A new policy report from Western Washington University argues that the Columbia River Basin, a massive watershed spanning seven U.S. states and a significant portion of British Columbia, suffers not from a lack of oversight but from oversight that is fragmented in ways that allow environmental threats to cross the international border faster than the agencies responsible for addressing them can coordinate a response.
The report, titled "Connected Waters, Connected Threats: Border Governance and Environmental Security in the Columbia River Basin," was produced by WWU's Border Policy Research Institute in collaboration with the University of Victoria. Its author, Jamie Ferrill, argues that what the basin needs is not more agencies or more rules, but a shared coordinating framework that allows the many existing bodies to act together rather than in parallel.
The Problem: Governance That Stops at the Border
The Columbia River Basin is one of the most intensively managed watersheds in the world. Federal agencies, state environmental departments, provincial authorities, tribal nations, hydropower operators, and municipal water utilities all have some form of jurisdiction or interest in what happens to the water. In the United States alone, the basin covers parts of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, and Utah. Add British Columbia to that picture and the governance challenge becomes genuinely complex.
Ferrill's central observation is that most of the governing bodies involved are organized around territorial or political boundaries, even though the environmental threats they are supposed to manage move freely through the watershed without regard for those lines. A mining spill in British Columbia does not pause at the 49th parallel to allow U.S. agencies to prepare a response. It flows downstream.
She uses the Copper Mountain Mine, located in British Columbia not far from the international border, as a concrete illustration of the problem. On multiple occasions, copper concentrations above permitted levels have entered the Similkameen River, flowed into Washington State, and entered the Columbia River system before a coordinated response could be assembled. The mine has been fined repeatedly for these discharges over several years, but fines alone do not clean up downstream contamination or speed up the intergovernmental communications needed to protect communities and ecosystems along the river's path.
The Washington Department of Ecology communications manager for the Northwest Region, Scarlet Tang, acknowledged the complexity in a statement provided to the Salish Current: "Cross-border efforts often need to involve many organizations because lack of participation or representation during policy development can cause problems with implementing solutions." That observation aligns with Ferrill's diagnosis, if not entirely with her proposed remedy.
What WWU's Report Recommends
Ferrill describes the current state of Columbia Basin governance as "polycentric," a term from political science that refers to systems with multiple overlapping centers of authority. Polycentric governance is not inherently dysfunctional; in fact, having many agencies with different types of legal authority and different constituencies can make governance more resilient and representative. The problem comes when those agencies operate in parallel rather than in coordination, duplicating effort in some areas while leaving gaps in others.
The report's core recommendation is the development of a shared narrative and coordinating framework, something that would allow all the major players in the basin to understand their role in a common system rather than operating primarily within their individual mandates. Ferrill stops short of calling for a new mega-agency; instead, she is asking for the kind of structured communication and joint planning that would allow existing bodies to act faster and more effectively when a threat crosses jurisdictional lines.
"What it came down to is that all the necessary bodies, policies, frameworks, entities, they're all there," Ferrill said. "They're all operating. But a lot of it is operating in parallel as opposed to being coordinated by this common narrative."
She also frames the underlying issue as one of environmental security, a concept that broadens the definition of security beyond its traditional military or law enforcement connotations. Pollution in the Columbia Basin threatens public health, cultural resources, economic livelihoods, and critical infrastructure. Treating those threats as disconnected from each other, or as primarily the concern of whichever agency has formal jurisdiction at the site where the pollution first appears, misses the systemic nature of the risk.
Why This Matters for Whatcom County
The Columbia River Basin does not touch Whatcom County directly; the county sits in the Nooksack and Salish Sea drainage system rather than the Columbia watershed. But the governance challenges Ferrill identifies in the Columbia Basin are closely analogous to the water management issues that Whatcom County residents live with every day. The Nooksack River system crosses the international border, the same mines and industrial operations in British Columbia that affect the Similkameen also affect waterways that drain into Bellingham Bay, and the same fragmented intergovernmental structure that Ferrill critiques applies to water quality and flood management throughout the Cascadia border region.
For Western Washington University, the report is part of a broader research agenda at the Border Policy Research Institute focused on how cross-border governance works and where it fails. The institute has produced work on border security, trade policy, and environmental management, and it draws on WWU's position in Bellingham, directly on the international border, to bring a geographic perspective that few other research institutions can replicate.
Jamie Ferrill noted that her original instinct was to look at cross-border crime and governance, and that the Columbia Basin water issue emerged as a natural extension of those interests. "Pollution doesn't stop at border crossing points, so we can't manage them like they are," she said. "It was really about trying to understand how networked threats operate in these hydrological systems."
The report is available through the Border Policy Research Institute and represents the kind of policy-relevant scholarship that connects the work happening at Bellingham's flagship university to real decisions being made by agencies in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia. For readers interested in other recent environmental coverage from the region, earlier reporting on the Harris Avenue Shipyard cleanup in Bellingham Bay shows how local communities are navigating their own legacy contamination challenges while keeping an eye on the waterways that connect them to a much larger system.
