cooperate, the principle of equitable and reasonable use and transboundary environmental impact assessments (EIAs). Key findings demonstrate that these rules and principles are defined in greater detail in the UNECE treaties compared to global treaties, which fills gaps in international law. For example, the UNECE clarifies international law regarding transboundary EIAs by providing criteria to identify what level of risk triggers the obligation to conduct an EIA and compulsory minimum content of EIAs. The UNECE regime also clarifies the effect of applying general principles, like the precautionary and polluter pays principles to the ‘no harm’ rule which strengthens these obligations. The strengths and weaknesses of UNECE’s contribution to developing reporting mechanisms for the Sustainable Development Goals, especially SDG 6 on water, are discussed.

In no other ecosystem is biodiversity being irreversibly damaged to the extent that is occurring in inland or freshwater ecosystems. International legal frameworks are failing to reverse the current global freshwater biodiversity crisis. The ecosystem approach has emerged as a promising scientifically and socially progressive approach to managing ecosystems and the vulnerable societies that depend on them. The legal normative content and international legal status of this concept remain unclear. This chapter identifies five international legal elements of an ecosystem approach concerning transboundary freshwater ecosystems, drawing from international biodiversity, wetlands and water law which also includes fair and equitable benefit-sharing. It demonstrates how the UNECE regime provides the strongest clarification of an ecosystem approach, going beyond the UN Watercourses Convention and customary international law but benefits from interpretive clarification under biodiversity and wetlands regimes. The concept of ecosystem services is part of an ecosystem approach and the legal dimensions of this concept are examined. This chapter discusses how the ecosystem approach stimulates cross-sectoral coherence and mutual supportiveness between these different areas of law and contributes to equity in that process. It outlines how international human rights law could be relied upon to promote a stronger equity dimension for ecosystem services.

The latest Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) reporting exercise demonstrated the wide spectrum of arrangements and shortcomings for transboundary cooperation at the river basin level in the UNECE regime, from basins with comprehensive legal frameworks to basins with no agreement at all. Transboundary water cooperation works best when there is a basin-level agreement and these agreements should be more detailed than regional or global treaties but must incorporate these rules and principles. This chapter identifies how the UNECE water regime contributes to transboundary water cooperation at the basin level through the development of basin agreements, river basin organisations and less formal cooperative arrangements. It identifies how the UNECE has supported implementation and compliance with the UNECE regime and international law at basin and national level and the involvement of non-state actors. It examines a range of basin arrangements including those with no agreement, like the Western Bug, or basins with advanced frameworks like the Danube and Sava. It also analyses the value of the UNECE regime in basins already subject to EU environmental law – seeking to understand the specific contribution of the UNECE vis-à-vis the EU law and discusses why EU states have demonstrated interest in the UNECE regime.

This chapter examines the English East India Company’s (EIC’s) rise to dominance in South Asia from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. The EIC followed Asian precedents by forging its empire through reliance on strategies of define and conquer and define and rule. Company officials first curated indigenous identities to mobilize a uniquely competitive multicultural conquest coalition. They then stabilized their rule through a diversity regime of ecumenical incorporation, which reified religious difference as the primary cleavage on which colonial divide and rule logics would rest. The chapter proceeds in six sections. The first charts the onset of competitive state-building in South Asia following the Mughal Empire’s decline. The second section recounts the EIC’s expansion, before critiquing existing explanations for this. The third to fifth sections advance my substantive explanation for the rise of the ‘Company Raj’. The discussion conforms to the template of emergence, institutionalization, legitimization and consolidation established earlier to explain the rise of the Mughals and the Manchus. The sixth section sums up the chapter’s findings and teases out its broader implications.

Chapter 8 focuses on State practice, with an emphasis on acts taken unilaterally by States in disputed maritime areas, due to which a conflict has arisen in bilateral relations. To provide the most complete picture of acts undertaken unilaterally in disputed waters, examples have been collected from two types of disputes: first, where disputes to title to territory underlie the disputed maritime areas; and, second, where overlapping claims to maritime zones exist. Unilateral conduct in disputed maritime areas is not exclusively concentrated to certain parts of the world. Varying extents of conflicts are created in State practice when activities under the authority of the coastal State – including concessioning, seismic work, exploratory drilling, exploitation, marine scientific research and fisheries activities – are undertaken unilaterally in a disputed maritime area. Reacting to such a unilateral act is often seen as vital by a claimant State, and these reactions can take various forms, including law enforcement. Acting in response might be a double-edged sword, however, as this reaction can sometimes set in motion a spiral of action and reaction, whereby each State feels obligated to react to the other’s act, so as to defend their sovereign rights and interests.