The value of a Hapū perspective to municipal water management practice : mauri and its potential contribution to sustainability decision making in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

The Mauri Model is a decision making framework that integrates the social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being dimensions of sustainability assessment. The Mauri Model is a new decision making framework that adopts mauri ('integrity' or the binding force between the physical and the spiritual elements) as the measure of environmental, economic, social, and cultural well-being in place of the monetary basis used conventionally for sustainability assessment. The model is based on Daly's triangle of well-being and adopts his hierarchy for sustainability; Ultimate Ends = Summum Bonum = Cultural Well-being = Mauri of the Hapū Intermediate Ends = Social Capital = Social Well-being = Mauri of the Community Intermediate Means = Built Capital = Economic Well-being = Mauri of the Whanau (family) Ultimate Means = Natural Capital = Environmental Well-being = Mauri of the Ecosystem Decision making that achieves sustainable development remains a difficult challenge. The Mauri Model has the potential to improve the cross-cultural understanding of practitioners with respect to sustainability, and empower Indigenous people's voices within decision making processes. Mauri is the bonding force between the spiritual and the physical. When this bond is extinguished the result is death in a living organism or alternatively the loss of capacity to support life in a material such as air, water or soil. The decision making framework incorporates this concept into a series of steps to determine whether the mauri of each dimension is being fully restored, enhanced, maintained, diminished, or totally destroyed. The Mauri Barometer assessment allows determination of the long term environmental, economic, social, and cultural sustainability of different courses of action. The use of mauri rather then money as the measure of sustainability avoids the disadvantage of making decisions based solely on economic or psuedo-economic considerations. The Mauri Model has been developed as the primary output from this thesis and trialed in conflict situations to help resolve conflict between municipal engineering practitioners and Maori stakeholders in a range of workshops since 2003, including SmartGrowth BOP, House of Tahu, and Mauri Tu Mauri Ora. Achieving genuine commitment to sustainability is a significant challenge. The commitment to effective decision making in the context involved here however is made even more complex due to the different cultural values and worldviews of the two cohorts engaged in the workshop trials. The value of this project to the Maori participants and engineers has been the identification of common ground and mutual aims in terms of sustainability; Something that may not have been readily identifiable in the past. The primary application of the Mauri Model is in planning and engineering sustainability, although ultimately the focus is well-being and therefore the model has very broad appeal to other professions including health and law. The opportunity remains to investigate the potential application of the Mauri Model in these fields and in other indigenous peoples' contexts especially Te Moana Nui A Kiwa