Our communities have progressively lost trust in how local authorities make decisions over water access, use and quality. As a result, New Zealanders are faced with declining public health outcomes, and a diminished environment.
No institution that makes decisions over water can function appropriately and in the best interest of its communities without trust, and nobody can say with a straight face that ‘business as usual’ is okay in the water management space.
My recently published research found that with diminished trust comes a higher risk of water conflict intensification.
Our country is the fourth most water-rich nation in the OECD, yet unbeknownst to most Kiwis, a number of different indexes for water quality have placed us in rather unflattering ranks globally.
The Water Poverty Index once ranked New Zealand in 56th place globally, two places ahead of Bolivia, and eight behind Botswana.
Our comparatively poor performance is partly due to how decisions over water have not balanced commercial water use with consistently safe access to drinking water.
Nowadays it is easy to use Havelock North’s 2016 waterborne disease outbreak as the standard-bearer of what a drinking water crisis looks like. Yet most Kiwis are not fully aware that New Zealand has a long and well-documented history of water quality crises, many of which precede the unfortunate events of Havelock North by several decades.
In order to face the challenges related to unsafe drinking water access, some communities I visited in the course of my research have had to rely on their own ingenuity and relationships to procure water supplies. These have included the establishment of community drinking water schemes, unregulated and outside of councils’ purview.
These communities are indeed not alone; conservative calculations note that the number of such schemes could be as high as 75,000 across the country.
My travels paint a picture of a country where communities have articulated environmental and public health concerns that have been ill-addressed at best, and ignored at worst, by their local councils. This repeated dissatisfaction has led communities to lose trust in their local authorities, and in their ability to serve as custodians of their water.
Court action undertaken by Aotearoa Water Action against water bottling consents in Canterbury is one of the most recent examples of how disputes over water intensify in our country.
There are no torch-carrying mobs in New Zealand engaging in open violence over water; conflict escalation manifests in often lengthy and costly legal battles and other forms of political mobilisation.
Something needs to change, but the question is, just how big a change do we need?
It is clear that the Government’s view on this is that system-wide reform is needed to address several of these long-standing issues.
One of the most prominent programmes of change, reforms to the Three Waters system, are not designed to manage water disputes specifically, but their policy intent is anchored on addressing issues that could open opportunities for greater water conflict resolution potential.
My research found that disputes involving councils could have benefitted from some kind of third party mediation. I consider that the creation of an independent water regulator (brought about by reform) means that the system now has a neutral party that could serve a de facto conflict resolution function when local water disputes intensify.
From a capability standpoint, the potential enactment of the Water Services Entities Bill would mean that the better-resourced water entities could be better-placed to identify and address disputes in their areas of operation than individual councils.
There are also opportunities for the entities to design the kind of dispute resolution pathways that work best for the areas they service. Added to this, the very premise driving the creation of the entities is to provide for optimal water service delivery. Should this be achieved, it would mean that the basic drivers behind water conflicts would be drastically reduced.
Change is challenging, and the discomfort it engenders is likely to be proportional to its scale. The proposals behind Three Waters reform (alongside other programmes) are no patchwork; they are major departures from our decades-long status quo.
As a result, the habits, ways of doing and living, and in some cases, the benefits that have been enabled by the status quo are very likely to be confronted by the changes proposed by the reform agenda.
Despite the scale of the identified challenges, my research uncovered a hopeful note. All parties that have started some form of change to help improve how water is managed have one trait in common: their actions are all anchored in the spirit of innovation, perseverance and courage.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone, and do not represent the views or position of any organisation.
