An ongoing ethnography of hydropolitical change

Abstract

The fair and effective governance of freshwater requires a significant engagement with - and understanding of - the ways in which water matters to people. Numerous methods and approaches have been created to categorise, map, quantify, rank and trade off these bundles of meanings, or freshwater values, and many such tools are already under consideration –if not already in circulation – throughout New Zealand. To explore how freshwater values concepts are treated, understood and supported in planning mechanisms, a research/council collaboration was undertaken in the Tasman District to start a conversation with key stakeholders about the use of values language in the Regional Plan. The initiative, Valuing Our Waters (VOW), consisted of five day-length workshops over the course of June-October 2011, and involved a variety of stakeholders, who were invited as ‘values experts’ rather than interest representatives. This study documents the unfolding of the VOW process through the eyes and experiences of the author, who was involved in the organizing research team. As an actively involved ‘insider’ the study embraces an autoethnographic sensibility to its observation and reflection, but also draws out elements from an emerging ‘performative action research’ to develop a methodology which is immersed in its observations of social processes, yet also concerned with enacting a series of political-intellectual concerns into relevance and narratives of social learning. As a mode of engagement, the this thesis assembles a personal reading of the empirical developments of VOW into an argument for understanding every stage of tool –making as involving political decisions about the inclusion and exclusion of groups of people, of ways of knowing water, and ways of talking about and enacting the project of ‘freshwater planning’, The empirical analysis of VOW reveals:  Categories and concepts of freshwater values as practised in planning instruments are unstable and highly contested – people value different things about freshwater  Water means different things across different scales, and different ideas about its management can be narrated in and out of ‘scale’, but are always locally produced  Current codes of practising water management are stabilised through norms around quantitative reasoning but openings exist to practice different modes of governance The thesis concludes by reflecting on methodology and the proposition for ‘knowing while doing’, arguing that it can and should be more widely pursued.