This Article begins with a bald and intentionally provocative claim: as we look ahead to the challenging and complex environmental problems that remain, conventional State-centric regulatory rules will turn out to be a less important part of the environmental management tool kit than is commonly supposed by legal scholars, environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and many others. This applies both in the domestic environmental policy arena as well as in the realm of complex transboundary environmental problems, including that of transboundary watershed management, the central topic of this Article.

What is meant by that? It is conventionally assumed that management of domestic natural resources and environmental problems is the prerogative of the sovereign State, which holds exclusive competence to impose binding rules on its subjects. It is also assumed that transboundary environmental management is conducted principally, and of necessity, through international legal instruments consisting of mutually binding rules of obligation owed by sovereign States to other sovereign States.