Rescaling Knowledge and Governance and Enrolling the Future in New Zealand: A Co-Production Analysis of Canterbury’s Water Management Reforms to Regulate Diffuse Pollution

ABSTRACT

Addressing diffuse agricultural pollution to improve water quality is a socioeconomic, political, and policy challenge worldwide. In New Zealand, catchment load limits are being introduced to regulate nutrient losses from agricultural land. Focused on the South Island region of Canterbury, this article presents an interpretive co-production policy analysis to examine the role of science through modeling in rescaling the knowledge and governance of diffuse pollution. The article assembles a discourse of limits, scientific representations of catchment-scale diffuse pollution, a “fast-track” institutional pathway, and identities of scientists and government as knowledge broker and the community as decision maker. The analysis identifies the paradoxical scripting of “predictable nature” and “uncertain nature” and the enrollment of the future as a governance space essential for resolving water resource conflict. The article illustrates a role for modeling well beyond informing and facilitating environmental decision making to constituting the identities, objects, and spaces of governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-production
• diffuse pollution
• futures
• New Zealand
• predictive modeling
• water policy and governance
• water quality

Acknowledgments

I thank the journal editors and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Notes

In October 2016, regional council elections were held in Canterbury under central government’s mixed model whereby seven councillors were elected to join six central government appointed commissioners on the council. The ECan Act remains in place.