Crafting Collaborative Governance: Water Resources, California's Delta Plan, and Audited Self-Management in New Zealand

• Date: 01 April 2015

45 ELR 10324 ENVIRONMENTAL LAW REPORTER 4-2015

Crafting

Collaborative

Governance:

Water Resources,

California’s Delta

Plan, and Audited

Self-Management

in New Zealand

by Cameron Holley

Dr. Cameron Holley is Senior Research Fellow

at the Law Faculty, UNSW Australia, Connected

Waters Initiative Research Center and National

Center for Groundwater Research and Training.

Summary

Since the 1980s, water governance has increasingly

been linked to institutions and laws that engage local

actors and closely relate to local ecosystems and catch-

ments. ese approaches, referred to as collaborative

water governance, encompass new coalitions among

governments, their agencies, and institutions of civil

society, and are typically held together via guidelines,

plans, and nonbinding agreements. is Article oers

an empirical look at two examples, Audited Self-

Management in New Zealand and California’s Delta

Plan, asking whether these initiatives promote genu-

ine, eective stakeholder collaboration and how they

blend their collaborative elements with traditional

legal systems.

I. Introduction

Charles Montesquieu’s classic text, e   ,

presents an account of law and governance that is acutely

related to the physical aspects of countries.1 Climate and

geography, he said, produced dierent characteristics

and forms of government (for example, democratic or

despotic).2 Law should relate to these dierences and to

the physical aspects of a country, including its climate and

the properties of the terrain.3 Moreover, good governance

(at least in a republican sense) depended fundamentally on

actions at small local scales, where “the public good is bet-

ter felt, better known, [and] lies nearer to each citizen.”4

Montesquieu’s image of governance nds strong

resonances in modern ecological and democratic ideals

that inform how we think about and create arrangements

for governing water. Indeed, since the 1980s, the “good

governance” of water has increasingly been linked to

institutions and laws that engage local actors and closely

relate to local ecosystems and catchments.5

Stirred by a growing awareness of ecological realities,6

traditional top-down regulatory approaches have been

increasingly spurned, due to a lack of t between the

boundaries of water and political systems.7 A ssociated

drivers have included the need to circumvent the

increasingly rigid and siloed responsibility of centralized

governing agencies to better account for and adapt to the

1. C L. M, T S   L (Cambridge Univ.

Press 1989) (1750); Richard Perry,     

    , in J B  H M.

I, R  W: N A  T

C  C 301-03 (2001).

2. Id.

3. M, supra note 1, at 9.

4. Id. at 124; Daniel Kemmis & Matthew McKinney, Collaboration as an

, N’ C R. 6-7 (2011).

5. ere are competing mentalities and ideals within water governance

approaches, not least of which is privatization/neoliberalism. See Matthias

Finger,  , in D L  P N, T

B  G E G (2005).

6. E O, F  E (1953).

7. Bradley C. Karkkainen, Collaborative Ecosystem Governance: Scale,

 , 21 V. E. L.J. 189 (2002) [hereinafter

Karkkainen, Collaborative Ecosystem].





      





 

   

  Cameron Holley & Neil Gunningham, 

       

, 24 N.Z. U. L. R. 309 (2011). e author





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