Research

INTRODUCTION

Across the world, there is increasing demand for collective approaches to complex socio-ecological challenges, including the vexing problem of diffuse water pollution from farming (OECD 2017a, Wiering et al. 2020). Policy approaches that have focused on individuals - such as extension, subsidies, and regulation - have had limited success, leading to calls for more collective approaches, for example in Europe (Riley et al. 2018, De Vries et al. 2019) and Australia (Wallington and Lawrence 2008).

Collective approaches are advantageous because addressing the biophysical dimensions of water pollution requires strategically coordinated action. Catchments (i.e., watersheds) inherently accumulate the effects on waterways of multiple disturbances over space and time, meaning that mitigation actions by land users must be coordinated in some way to address land use impacts effectively. The complexity of interactions between soils, climate, landforms, aquatic habitat, and aquatic life means that regulating farming practices to improve water quality in one setting may impose inappropriate practices in another, leading to resistance from farmers.

In Europe, the interest in collective action was explained as follows:

... the founding premise of individual, farm-level, agri-environmental measures may be insufficient to achieve their environmental objectives - both because many habitats and features of environmental value may span ownership boundaries and also, particularly relating to riparian environments, the actions of one land manager within a catchment may impact upon those within another part (Thomas et al. 2020:1).

The idea of land users collectively managing local waterways to achieve ecological objectives has ample scholarly backing. The work of Elinor Ostrom and others (e.g., Ostrom 1990, Ostrom 2009, Cox et al. 2010) provides insight into when and how such land user groups or collectives can achieve common goals. That research produced a set of principles that are widely used to guide thinking and practice about collective efforts for environmental management (Cox et al. 2010).

Concomitant with rising demand for farmers to undertake collective management, the supply of collectives is also increasing as land user groups emerge to address issues of shared concern. Farmers are working together on catchment-scale issues in Britain (Cook et al. 2012), the Netherlands (Barghusen et al. 2021), France and Greece (Villamayor-Tomas et al. 2019) as well as in Australia (Wallington and Lawrence 2008) and the United States (Yoder 2019).

Like the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, New Zealand has experienced two quite distinct variants of collaborative water governance. With the first type, collaborative policymaking, government, land users, Indigenous representatives and other stakeholders met in facilitated sessions to reach consensus on policy objectives and strategies (Eppel 2015). From this experience, several studies (Duncan 2017, Berkett et al. 2018, Tadaki et al. 2020) have contributed insights to the wider literature on collaborative water governance (e.g., Ansell and Gash 2008, Margerum 2011, Emerson et al 2012, Koontz 2014, de Loë et al. 2015, Newig et al. 2018). However, while collaborative policymaking in New Zealand helped to narrow differences on policy objectives, policy implementation has been uneven and slow (Pham et al. 2019).

As a result, in recent years there has been a shift toward a second type of collaboration focused on collective management. Collective management involves groups of land users who coordinate their resource use practices to ensure sustainability of the resource. In New Zealand, groups of land users in the same watershed, called “catchment groups,” are increasingly valued by government as a mechanism to develop and implement local solutions, including for objectives agreed through multi-actor collaborative policymaking. We, therefore, distinguish between collaborative policymaking - involving multi-stakeholder groups seeking agreement on objectives and strategies - and collective management, in which typically more homogenous groups of resource users develop, implement, and monitor agreed actions (in the literature, sometimes cast as rules) to realize their shared objectives.

In New Zealand, as water-related regulation of farming has increased, over one hundred rural catchment groups have been established since 2010 (Sinner et al. 2022b). While their structure and purpose vary, these groups typically comprise farmers from a common catchment and have a goal of improving the local waterways. However, these catchment groups do not have the features recommended by Ostrom and others for the collective management of common pool resources (Ostrom 1990, Cox et al. 2010, DeCaro et al. 2017). For example, membership often does not include all land users in the catchment, and most groups have no specific freshwater objectives and nothing resembling rules or sanctions (Sinner et al. 2022b). Uncertainty dominates understanding of ecological processes. Meanwhile, the government has been funding catchment groups without an evident strategy for their role in implementing policy.

