Infrastructure
Community confidence in local authorities’ ability to manage vital water resources has been lost, and change is needed to prevent escalating water conflicts, writes Dr Adan Suazo
Our communities have gradually lost confidence in the way local authorities make decisions about water access, use and quality. As a result, New Zealanders face declining public health outcomes and a diminished environment.
No institution that makes decisions about water can function properly and in the best interests of its communities without trust, and no one can honestly say that ‘business as usual’ is okay in water management.
Mine recently published research found that having decreased confidence carries a higher risk of intensifying water conflicts.
Our country is the fourth most water-rich nation in the OECD, but unbeknownst to most Kiwis, a number of different water quality indices have placed us in rather unflattering rankings worldwide.
The Water Poverty Index once placed New Zealand in 56th place worldwide, two places ahead of Bolivia and eight behind Botswana.
Our relatively poor performance is partly due to the way water decisions have failed to balance commercial water use with consistently safe access to drinking water.
Today, it’s 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 predate the unfortunate events of Havelock North by decades.
To meet the challenges associated with unsafe access to drinking water, some of the communities I visited in the course of my research had to rely on their own ingenuity and relationships to procure water resources. These include the establishment of municipal drinking water schemes, unregulated and outside the jurisdiction of the municipality.
Indeed, these communities are not alone; conservative calculations note that the number of such schemes nationwide could be as high as 75,000.
My travels paint a picture of a country where communities have raised environmental and public health concerns that have been poorly addressed at best and ignored at worst by their local councils. This repeated discontent has caused communities to lose confidence in their local authorities and in their ability to serve as stewards of their water.
Legal action taken by Aotearoa Water Action against permission to bottle water in Canterbury is one of the most recent examples of how disputes over water are increasing in our country.
There are no torch-carrying gangs in New Zealand engaged in overt violence over water; escalation of conflicts manifests itself in often lengthy and costly legal battles and other forms of political mobilization.
Something has to change, but the question is: how big is the change?
Clearly, at this point, the government believes that system-wide reforms are needed to address some of these long-standing issues.
One of the most prominent change programs, Three Waters System Reforms is not specifically designed to manage water disputes, but their policy intent is anchored in addressing issues that could provide opportunities for greater potential for resolving water conflicts.
My research found that disputes involving councils could have benefited from some form of third-party mediation. I believe that the creation of an independent water regulator (created through reform) means that the system now has a neutral party that can act as a de facto conflict resolution when local water disputes escalate.
From a capacity standpoint, the potential enactment of the Water Services Entities Bill would mean that better resourced water entities could be in a better position to identify and address disputes in their area 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 serve. In addition, the starting point for the establishment of the entities is to ensure an optimal delivery of water services. Achieving this would mean that the fundamental drivers behind water conflicts would be drastically reduced.
Change is a challenge, and the inconvenience it brings is likely proportionate to its magnitude. The proposals behind Three Waters reform (among other programs) are not a patchwork; they are significant departures from our decades-long status quo.
As a result, the habits, ways of doing and living, and in some cases the benefits made possible by the status quo, are very likely to face the changes proposed by the reform agenda.
Despite the magnitude of the identified challenges, my research revealed a hopeful note. All parties that have deployed some form of change to help improve water management have one characteristic 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 only and do not represent the views or the position of any organization.