title: Environmental Resource Management in Borderlands: Evolution from Competing Interests to Common Aversions.
abstract: Great enthusiasm is attached to the emergence of cross-border regions (CBRs) as a new institutional arrangement for dealing with local cross-border environmental resource management and other issues that remain too distant from national capitals and/or too expensive to be addressed in the traditional topocratic manner requiring instead local adhocratic methods. This study briefly discusses the perceived value of CBRs and necessary and sufficient conditions for the successful and sustainable development of such places. Then, assuming that necessary conditions can be met, the study investigates an intriguing hypothesis concerning the catalyzing of sustainable consensus for cross-border resource management based on a game theoretical approach that employs the use of dilemma of common aversion rather than the more traditional dilemma of competing common interests. Using this lens to investigate a series of events on the Pacific northwestern Canadian-American border in a part of the Fraser Lowland, we look for evidence of the emergence of an active and sustainable CBR to address local trans-border resource management issues. Although our micro-level scale fails to conclusively demonstrate such evidence, it does demonstrate the value of using this approach and suggests a number of avenues for further research.
authors.affiliation: Huxley Environmental College, Western Washington University, 516 High St., Bellingham, WA 98225, USA. Patrick.buckley@wwu.edu.
authors.forename: Patrick Henry
authors.initials: PH
authors.lastname: Buckley
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography and the Environment, University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, BC V2S 7M7, Canada. John.Belec@ufv.ca.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Belec
authors.affiliation: Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, Virginia Commonwealth University, 923 W. Franklin St., Box 842028, Richmond, VA 23284, USA. jklevy@vcu.edu.
authors.forename: Jason
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Levy
mesh_terms: D002170:Canada; D006801:Humans; D007391:International Cooperation; D000067936:Natural Resources; D014481:United States
keywords: Canada-United States border region; cross border regions; cross border resource management; game theory