Abstract
Like other watersheds in the Central American region, the Sixaola River basin, located between Costa Rica and Panama, has become a privileged site for cooperation efforts in the last 20 years. The attention directed towards this basin derives from its important environmental and sociocultural wealth, as well as its growing vulnerability, since the local governments with the lowest development indexes in Costa Rica and Panamá are located within this watershed. This border region’s fragility is also the result of growing environmental degradation and lack of territorial planning. These factors have wors- ened the region’s vulnerability towards constant and extreme natural events, which in turn have growing drastic impacts on the communities surrounding the basin. On the other hand, Sixaola River basin characteristics have fostered neighbor relationships that have led to the development of one of Central America’s most advanced institutional cooperation frame- works based on a shared ecosystem. Aside from state sponsored initiatives, bi or multilateral cooperation organism and non-governmental organization projects also converge in the region. The majority of these projects are oriented towards environmental problem solutions and basin management. The significant presence of these trans-border cooperation initia- tives in the region has had favorable impacts, but has also drawn considerable criticism.Through a case study of the Sixaola River watershed, this article enumerates and analyzes trans-border cooperation initia- tives for the management of shared river basins led by different actors. This is done in order to determine the implications of the growing role of cooperation organisms and NGO’s in the generation and execution of territory management projects.The objective is to stimulate analysis on the execution capacity of these projects, in terms of viability and sustainability in the long term.In this way, governability dynamics within the basin are studied through the analysis of coordination and decision making mechanisms that are being used by the different actors that converge in the region. These mechanisms are put in place by the initiatives in order to motivate “participatory” basin management. It is then highly important to question the role of states and local governments within these participatory platforms for project execution, with the key challenge being the management of a trans-border territory.