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How is it that the New Zealand government’s process for re-establishing Indigenous fishing rights has failed to deliver thriving Māori fisheries? This paper examines why, at Te Waihora, a coastal lake, and site of one of the nation’s longest running and best-funded state-Māori co-governance agreements, Māori fishers have been unable to use their rights to support their fishery. As of 2018, the lake’s culturally and ecologically significant eel population was no longer commercially viable, a decline fishers have attributed to rampant dairy industry expansion upstream. Drawing on environmental justice literatures, we deploy a multi-dimensional framework to identify factors shaping possibilities for justice in the wake of rights reconciliation, as experienced by Māori fishers, scientists, and leaders. We engage theories of political economic relations to interpret the implications of these experiences for environmental justice theory and politics. Ethnographic accounts demonstrate that the New Zealand government’s process for re-establishing Māori rights falls short of achieving distributional, procedural, and recognition-based dimensions of environmental justice, and that these effects are interlinked. In particular: (i) downstream fishers are placed to bear disproportionate costs of runoff from upstream land use change; (ii) Māori fishers have little influence over governance decisions that affect land use; and (iii) government claims, including that Māori should, “move beyond grievance mode,” obscure logics for resistance. We suggest that the government’s support for dairy industry expansion represents an attempt to mitigate crises of overaccumulation, characteristic of competitive markets. Unlike those who identify persistent injustice as a logic for turning away from the state, we argue that the recurring nature of these crises, and the role state organizations play in directing responses, indicates a rationale for continued engagement with state governing bodies to advance justice.
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For the past decade, collaboration has been the preferred method of devising land and water policy in Aotearoa New Zealand to achieve agreed outcomes. However, the use of collaboration in policymaking is at a crossroads, as some argue it is unrealistic to expect stakeholders and tangata whenua with competing interests to work in partnership on contentious policy issues. To help clarify the future direction of collaboration, this paper provides authorising agencies (those with responsibility for the policy problems) with prompts to reflect ex ante on the advantages and disadvantages of pursuing collaboration. Based on a retrospective review of collaborations in New Zealand’s land and water policymaking, and a two-day symposium with collaboration practitioners, we identify situations that are potentially less suited to collaboration owing to factors that are challenging to overcome through process design. Four issues that affect the success of collaborations are identified: the nature of the policy problem, the personal and collective qualities of those involved, power relationships, and the collaborative process. Finally, we draw together practical lessons from history, the symposium, and the literature to develop a list of questions for authorising agencies to use to reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of pursuing collaboration.
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Topic
- co-governance
- economic aspects (1)
- environmental justice (1)
- equity (1)
- fisheries (1)
- land policy (1)
- policy (1)
- water management (1)
Resource type
- Journal Article (2)