Re-conceptualising the integrated water management model: reflections from the New Zealand experiment

Abstract

The widely accepted, but increasingly criticised concept and process of Integrated Water Management (the IWM model) has been embedded within the wider environmental management and planning literatures for well over a century. Unfortunately, particularly over the last four decades, it has become equally well known for its ‘implementation gap’ - the inability to translate the concept into sustainable outcomes for the freshwater systems under management. The literature is increasingly clear that more conceptually robust and practically applicable approaches to IWM are urgently required. The literature is also increasingly cognisant that IWM rule-sets neither exist nor operate in a social vacuum. In particular, wider social systems of institutional arrangements are increasingly considered as key influences upon IWM outcomes. Institutional arrangements are here considered to be those formal and informal rule-sets generated by, inter alia: social worldviews and cultural perspectives, including perceptions of the resource system; traditional or customary uses of the resource, and; social norms, laws, or systems of property rights.

Paradoxically, the IWM implementation gap is particularly acute in places such as New Zealand, Florida, or British Columbia, which would appear to have every IWM advantage: developed, ‘Western’ jurisdictions with plentiful (if geographically and temporally heterogeneous) freshwater resources; the technology and physical infrastructure to ensure reliable freshwater supplies, and; extant collaborative (or at least, cooperative) IWM policies, programmes, or plans. Yet, these are the very places where the emergent polycentric (meaning ‘many centred’) challenges facing IWM efforts, already exceed the ability of the IWM model to address them in ways that are considered both equitable and efficient.

Three broad questions relating to the above are considered in this thesis. Firstly, why have sustainable freshwater outcomes from IWM efforts in places such as New Zealand (the selected case study nation) remained so elusive? Secondly, how do wider social systems of institutional arrangements influence the sustainability intentions of IWM rule-sets? And thirdly, how may institutional design address the current generation of polycentric difficulties facing IWM, which already exceed the capacity of institutional design to address?

From the above, the thesis has two aims. The first aim is to reconceptualise IWM to provide a more robust theoretical understanding of its elements, processes and problems. Related to this, the second aim is to employ that understanding to inform an analysis of the role of institutional arrangements in IWM outcomes in New Zealand, under the RMA.

In order to achieve these two aims, four broad research objectives are identified. The first research objective is to seek more realistic and conceptually robust theoretical underpinnings for IWM. Based on this, the second objective is the development of an evaluative framework for the re-conceptualised IWM process. The third objective is the employment of the evaluative framework in the multi-scale case study analysis of the role of institutional arrangements in IWM outcomes in New Zealand. The final research objective for this thesis is: to identify insights arising from the study, and to draw conclusions on: the theoretical underpinnings for re-drawn IWM and the evaluative framework, and; the influence of key institutional arrangements on IWM outcomes in New Zealand, including some suggestions towards improved future outcomes.

Key findings from the first two (conceptual) research objectives are drawn from insights from Commons Theory and the complexity thinking approach (whereby systems adapt, or sometimes ‘learn’ through experience of changing contexts). I argue for a theoretical perspective of the IWM model as a complex adaptive process of social learning, with respect to the governance of freshwater. I also argue that the IWM model alone will not be able to overcome historically embedded unsustainable social perspectives of freshwater. Thus, a complex adaptive systems perspective of IWM, and consideration of the potential influence of institutional arrangements, are key to the ‘success’ or otherwise of IWM efforts, especially with respect to the emergence of problematic polycentric IWM challenges.

Key empirical findings from the multi-scale case study indicate that existing institutional arrangements relating to the expressions of property rights, markets, and cosmologies and worldviews, are deeply embedded in the national, regional, and local histories, and are key barriers to sustainable freshwater outcomes. At the national scale, the internationally renowned Resource Management Act (1991) has become a symbolic policy through non-implementation. At this scale, the change from a pioneer, exploitative perspective to a more mature, conservationist one with respect to New Zealand’s freshwater systems, is yet to be achieved. Findings for Canterbury (the regional scale) indicate that the recent, potentially sustainable Canterbury Water Management Strategy has been a victim of its own success, undermined by national government response to a perceived threat to abstractive ‘business as usual’. This is particularly with respect to the continued development of the economically valuable dairy industry in that region. Study findings also suggest that New Zealand and Canterbury are now in real danger of being locked-in to the export of freshwater in the shape of low-value-added milk powder. However, in a typical IWM paradox, the potential compromise of sustainability at the national and regional scales may yet result in benefits at the local level, for Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere, the local-scale element of the study.