These catchment groups exemplify the messy business of emergent collective action that does not follow the design guidelines proffered by Ostrom and associated researchers. This raises several questions. What type of collective action are these groups doing and why? How does this emergent supply of collective action align with the demand from policymakers and publics for groups to address diffuse water pollution? And how can we improve the chances for these catchment groups to contribute to more healthy waterways?

In a recent study (Sinner et al. 2022a), we called for action research to understand these challenges and how to address them, recognizing that subjective identity frames how people perceive costs and benefits and that institutional design has implications for environmental justice. This study builds on that enquiry, relating how our research engaged with the lived experiences of agency staff and catchment group members, giving us a deeper understanding of the conditions affecting collective action to address diffuse water pollution. In particular, we explore the ways that different parties conceptualize collective action and how this can help researchers and policymakers to understand catchment groups and to support them to act collectively to improve waterways.

THEORY AND PRACTICE OF COLLECTIVE ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION

For guidance on enabling collective management, many researchers and practitioners turn to the work of Ostrom and others, who researched hundreds of situations of collective resource use and stewardship, identifying situational features that were consistent with sustainable resource use by communities (Ostrom 1990). This body of work is extensive in its empirical scope, covering environmental commons ranging from forests, to irrigation, to fisheries. The work has also been helpfully and famously translated into a general framework (Ostrom 2009) and design principles describing conditions that support collective management (Cox et al. 2010), which are regularly consulted in institutional design. For instance, one principle states that collective management of common property is most likely to succeed in user groups that are relatively homogeneous in their social norms and values (Ostrom 2009). Another states that groups will be more successful if the rights of users to design their own institutions and rules are not disputed by government agencies.

However, while Ostrom-esque collective management analyses and principles are widely used, they suffer from well-known limitations. For one, the evidence (and hence principles) does not address externality situations, where benefits of collective action (in this case, reduced pollution from farming) accrue to others. This means that we cannot rely on self-interest to motivate collective action by farmers without intervention from the state or those who are adversely affected (Villamayor-Tomas et al. 2019). Nor does Ostrom’s work provide guidance about how to craft new collective management institutions and organizations, especially when the starting conditions do not align with the design principles, e.g., when groups have heterogeneous norms and values, or when the state is regulating practices while groups are trying to devise their own solutions.

For those wanting to initiate collective management in imperfect real-world conditions, there is a need to move away from thinking that collective management must be made to resemble the ideal, or that it will only work if it does (Quintana and Campbell 2019, Yoder et al. 2022). Instead, researchers can engage with institutional crafters to help them learn from theory and then trial new institutional arrangements for their settings. We can still learn from the empirical literature on collective management, but must ask a different question of it: how does real-world collective management compare to the expected ideal? From the recent literature, we identify three points that help illuminate how real-world collective management differs from theoretical ideals.

First, there is considerable breadth of interpretation of what constitutes collective management. Collective management as described by Ostrom (1990) typically comprises a well-defined group of resource users with rules, monitoring, and sanctions to protect the resource upon which they all depend. Cases more recently described as collective management of water quality range from formal farmer cooperatives in The Netherlands (De Vries et al. 2019) to community groups in the United Kingdom (Cook et al. 2012) and informal cooperation by farmers in Florida, USA (Yoder 2019), to the participation of French farmers in contracts offered by water supply authorities, i.e., where the coordination was via contracts rather than user groups (Amblard 2019).

The Dutch farmer co-ops organized landscape-scale projects involving some 200 farmers, while representatives of Florida farmers were involved in negotiating terms of court-ordered regulation. UK catchment groups mobilized diverse partners to address catchment-scale issues, and French farmers signed contracts with water supply authorities but not with each other. None of these studies, however, describe groups with internal rules, monitoring and sanctions to improve water quality. Thus, those seeking collective management solutions to these problems need to be armed with different questions and approaches than have been offered in the literature.

Second, the question of motivation is central to understanding what collectives do and are willing to do. In an ideal setting, resource users are self-motivated to act collectively to manage the resource they all rely on for their livelihood. This does not apply to an externality situation like diffuse water pollution. Knook et al. (2020) and Riley et al. (2018) reported that most farmers do not have sufficient motivation and resources to address water pollution without additional incentives such as regulation, funding or social pressure.

