The future of the Columbia River treaty

This paper examines the future of the Columbia River Treaty (CRT). In particular it assesses the degree of flexibility available under international law and the domestic laws of the United States and Canada for the relevant parties to negotiate and implement possible future legal arrangements for the Columbia River Basin. We do not argue for the adoption of any particular vision of those future arrangements, but take as a starting point the possibility that the future may hold something different from the two options that are allowed in the current text of the Columbia River Treaty. The two default options that the Treaty provides for are continuation and unilateral termination. We leave it to the relevant parties, including basin stakeholders, to consider the additional specific scenarios they would like to explore. Our focus is to assess the degree of flexibility available under international and domestic law to adopt and implement any such alternative arrangements.