Governance of a complex system: water

This paper sets out a complex adaptive systems view of water governance. Overview Fresh water is a life - enabling resource as well as the source of spiritual, social and economic wellbeing and development. It is continuously renewed by the Earth’s natural recycling systems using heat from the sun to evaporate and purify, and then rain to replenish supplies. For thousands of years people have benefited from these systems with little concern for their ability to keep up with human population and economic development. Rapid increases in population and economic activity have brought concern for how these systems interact with human social and economic systems to centre stage this century in the guise of a focus on water governance. What do we mean by governance and how might we better understand our water governance systems to ensure their ongoing sustainability? This paper sets out a complex adaptive systems view of water governance. It draws on the academic literature on effective governance of complex systems and effective water governance to identify some principles for use in water governance in New Zealand. It illustrates aspects of emerging water governance practice with some examples from New Zealand which have employed a multi-actor, collaborative governance approach. The paper concludes with some implications for the future evolution of effective water governance in New Zealand. Collaborative governance processes are relatively unfamiliar to New Zealand citizens, politicians and other policy actors which makes it more important that we study and learn from early examples of the use of this mode of governance

Collaborative governance case studies: the Land and Water Forum

This paper examines the progress of the Land and Water Forum, which was a stakeholder-led collaborative governance process established to recommend potential reform of New Zealand’s fresh water management. Introduction: Looking at collaborative processes in retrospect is always easier than it was at the time they were first happening. They tend to look more designed, orderly, and less messy than they actually were. In Land and Water Forum case, a number of strands of activity/inactivity and actors came together to construct the beginning. By 2008, progress to establish a framework for land and water protection and use in New Zealand, beyond earlier policy initiatives (1967 Water and Soil Conservation Act to the RMA in 1991), had stalled, and processes around water governance had become increasingly conflict-riven and uncertain. A voluntary Accord between dairy farmers and government agencies to stem the environmental effects of run-off contaminants into streams and rivers, occurring from increased dairying, was seen as inadequate for stemming a growing water pollution problem. Most environmental advocates, wanted a more effective and nationally consistent approach to regulation than the regional councils, empowered by the RMA, were delivering. Guy Salmon, a well-known and widely respected environmental advocate had been funded to examine more collaborative approaches to environmental policy used in the Nordic countries. Salmon reported on his findings to an audience at an environment conference which included a wide range of the key players with an interest in the environment and environmental regulation. According to Salmon, the Nordic countries had some impressive achievements in making major changes to create more sustainability in infrastructure and resource use using collaborative approaches. Salmon’s research and advocacy for a more collaborative approach to solving New Zealand’s impasse gained support from some key actors attending an environment conference such as the Environmental Defence Society, iwi, agricultural business interests. Continuing discussions among key people and also the person who would become the Minister for the Environment after an election that changed the government in late 2008, opened up the possibility of the application of the approach in New Zealand. In late 2008, Ministers in the then new National-led government saw this increasing difficulty in establishing a consensus about what constituted sustainable land use and its implications for freshwater governance as an opportunity to back a different approach. The willingness of a critical number of keys actors representing powerful environment, agricultural business, and iwi interests to work actively on a solution and the willingness of Ministers to give support to a collaborative process took some months of negotiation to secure. Agreement first had to be reached about the problem that the various key stakeholder interests were willing to work on and the mandate that ministers were willing to give to a learn-as-you-go collaborative process. The result was that in July 2009 Cabinet gave the Minister for the Environment (Nick Smith) and the Minister for Agriculture, later Primary Industries, (David Carter) permission to initiate a stakeholder-led collaborative governance process to recommend reform of New Zealand’s freshwater management. The Land and Water Trust was formed by key non-government actors (with trustees from Ngati Tuwharetoa, Dairy New Zealand; Forest and Bird; and Alastair Bisley as Chair) to create a vehicle which could support a collaborative process separate from government

Improving New Zealand water governance: challenges and recommendations

The overwhelming majority of New Zealand’s exports – not least agricultural and horticultural – require water, and in large quantities. Indeed, in many respects water is New Zealand’s largest export. Yet the management of our fresh water has not been ideal. We have over-allocated and badly polluted some of our water resources. Such problems point to significant weaknesses in the governance of fresh water in this country. This article explores these governance issues through a complex adaptive systems lens and outlines some possible solutions

Canterbury water management strategy: ‘a better way’?

A refrain heard often in respect of Canterbury’s current approach to water governance is ‘there had to be a better way’. Canterbury has 12.7% of the national population, contributes 13% to GDP, and yet encompasses 17% of New Zealand’s land area, much of which, because of soil type and slope, is considered irrigable. What happens in Canterbury has material significance for the country as a whole. So, what is Canterbury doing about the management of its water resources, why do those involved think it could be ‘a better way’, and is there evidence that they might be right

Authorising Environment: Mapping Role Designation and Practice in the New Zealand Model- A review of the New Zealand literature

