The UNECE Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes provides invaluable insights into the contribution of this international agreement towards transboundary water cooperation via its legal provisions, accompanying institutional arrangements and subsidiary policy mechanisms. Contributing authors - experts on key aspects of the Convention - address a broad range of issues, primarily concerning its: development and evolution; relationship with other multi-lateral agreements; regulatory framework and general principles; tools for arresting transboundary pollution; procedural rules; compliance and liability provisions; and select issues including its Protocol on Water and Health.

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Entry into force of the UN Watercourses Convention in August 2014, and the opening of the UNECE Water Convention to all states in March 2016, are significant milestones in international water law. A comparative analysis of these two global water conventions and the 1995 Mekong Agreement reveals that all three instruments are generally compatible. Nonetheless, the international legal principles and processes set forth in the two conventions can render the Mekong Agreement more up-to-date, robust and practical. The Governance Regime of the Mekong River Basin: Can the Global Water Conventions Strengthen the 1995 Mekong Agreement? contends that strengthening the Agreement would be timely, given the increasing pressures associated with the rapid hydropower development within the basin and the gradually emerging disputes therein. Due to these fast-moving developments, Kinna and Rieu-Clarke strongly recommend that the Mekong states should seriously consider joining both conventions in order to buttress and clarify key provisions of the 1995 Mekong Agreement.

On 30 October 2011, it will be exactly ten years ago that the Convention on Access to information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, signed by representative of 35 States and the European Community at a pan-European ministerial conference in the Danish city of Aarhus in 1998, entered into force. This multilateral treaty, negotiated under the auspices of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, represents the most comprehensive and ambitious effort to establish international legal standards in the field of citizens' environmental rights to date. Though some of these standards were inspired by earlier EU environmental legislation, many provisions of the Aarhus Convention went beyond the rights already guaranteed by the EU and compelled the European Commission to propose new legislature acts, most of which were adopted between 2003 and 2006, to bring EU environmental law up to the Convention's standards. Since its adoption over a --

A comprehensive overview of treaty implementation and compliance concerning transboundary environmental governance in Asia is provided in this timely book. Recent United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) membership by Asian states in the C