Collaborative Planning in Response to Policy Failure: The Case of Freshwater Management in Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand

Six of New Zealand’s 16 regional councils are trialling collaborative planning as a means of addressing complex challenges in freshwater management. Although some work has been undertaken to evaluate similarities and differences across those processes, the success or failure rests with the public’s acceptance of the processes and their outcomes. This is the first study to evaluate public perceptions of freshwater management in regions with collaborative processes. We surveyed 450 respondents in Hawke’s Bay, Northland, and Waikato, some of whom live in catchments in which collaborative processes are under way and some of whom do not. In addition to assessing awareness of the collaborative planning processes, the survey measured perceptions regarding the regional council’s management of freshwater resources, the extent of agreement regarding freshwater management among various interests, the fairness of freshwater management, and the extent to which respondents believe that their interests and concerns are included in freshwater management. We hypothesized that relative to respondents in parts of the region in which traditional processes are in places, respondents in catchments with collaborative management of freshwater resources would have more positive perceptions of management, agreement, fairness, and interests, even if there is low awareness that a collaborative planning process is under way. Survey results indicate that knowledge of collaborative processes is generally low and that living in catchments with collaborative processes does not impact respondents’ perceptions of management, agreement, fairness, or interests in Northland or Waikato. However, relative to Hawke’s Bay respondents living outside of the collaborative catchment, respondents living inside the collaborative catchment believe that the regional council’s freshwater management is better and fairer. Moreover, Hawke’s Bay residents living inside the collaborative catchment perceive less conflict over freshwater management than Hawke’s Bay respondents living outside the collaborative catchment. Further research is needed to identify the reasons for this regional variation.

Stop drinking the waipiro! A critique of the government's ‘why’ behind Te Mana o te Wai

The landmass of Aotearoa New Zealand totals some 268,000 km2, including 425,000 km of rivers, more than 4,000 lakes and approximately 200 aquifers. For Aotearoa New Zealand's indigenous Maori, these freshwater bodies are part of a complex system of genealogical relationships from which derive the traditional Maori knowledge, values and ethics which shape Maori customary practices for freshwater monitoring and freshwater management. The rupture of these relationships through a century and a half of colonization and industrialization and the dispossession of Maori from their lands and waters also dispossessed Maori of their rights and responsibilities to enact traditional customary practices of kaitiakitanga, stewardship of the natural environment. In 2017 Aotearoa New Zealand's freshwater systems were designated as among the worst in the world. Today they are continuing to degrade. This article focuses on Maori traditional knowledge, ethics and values for freshwater monitoring and management. The article reviews the impact of colonization and development on Aotearoa New Zealand's freshwater systems, the extensive struggle by Maori for recognition of Maori traditional knowledge, rights and responsibilities regarding waterways, and the development of contemporary Maori models for freshwater monitoring and management. Treaty settlements and other legislative initiatives have also catalyzed changes in freshwater management. Faced with catastrophic climatic impacts on freshwater systems and implications for the wellbeing of species and communities, questions of how to ethically manage freshwater are critical. Maori freshwater ethics, values and practices provide a model of renewal and possibility, although one that is not without contest.This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Human Water > Water Governance Water and Life > Conservation, Management, and Awareness

Harmsworth, G., S. Awatere, and M. Robb. 2016. Indigenous Māori values and perspectives to inform freshwater management in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Ecology and Society 21(4):9.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08804-210409

This article examines the challenges posed by governance and policy to stream daylighting efforts in the urban context of Aotearoa New Zealand. Building on the work of McLean (2020), it examines the prospect of daylighting the Waimapihi stream in Te Whanganuia- Tara–Wellington. It then provides recommendations for future directions in freshwater management in light of ongoing reforms in the policy sphere, calling for a more inclusive scope of protection within Aotearoa New Zealand’s foremost resource management legislation.