There is divergent evidence on whether regulation, or the threat of regulation, helps to motivate collective action. Court action spurred informal cooperation between farmers in the Florida Everglades (Yoder 2019) and in Greece (Villamayor-Tomas et al. 2019). Some observers, however, have argued that casting blame and regulatory threats can cause farmers to resist taking responsibility for environmental problems (Wallington and Lawrence 2008).

Wider relationships are also important: Dorner et al. (2023) found greater uptake of good management practices that are easily observed and recognized by the public (e.g., from high-use roads) compared to less visible practices. Indeed, van Zomeren and Louis (2017) highlighted the importance of culture, including identity and emotional experience, for understanding collective action.

Third, the literature reveals a variety of mechanisms for coordinating farmer action, few of which fit the idealized concept of group-defined rules. In the European Union, government-funded agri-environmental schemes enable farmers to design and implement projects together (De Vries et al. 2019, Hardy et al. 2020). The Australian government funded coordinators for Landcare groups but later, not satisfied with results, moved the funding to larger, regional bodies seen as more accountable (Wallington and Lawrence 2008, Curtis et al. 2014). In the Florida Everglades, state regulation provided the coordinating mechanism after state officials and farmers agreed on a list of acceptable practices (Yoder 2019). In France, a farm chemical cooperative negotiated with other groups the terms of a scheme that paid farmers to reduce chemical use, then successfully promoted the scheme to farmers (Del Corso et al. 2017). Groups in New Zealand (Sinner et al. 2022b), England and Wales (Cook et al. 2012) are self-organized but the extent of coordination of members’ land use practices appears limited - e.g., there is little evidence of these groups defining acceptable and unacceptable farming practices in their catchments.

These cases all represent attempts at collective action by farmers to address water-related issues. Group constitution, motivation, targets and coordination mechanisms all appear important, but experience diverges from theoretical ideals and there is no clear model of success. Collective management design principles were not derived from cases involving externalities, so trying to align such cases to reflect these ideal design conditions may not help this type of collective management. Furthermore, not all conditions are able to be reshaped into these ideal conditions. Some features - such as coordination mechanisms and objectives - can be designed or at least strongly influenced by policy and regulation, but other conditions - such as group purpose, composition and commitments - are largely determined by history and local social dynamics.

Observing an imperfect and constrained world, we have called for another approach for studying attempts at collective management (Sinner et al. 2022a). To complement large-n studies of collective management cases, we proposed more engaged research - learning-by-doing with groups who are working their way through local circumstances to achieve collective aims. Rather than focusing on the deficit between reality and ideal design, our research looked at the emergent supply of collective management as it is being experienced, thought about, and implemented by its protagonists. Through collective reflection and analysis involving actors from across the system, we were able to explore the situational aspects driving the aspiration for collective management in a given case. We asked, how is the aspiration confronting the world and how is it being reworked in the process?

This approach complements and contributes to a related body of research, institutional bricolage, which examines how local contexts and relationships shape how people respond to policy (Cleaver and de Koning 2015, Whaley 2018). As Whaley et al. (2020) argued:

[Institutional bricolage] is concerned with how all attempts to govern are socially embedded, where people both consciously and non-consciously patch together institutional arrangements from the social and cultural resources available to them (Cleaver 2002, 2012). In this sense, it differs markedly from the more mainstream view of institutions whereby people consciously and rationally “build” or “craft” arrangements from scratch (Ostrom 1990, 2005).

To reconcile the differences in the supply and demand for collective management, government could implement policies to encourage groups (the supply) to conform to demand for idealized collective management. As we show in this study, this approach does not appear to be working in Aotearoa New Zealand. An alternative would be to change government’s expectations of catchment groups, i.e., to modify demand, based on a more nuanced understanding of constrained and imperfect conditions for supply of collective management. This then raises the question, how can collective management of water quality be encouraged and undertaken to achieve beneficial environmental and social outcomes for all?

LOCAL CONTEXT

To understand what is happening in New Zealand, and how catchment groups differ from idealized notions of collective action, requires consideration of local conditions. This section describes the context of our research. It is followed by our methods, findings, and then a discussion.

Like many other countries (Amblard 2019, Bouleau et al. 2020), New Zealand has failed to manage diffuse water pollution from agriculture, which has caused significant deterioration in freshwater ecosystems (OECD 2017b). In response to public concern (Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment 2004, Hughey et al. 2010, 2019), successive governments have implemented a series of national policies and regulations to improve the state of water bodies (Ministry for the Environment 2021).