The starting proposition for the Authorising Environment strand is that reform of public management system to date has been a one way street. By and large reform has focused on how public organisations set, manage and report their performance, paying insufficient attention to the role of the authorising environment, such as ministers, parliament and the media. Recent international analyses of public management reform identify authorising agents as the ‘missing piece’ in system design and performance, emphasising, for example, the formal role of politicians and legislators in setting performance criteria and their absence of understanding and inconsistent levels of utilisation. It is taken for granted that public sector reform revolves around both normative and descriptive suppositions that the signals sent by authorising agents matter within the design and operation of public management systems, and yet we know precious little about how this part of the system actually works. The authorising environment is an ongoing project, which explores the missing link in systemic public management reform: the role expectations for ministers and the question of what should (or can) be done to modify the way ministers and legislators engage with the public management systems that they have installed. This is about both better alignment (by clarifying the expectations of authorising agents and the fit with what public organisations do) and stronger engagement (by examining what can be done to increase conformance by authorising agents with the systemic expectations that they themselves have set). This paper is part of the initial phase of the project: a literature review on what is already known about the role expectations of the key authorising agents – ministers – in the New Zealand public management system. The focus has been on the ‘performance’ framework governing minister-chief executive relations, and has confirmed that this area is under-researched. In the second stage of the project this New Zealand research literature will be placed in the context of the international literature on ministerial role expectations and public management design, as a first step in scoping a research question for empirical study

Collaborative governance: framing New Zealand practice

Collaborative governance is talked about as something New Zealand needs to have more of, to deal with the sorts of issues governement faces today, like solving use and conservation of fresh water.  There is even some promising practice of collaborative governance such as through the Land and Water Forum.  Yet beyond this well-known example, the government, the public sector and the public of New Zealand do not have ready access to information about collaborative governance: what it is; what is entails; when this mode of governance is likely to be effective; and what is needed for successful collaborative governance. This working paper addresses this gap

Improving Information Sharing for Effective Social Outcomes

The research project focused on the following questions: To what extent and how is personal information of individuals with complex social needs collected, managed, and shared across government and other organisations? What are barriers and enablers to cross-government information sharing? What are existing strategies and arrangements for enabling cross-government information sharing in other jurisdictions? What can New Zealand learn from other jurisdictions in that respect? How, and under what conditions, can cross-government information sharing be improved in order to achieve more effective social outcomes

Experimentation and Learning in Policy Implementation: Implications for Public Management

Policy objectives often can be simply stated. Yet, policy implementation frequently becomes complex, not only when the problem addressed is complex or wicked, such as family violence prevention, but also when the policy is simply stated, such as raising the GST. In complex implementation, effective organisational and individual practices facilitate learning by experimentation. Practices centre on detecting anomalies and then explicitly incorporating reflections on them in ongoing design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation activities. The research drew on policy and experimentation literature to propose a new framework for describing complex implementation practices, a range of cases studies, and discussions with policy managers. Findings highlight the need for a consistent strategic view of end goals, some means for testing changes, and the capacity to identify and assess results in order to redirect effort. Support for these practices involves ensuring appropriate permission to experiment, early and sustained activity conducted outside the responsible agencies, and open access to multiple sources of expertise. Implementing agencies and the policy management system need to take every opportunity to fully incorporate learning into their understanding of the agency’s role, capability requirements, and future focus

The Contribution of Complexity Theory to Understanding and Explaining Policy Processes: A Study of Tertiary Education Policy Processes in New Zealand

The thesis examines how policy processes occur in practice over time, and advances a theory for understanding and explaining them using a complexity analytical lens. This lens provides a different way of 'seeing' policy processes holistically, in comparison with dominant alternative actor-focused, institutions-focused or idea-focused perspectives. The overall aims of the thesis are achieved through four phases. First, to construct the complexity lens, the thesis analyses the potential contribution of complexity theory, particularly as it relates to social systems and organisations. Second, existing theories of policy processes are scrutinised to identify areas where a complexity lens could provide new perspectives for their understanding, through a focus on: - 'wholes' of policy processes - policy problems and solutions - multiple participants - interactions within policy processes - dynamics within policy processes. Third, a study of New Zealand's tertiary education policy processes provides new empirical data. Data collected in unstructured interviews is represented in three differently-themed narratives, corresponding to three well-theorised analytical emphases: (1) participants; (2) institutions; and (3) ideas. The selection of three different perspectives takes into account the socially complex nature of policy processes. Fourth, the narrative data are examined through the complexity analytical lens and the results are compared with the views of policy processes obtained using the single lenses in the themed narratives. The four phases come together by demonstrating that viewing tertiary education policy processes through the complexity analytical lens provides a new perspective on policy processes which has implications for designing and intervening in policy processes. From this new perspective, policy processes are understood as complex social systems in interaction with other complex social systems. These systems consist of large numbers of interdependent and self-referencing participants, interacting with each other in ways that are nonlinear, influenced by prior experiences, and unpredictable in any precise sense

Managing for joint outcomes: connecting up the horizontal and the vertical

In pockets throughout the New Zealand public sector, ordinary officials are doing extraordinary things as they learn to do something very difficult: how to collaborate with people from other agencies. This occurs as they learn what needs to be done in managing for shared outcomes in complex policy cases. They appear to be doing excellent work in achieving desired outcomes for clients; yet they are doing so in spite of the public management system they work in, without much support from their organisations and the sector generally, and in the general absence of a learning culture. As there are no textbooks, they also confront the challenge of making it up as they go along. In several respects, therefore, their ways of working are unlike those assumed by traditional models of Westminster officials – and Kiwis may be better off because of it