This article evaluates existing freshwater regimes and offers suggestions for the elaboration of future regimes that can promote environmental security. The authors argue that ecosystem-oriented principles are essential to shaping effective freshwater regimes as they evolve along a continuum from dialogue and sharing of information, to more defined frameworks of cooperation, to binding legal norms. They suggest that this process of regime formation and consolidation will further benefit from an emphasis on implementation and dispute avoidance, rather than on enforcement and dispute settlement.