These policies and regulations address farmers as individuals, rather than as members of collectives. As noted by Thomas et al. (2020), such measures are unlikely to achieve freshwater objectives. Unless coordinated at catchment and sub-catchment scales, most farm-scale action is likely to default to recognized good management practices that are affordable for the farmer, rather than practices designed to achieve specific place-based objectives by addressing locally significant stressors, which often requires coordination across property boundaries (Sinner et al. 2020).

In New Zealand, this situation has generated interest in, i.e., demand for, catchment groups to coordinate actions of farmers across multiple properties. Local farmer collectives have existed in New Zealand for many years, often to manage a shared resource such as irrigation water (Boone and Fragaszy 2018). Other groups have arisen around shared goals such as pest management and habitat restoration for threatened species, with activity accelerating significantly in the past decade (NZ Landcare Trust 2019, Peters 2019, Sinner et al. 2022b). In the 18 months to mid-2021, the government invested NZ$29 million in over 170 catchment groups (Ministry for Primary Industries 2021) and has invested more since then (e.g., Williams 2022, Hubbard 2023). Most recently, a significant report called for catchment groups to play a major role in facilitating land use change to address climate change and freshwater challenges (Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment 2024).

In this context, the term catchment group describes a voluntary collective of land users, and sometimes others, organized based on catchment (i.e., watershed) or sub-catchment boundaries, that coordinates action on private land to address concerns about water quality and other environmental issues. However, the nature and role of catchment groups are contested, including issues of membership, purpose, structure, involvement of local Mâori and, ultimately, whether government should expect these groups to focus on freshwater policy objectives (Challies et al., in press).

The role of Mâori in freshwater decision-making is gradually increasing, underpinned by Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840). Although the treaty was long ignored (King 2003), since the 1970s there has been increased recognition of treaty rights and principles, including settlement of historical grievances with many tribes (Sullivan 2016). The National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management 2020 requires regional water authorities to actively involve local Mâori in freshwater management, in recognition of their historical and ongoing rights and interests in land and water (Ministry for the Environment and Ministry for Primary Industries 2020).

METHODS

Our research aimed to understand catchment groups as an emerging and now salient phenomenon in environmental management in New Zealand, and to advise catchment groups, government, and sector agencies on how to develop and support catchment groups to improve the health of waterways. To this end, we employed a transdisciplinary exploration of the phenomena of catchment groups through dialogue and interchange between researchers, policy makers, and on the ground actors (Pohl and Hadorn 2008). This used a combination of collaborative inquiry techniques of action research (Westling et al. 2014, Bartels et al. 2020) alongside relational oriented practices (Böhme et al. 2024, West et al. 2024, Ives et al. 2023). The latter included exploration of social and environmental systems interactions through story telling (Snow 2022, Talgorn 2021) and inclusion of Mâori Tikanga, history, and protocols for dialogue (Ataria et al. 2018). This opened the problem construct to a variety of perspectives and highlighted the influence of interactions and relationships between actors, institutions, and the environment.

We created two mechanisms to explore collective management by catchment groups: (i) a forum of local champions of collective management from four catchments, and (ii) a policy advisory group with people involved in water policy and regulation, including government and industry representatives and Mâori experts. The forum comprised a farming leader and Mâori representative from each of four catchments across New Zealand. It involved six two-day meetings between October 2020 and November 2022 and included field visits to all four catchments. Prior to the initial meeting, we conducted 18 semi-structured interviews in the four catchments with forum members (8 interviews), other farmers and local Mâori (5), and local government officials (5) to explore the preconditions and drivers of catchment groups’ work.

In the forum, we discussed theories of collective action, asked participants about their motivations and strategies for establishing collective management, and posed hypothetical scenarios to elicit their views on opportunities and challenges. As trust and reflective capacity developed through the forum meetings, topics for discussion were increasingly chosen cooperatively, resulting in a mix of pragmatic, policy, and conceptual foci. For instance, in one forum meeting, participants considered the relevance of Ostrom’s design principles for their catchment groups (Tadaki et al. 2021); in another session, we discussed how farmers in the Florida Everglades had achieved a collective target for reduction of phosphorus in surface waters (based on Yoder 2019). Through iterative discussion, we developed ideas about “what works” and “what’s challenging” during workshops with the forum and meetings with the policy advisory group. These discussions served to (i) support forum members to think through, establish, and strengthen collective arrangements in their local settings and (ii) build understanding of institutional crafting in real time.

