Enabling sustainable river futures: Exploring institutional interventions

Abstract

Increasing concern over deteriorating health of river systems has prompted a shift in river management practices from a technocratic ‘command-and-control’ focus towards notions of river repair. Key elements and principles of this emerging approach are encapsulated in ‘sustainable river management’, incorporating visionary, catchment-framed, ecosystem-based approaches through participatory and adaptive processes, couched within principles of integration, justice and place. While these ideas are firmly ingrained within the river management literature, management practice has not necessarily paralleled these trends. Governance frameworks underpinning management applications are key to enabling this transition. ‘Middle ground’ frameworks are considered to promote and enable sustainable river management, as they integrate ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ frameworks. This thesis seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of the precise structure, mechanisms and practices of middle ground governance frameworks. Geographical literature on environmental governance provides a lens for analysing governance frameworks, emphasising concerns for engagement with space and place. Notions of scale, nature-society coherence, adaptive governance and imagining, challenging and producing environmental futures embrace space and place concerns demonstrate how governance frameworks mediate dynamic relationships between nature and society. These themes provide an analytical framing of an inductive mixed-qualitative methods approach to examine the experience of three institutional interventions: Project Twin Streams in Auckland, New Zealand; the Grand River Conservation Authority in Ontario, Canada; and the Mersey Basin Campaign in North West England. Each of these interventions are internationally recognised for their success in undertaking sustainable river management practices, and together, their stories provide an understanding of the diversity and place-specific grounding of frameworks. Emerging from analysis, three key lessons underpin understandings of how middle ground governance frameworks support the emergence and continuance of sustainable river management practices. First, a diversity of governance spaces available for river management leads to diversity in the configuration of the middle ground. Secondly, disturbance and change within the political, socioeconomic and biophysical context of each catchment intervention render no ‘one grand narrative’ appropriate for the evolution of a given middle ground framework. Thirdly, the work which middle ground networks perform is more important than the configuration of the relationships themselves.