Volume 26 Issue 2 U.S. - Canada Transboundary Resource Issues Spring 1986 The Columbia River Treaty - Where Do We Go from Here Neil A. Swainson Recommended Citation Neil A. Swainson, The Columbia River Treaty - Where Do We Go from Here, 26 Nat. Resources J. 243 (1986). Available at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nrj/vol26/iss2/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Natural Resources Journal by an authorized editor of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. NEIL A. SWAINSON* The Columbia River Treaty-Where Do We Go From Here? INTRODUCTION When John Krutilla wrote his classic study on the Columbia River Treaty nearly twenty years ago, he wisely devoted part of his introduction to reviewing a number of ways in which cooperative international river development can be justified.' Readers of this article are encouraged to read or re-read Dr. Krutilla. At the same time it will be helpful if we begin with a reminder that while we have learned a good deal about international river development over the last generation, the advisers to the governments of Canada and the United States forty years ago were well aware at that time of the fact that the case for or against the coop- erative development of shared watersheds is far from being a self-evident one. They were conscious of the relevance to it of the great range of values associated with such river development.2 To some extent they were also aware of the manner in which actions on international rivers, whether upstream or downstream, can produce sets of benefits and costs distributed in .extraordinarily asymmetric ways between upstream and downstream riparians.