Through the forums we ground-tested relevant theories and literature (Schlüter et al. 2022) and explored framings on power and equity offered in critical theory (Molle 2008, Cleaver and de Koning 2015). By staying alert to the shifting learning needs of different actors across the system (Roux et al. 2017), we moved from a generalized understanding of the problem to envisaging potential change, examining the possible means to transform existing practices and create new ones (Ives 2023).

All interviews, forum sessions and policy advisory group meetings were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Interviewees were invited to check transcripts and some offered corrections and clarifications. All transcripts were read by at least two researchers who identified and shared passages of interest with other members of the research team. Summaries of forum and policy group meetings (including quotes) were shared with participants; in some cases, this spurred further discussions via email. This extensive material was not systematically coded but rather drawn upon to spark further discussion and illustrate a range of perspectives on catchment groups.

Emerging insights from the forum were discussed with the policy advisory group and vice versa, and were processed iteratively by the research team in bi-weekly meetings over three years (Kilvington et al. (in press) for further detail). We also tested and refined emerging insights with a wider audience through a series of blog posts (https://ourlandandwater.nz/project/new-models-of-collective-responsibility/) and a webinar to present findings of our major report (Sinner et al. 2023). With 172 attendees including government officials, industry experts, farming leaders, researchers, and environmentalists, the response to the webinar attests to the ongoing interest in catchment groups and their evolving role in environmental politics in New Zealand. Multiple threads of collective dialogue, reflection, distillation, and feedback with the catchment forum, policy advisory group, and wider community of catchment group practitioners, have confirmed that our findings reflect a reality for a considerable number of catchment groups and have resonated with the policy network in New Zealand.

RESULTS

Through our research, we learned that catchment groups imagine themselves quite differently to the well-defined groups with clear boundaries and rules that are typically theorized in studies of collective management. Here we present our findings synthesized into what we call “logics” that different actors subscribe to. These logics provide a coherence to actors’ worldviews and explain priorities for the actors who subscribe to them. Since the aim of our research was to understand why catchment groups look different to the theoretical ideal type, we wanted to take catchment groups on their own terms and explore how they view the world.

In particular, our research revealed important differences between what catchment groups and government officials think catchment groups should do. We found that catchment groups shared certain relational logics, whereas policymakers and researchers tended to share certain instrumental and managerial logics. These categories are not absolute, of course. Some catchment group members exhibited management logic at times, and some agency staff demonstrated relationship logic. That said, surfacing these logics can help us to think about bridging the gap between supply and demand for collective management of diffuse pollution.

Management logic

The first way of understanding catchment groups we call management logic. This perspective, found among government policy actors and frequently among researchers like ourselves, sees diffuse water pollution as the problem and catchment groups as a possible solution, through rational planning and monitoring, overcoming the limitations of regulatory solutions. In this case, the logic focuses on establishing clear objectives (i.e., waterway protection, often in terms of specific standards) and coordinating actions by individuals as an efficient and effective means to achieve those objectives. For instance, government agencies are interested in catchment groups as a vehicle for realizing improvements in ecological attributes defined in national policy. Therefore, they emphasize measurable ecological outcomes as “success” and are most interested in providing means (such as funding) to achieve this.

Ostrom’s design principles - concerned with maintaining a common pool resource through collective management - are attractive to those using management logic. According to these principles, groups develop internal rules and sanctions focused on who can use the common resource, how they can use it, and how use is monitored and enforced. These measures ensure ongoing viability of the resource upon which the group depends.

