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.

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.

This chapter lays out a novel framework for conceptualising the water-relevant binding and non-binding instruments of the UNECE environmental conventions as one common normative regional environmental regime – an original contribution. In exploring the idea of a single regime, this chapter seeks to overcome a strictly positivist view of international law and understand the relevance of overlapping and/or non-uniform state membership of the UNECE legal instruments. It explores regionalism and regional approaches to international law and examines the relationship of the UNECE regime to international law and other international institutions. It sets out a framework for determining the UNECE regime’s relationship to general international law and other international water treaties – asking whether the regime lex specialis – a theme returned to throughout the remainder of the book. This chapter sets out a framework for exploring the making, implementation and enforcement of international law in the UNECE regime, which is employed throughout the research. This frame contributes to understanding around systemic integration, mutually supportive interpretation and cross-fertilisation in international environmental law and international law relevant to transboundary freshwater ecosystems.

In a verse reflecting the (colonial) attitudes of his time, Kipling once wrote, ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West; and never the twain shall meet’.Although written in 1889, the underlying sentiment might equally describe the bipolar geopolitics prevalent at the height of the Cold War. Indeed, by the time of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to suppress intended liberal reforms, to many, the ideological chasm between the Eastern and Western blocs appeared insurmountable. Notwithstanding these divisions, key political leaders (particularly in Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union) sought strategies to promote greater stability and predictability in international affairs. To this end, they pursued more cooperative East–West relations, recognising that collaboration on environmental issues might help to defuse Cold War tensions. The apparently non-political nature, and seeming objectivity, of environmental issues contributed to their becoming, by 1975, a central pillar of détente between the East and the West.