INTRODUCTION

Reflexive environmental law has been increasingly recognised as an important means by which to, ‘establish internal evaluative procedures and patters of decision making within institutions to think critically, creatively and continually about how their activities affect the environment and how they improve their environmental performance’. In so doing, such an approach offers the potential for law to more effectively support the most promising pathways to sustainability. However, the adoption of reflexive approaches to water resources governance is largely lacking at a transboundary level. Few watercourse treaty arrangements contain any comprehensive mechanisms that can ‘critically, creatively and continually’ evaluate their environmental performance.

One promising development, however, is the establishment, in November 2015, of a reporting mechanismto monitor the implementation of the Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes (Water Convention). In some respects, the decision for the Parties to the Water Convention to introduce a reporting mechanism capable of monitoring the extent to which the Convention's commitments have been implemented by the Parties might be seen as unsurprising. Recent decades have witnessed the introduction of reporting into multilateral environmental agreements at such levels that some commentators suggest that, ‘most environmental conventions [provide] for contracting Parties to transmit regularly to the Secretariat information on the measures adopted by them in the implementation of the convention to which they are Parties’ .

However, a number of factors make reporting under the Water Convention significant; and, combined, they have the potential to ensure that transboundary watercourse agreements make a more effective contribution to the drive towards sustainability. Firstly, while the Water Convention was originally conceived as a framework instrument covering the pan-European region, as of March 2016 an amendment to it has meant that it is now open to all UN Member States. Since then Chad and Senegal have become the first Parties from outside the UNECE regional to become Parties to the Convention, and other countries have expressed an interest in joining.