In terms of catchment groups in New Zealand, management logic focuses on how government can motivate and support these groups to implement actions to achieve policy objectives. Some government officials are familiar with Ostrom’s work (e.g., Ministry for the Environment 2012, Boone and Fragaszy 2018) and think about catchment groups as a form of collective management of water bodies. One government official asked us:

[Regarding] successful groups, how do they deal with free-loaders? In the sense of people in the catchment who don’t join in but effectively get some of the benefits (of perhaps accolades to the community, less regulatory attention etc.) (email 14 December 2020)

We asked our policy advisory group to identify widely held ideas about catchment groups in New Zealand. They saw catchment groups as an efficient way for local government to interact with farmers, coordinate farm environment plans and reduce compliance costs, and as a place for local Mâori to connect with farmers. Some officials also saw catchment groups as empowering farmers to develop their own solutions, thereby reducing the need for regulation and reducing conflict with the farming community. These responses reflect management logic, seeing catchment groups as a means to address the policy problem of diffuse water pollution.

As researchers, we began the project by acknowledging assumptions, which included our own tendency to see catchment groups through this theoretical lens. This offered us a useful starting point to explore, with catchment forum participants, how to support collective responses to diffuse water pollution, initially by having participants evaluate the relevance of Ostrom’s design principles for their catchment groups (Tadaki et al. 2021). However, awareness of our own preconception bias enabled us to see where data did not fit, and to redirect the inquiry to explore the other ways in which forum and policy group participants were conceptualizing catchment groups.

Relationship logic

Compared to management logic, the relationship logic evident among catchment group leaders is less environmentally instrumental and more concerned with maintaining the viability of farming through building relationships with different constituencies, such the regional council, schools and the wider community, sometimes extending to local Mâori and environmentalists. Farmer members of catchment groups want to improve the perception of farming in the wider community. Comments suggested that many farmers feel that their good work is not always valued, and view catchment groups as an opportunity to change the narrative and provide members with a stronger voice in policy and community dialogues. Farmers want to show that they care about the environment and that they are already investing substantial time and money to make things better. Similarly, de Loë et al. (2015) found that many farmers participated in multi-actor collaborative processes to strengthen relationships with other groups.

The relational logic also applies within a catchment group. Catchment group leaders want to lead by example, not tell others what to do - for instance, our forum members said that the design principle related to sanctioning non-compliant members had little relevance for them (Tadaki et al. 2021). They are motivated more by local relationships and community concerns than by policy objectives and water quality jargon. Catchment groups also offer a forum for sharing information, supporting each other, and strengthening relationships within the farming community.

These quotes from catchment group members demonstrate relationship logic:

If I get these rules come from Wellington, my thoughts are: “it's gonna impact me in this way, how can I find my way around it?” ... [Whereas] if I've had direct involvement, say, [Joe] from the marae has come around and we've chatted about this problem and that problem, my thinking's completely different. All of a sudden, I feel the weight of responsibility a lot more and I feel a lot more part of it. (CF member 1)

What helped was we had our catchment group. It might've been about 23 people of all walks ... [those] from down at the marae down at the estuary, said, ‘I can't go and get my pipi [shellfish] anymore. It's either getting polluted or covered by silt.’ ... We can talk about the figures and numbers until the cows come home, and it doesn't really impact until you realize the human impact of it. (CF member 3)

... if some of us are doing the things and one bad farmer or two bad farmers let the side down, we’ve lost the battle a bit haven’t we. ... you get one farmer who is not pulling his weight and he gets on TV. ... It’s interesting, though, with more success you get...you know, I got a few more farmers involved just because they thought, ‘well I better not miss out on what could eventuate’ you know. So success gets... it brings more people in. (Interview 2)

Management logic suggests that a group should have a specific objective and a plan to achieve it. But our forum members told us that they see catchment groups as a place for dialogue and learning. It’s about continuous improvement, testing new ideas, and building relationships, as opposed to a detailed 20-year roadmap leading to the work being finished at some future date. One forum member reflected:

I mean, it should always be continuous improvement. That’s what we do on our farms every day. We don’t get to a certain level and then say, “Now we’re there, we’ll stop.” You're always looking to improve in different areas. But having those milestones where you can actually tick things off and get some feel-good factor about it, everyone likes being able to tick things off and get a bit of praise for it, so I think that's probably quite important. (CF member 1)

Table 1 summarizes and contrasts key features of management and relationship logics that we observed in our research.

Genealogical, political, and other logics

While management and relationship logics dominated the discourse in our policy advisory group and catchment forum, we also identified other logics framing catchment-scale collective action.