Services offering on-demand delivery of unhealthy commodities, such as fast food, alcohol and smoking/vaping products have proliferated in recent years. It is well known that the built environment can be health promoting or harmful to health, but there has been less consideration of the digital environment. Increased availability and accessibility of these commodities may be associated with increased consumption, with harmful public health implications. Policy regulating the supply of these commodities was developed before the introduction of on-demand services and has not kept pace with the digital environment. This paper reports on semi-structured interviews with health policy experts on the health harms of the uptake in on-demand delivery of food, alcohol and smoking/vaping products, along with their views on policies that might mitigate these harms. We interviewed 14 policy experts from central and local government agencies and ministries, health authorities, non-Government Organisations (NGOs) and university research positions in Aotearoa New Zealand using a purposive sampling strategy. Participants concerns over the health harms from on-demand services encompassed three broad themes—the expansion of access to and availability of unhealthy commodities, the inadequacy of existing restrictions and regulations in the digital environment and the expansion of personalized marketing and promotional platforms for unhealthy commodities. Health policy experts’ proposals to mitigate harms included: limiting access and availability, updating regulations and boosting enforcement and limiting promotion and marketing. Collectively, these findings and proposals can inform future research and public health policy decisions to address harms posed by on-demand delivery of unhealthy commodities.

A02 Criteria Methodology for Integrated Health and Sustainability Assessment

Worldwide, the cumulative effects of diffuse pollution arising from a range of human activities are diminishing the quality and ecosystem capacity of lakes, rivers, estuaries, and oceans. Devising effective ways to regulate the causes and effects of diffuse pollution is a fraught legal, political, policy, and management challenge given the difficulties in identifying and measuring who is responsible for what, where, and when. In 2011, under its Resource Management Act, 1991, the South Pacific nation of New Zealand introduced national policy to arrest diffuse pollution with a requirement for local government to institute enforceable water quality and quantity limits on all freshwater bodies. The blueprint for these national freshwater policy reforms comes from its South Island region of Canterbury. Canterbury's regional council has adopted a catchment load approach whereby an overarching limit on nutrient losses from agricultural land is calculated and linked to land use rules to control property-scale agricultural activities. With a focus on the Canterbury region, this case study examines two approaches to establishing a catchment load for diffuse nutrient pollution to link to legal provisions in its regional plan. One is based on a river's nutrient concentrations and the other relies on predictive modelling. The case study opens important questions about measuring and regulating diffuse pollution and the difficulties faced by policy-makers and regulators in linking numbers to legally binding compliance and enforcement mechanisms, e.g. how to account for lag effects when establishing ‘in-stream’ limits and how to address changes in software when relying on ‘modelled’ limits?

Water allocation is an increasingly prominent policy issue in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), where regulation has largely failed to secure sustainable management of water resources over the past three decades. Although there is abundant water in NZ, the cumulative effects of abstractions and diversions, alongside diffuse pollution from agriculture and other urban and rural land uses, have led to highly degraded and depleted water resources in some locations. This has had significant social and ecological impacts. As a result, governmental planning and decision-making around water allocation (and land-use and development more widely) are increasingly driven by the imperatives to maintain ‘environmental flows’ and safeguard community values. In the NZ context, the Government has special obligations to partner with Māori (Indigenous New Zealanders) in all aspects of environmental management. This task must be informed by principles and values from Te Ao Māori (the Māori world), meaningfully involve Māori in governance and management, and recognise Māori rights and interests in water. Local government (regional councils), which are responsible for defining allocation rules, must ensure rules serve broader freshwater management objectives that are developed through engagement with Māori and wider communities, and which safeguard the health and wellbeing of waterbodies, associated ecosystems, and people.

In attempting to address environmental degradation through participatory processes, planners need to be cognisant of societies becoming more ethnically diverse. This poses challenges to both engage with recent migrants, and to provide education and opportunities for involvement in host governance systems. Here, freshwater values of concern to ethnic Chinese in Aotearoa New Zealand are explored, along with involvement in participatory freshwater management processes. Results from surveys (n = 151), and interviews with public officials and prominent ethnic Chinese (n = 10), showed that values centred strongly on drinking water quality. While there was clear support for involvement in planning; very few had previously engaged due to a range of surmountable barriers. Given ∼30% population were born overseas, planners should expand engagement methods to facilitate the participation of diverse ethnicities. Such an approach would help to build relationships between local government and diverse publics that may aid collaborative responses to environmental change.

Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter Aotearoa NZ) is a frontier in international efforts to develop place-centred and collectively energised transitionings in economic-environment relations. The contention is that new holistic overviews of existing and potentially different associations of social, political, economic and cultural and ecological processes are being forged through the impetus of Ki Uta Ki Tai/Mountain to Sea perspectives. The chapter uses enactive geography insights to argue that this unprecedented situation is traceable to a number of influences: engagements involving Māori and hence Mātauranga Māori, science and social science knowledge, moves away from the separation of sea, coast and land in disciplinary, administrative and legal frameworks, and new kinds of relational agency grounded in particular places. The chapter documents a thought experiment involving two significant exemplars of re-commoning: (1) Wakatū Incorporation, an organisational ensemble who descend from the original Māori landowners of Te Tau Ihu - Nelson, Tasman and Golden Bay Regions and headquartered on tribal lands in the Nelson area; and (2) the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, a regulatory agency responsible for nurturing economy and ecology through the legal apparatus of the Resource Management Act 1991. The chapter puts these developmental trajectories of enterprise and institution into tension, by asking ‘If every enterprise in Aotearoa NZ was like Wakatū, what does this mean for Regional Councils?’ and ‘If every Regional Council was like Hawke’s Bay, what new relationships with enterprise could be forged and how might enterprise look?’

Regional characteristics of extreme precipitation events over Aotearoa New Zealand

This chapter discusses One Welfare, which is an influential approach to understanding the vital relationship between human and animal welfare in a variety of industries and organizations around the world. One Welfare Aotearoa recognizes the need for both a trans-disciplinary approach and partnership with Māori (the tangata whenua or Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand), around human-nonhuman-environmental interfaces to do with human and animal health and welfare. The One Welfare concept extends beyond physical health, recognizing that human wellbeing, animal welfare, and the natural environment are all interconnected. The chapter introduces a research project on attitudes to companion animals in Aotearoa to discuss a Te Ao Māori approach to One Welfare. The research project involved a Whānau Ora (family wellbeing) collaborative action research case study between local educators, tertiary students, researchers, and the PatuTM Aotearoa gymnasium and its whānau (staff and members) who were predominately Māori, along with their pets. The chapter discusses the Whānau Ora study to show how Indigenous worldviews contribute to understanding human-animal relations in both research and in local bodies such as regional councils. A focus on human-kurī (dog) relations and the issue of dog registration illustrate the chapter’s arguments and contributions to developing animal organizational studies is discussed.

Effective volcanic impact and risk assessment underpins effective volcanic disaster risk management. Yet contemporary volcanic risk assessments face a number of challenges, including delineating hazard and impact sequences, and identifying and quantifying systemic risks. A more holistic approach to impact assessment is required, which incorporates the complex, multi-hazard nature of volcanic eruptions and the dynamic nature of vulnerability before, during and after a volcanic event. Addressing this need requires a multidisciplinary, integrated approach, involving scientists and stakeholders to co-develop decision-support tools that are scientifically credible and operationally relevant to provide a foundation for robust, evidence-based risk reduction decisions. This study presents a dynamic, longitudinal impact assessment framework for multi-phase, multi-hazard volcanic events and applies the framework to interdependent critical infrastructure networks in the Taranaki region of Aotearoa New Zealand, where Taranaki Mounga volcano has a high likelihood of producing a multi-phase explosive eruption within the next 50 years. In the framework, multi-phase scenarios temporally alternate multi-hazard footprints with risk reduction opportunities. Thus, direct and cascading impacts and any risk management actions carry through to the next phase of activity. The framework forms a testbed for more targeted mitigation and response planning and allows the investigation of optimal intervention timing for mitigation strategies during an evolving eruption. Using ‘risk management’ scenarios, we find the timing of mitigation intervention to be crucial in reducing disaster losses associated with volcanic activity. This is particularly apparent in indirect, systemic losses that cascade from direct damage to infrastructure assets. This novel, dynamic impact assessment approach addresses the increasing end-user need for impact-based decision-support tools that inform robust response and resilience planning.

This article reports on a process evaluation of the efforts of a collaborative team organized to develop a comprehensive plan for children of prisoners in the state of Missouri over an 18-month period. Direct observation of planning team meetings, content analysis of work products, surveys of team members, and interviews of staff were used to evaluate work done, needs addressed, voices heard and valued, and organization of the planning process. Evaluation findings suggest six lessons for collaborating across diverse groups including state and local governmental agencies and not-for-profit agencies. Lessons include recognizing the importance of setting realistic goals, having a clear purpose, establishing a system to track progress toward these goals, establishing a structure appropriate to the task with clarity of roles within that structure, developing creative means to ensure attendance of key parties, and evaluating subjective and objective outcomes of the planning process in addition to the achievement of stated goals. With training and careful planning to address the issues identified, collaborative planning can make a substantial contribution to social service delivery.