Tangata whenua (Mâori of a particular place) members often talked about catchments, and involvement with catchment groups, through the lens of whakapapa - a Mâori term for the genealogy that connects everyone and everything (Kawharu 2000). The whakapapa of any tribe or sub-tribe includes legends of how the land, waters, flora and fauna evolved, how their ancestors arrived and often fought for the land, and other stories about their connections to the land. In a Mâori worldview, people belong to the land rather than the reverse. Genealogical logic can be seen as a form of relationship logic, with greater focus on historical and cultural connections.

The forum discussed the importance of understanding the stories of each catchment. Asked what others should know, one tangata whenua member said:

Early history, iwi history, the progression through from pre-European through to post-colonial, all the way through and land losses. ... we had to follow the land that was granted because they’d taken the good stuff off us... We all have to learn and respect who we are and where we came from, because it's quite a big story when you start going back and we're never gonna stop learning. Just seeing what happened with water, it's scary in some ways what we see over the years. ... Let’s all go ahead. We don’t have an option.

Another acknowledged farmers’ stories and the need to ‘bind’ these to tangata whenua stories as the basis for an action plan:

... a starting point and an ending point for the layers of the story of the catchment, like [tangata whenua] history and values. Then, the landowners’ history and values as well. The binding of the two, then the working out what mahi [action plan], priority of the mahi and how to attack the issues faced in the catchment group and then another point is the progressing toward the objectives raised by those issues.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the 1840 treaty between Britain and Mâori chiefs, was another focus for Mâori members of our forum. Through colonization, Mâori have experienced significant loss, including illegal dispossession of land and reduced abundance of and contamination of traditional food sources such as fish and shellfish. For tangata whenua, catchment groups could provide an opportunity to reconnect with ancestral land and be involved in decision-making about freshwater improvement, although this opportunity is mostly yet to be realized. In our forum, tangata whenua said they also wanted to be able to fish, e.g., accessing waterways across farmland, and be recognized by the farmers as belonging there. Their shared connection to land and antipathy toward government helps explain why tangata whenua and farmers bonded during our catchment forum. Rather than blaming the farmers in the forum for the poor state of waterways, tangata whenua members empathized with and encouraged the farmers and sought recognition of Mâori in the catchment. For their part, farmers in the group wanted to improve awareness of their catchment group members about Mâori history and culture and to strengthen relationships with tangata whenua.

For politicians, supporting catchment groups is one way to respond to public concern about the poor health of freshwater bodies. The failure of previous policies has led to several iterations of regulation, each of which has met with resistance and criticism. Promoting catchment groups is a way to support farmers who are working to improve freshwater health while maintaining regulation that addresses issues more suited to national standards. Political logic, driven by short-term imperatives, can explain why some policies are not well-aligned (e.g., regulation and funding) and funding is available one year and gone the next.

Genealogical and political logics are other ways of understanding the role of catchment groups. There are no doubt more logics that could be identified - we have highlighted management logic and relationship logic as the dominant perspectives of government officials and the catchment groups themselves.

DISCUSSION

To see how these logics help us to better understand why catchment groups are not implementing Ostrom-esque collective action, we return to the three topics we highlighted earlier: what constitutes collective management, the motivation of those involved, and the mechanisms through which groups pursue their objectives. We also consider another topic, the role of specific objectives, which is prominent in management logic but not in relational logic. We frame this in terms of how to bridge the gap between the demand for, and supply of, catchment groups. Figure 1 shows the main points by way of an imaginary dialogue between a catchment group and a government agency, in which both realize that they can advance their goals by helping the other party achieve its goals.

Understanding the gap between supply of, and demand for, collective management

In New Zealand, government and sector groups are looking to catchment groups as a means to achieve water policy objectives. Groups proliferated when regulation started to bite and public sentiment turned against farmers, but farmers adopted strategies based on relationships rather than management logic. The different logics at play help us understand why these groups have not adopted specific objectives and why their coordination mechanisms differ from expectations of policy agencies.

Given that recent freshwater regulations include reference to specific water standards, it is perhaps surprising that few catchment groups in New Zealand have adopted measurable objectives to meet these standards. Our research indicates that this lack of specific objectives reflects the relationship logic that guides farmers’ approach to catchment groups. In this logic, catchment groups are formed to access funding as well as advice on good farming practices, and to demonstrate to the community that farmers are doing the right thing. As a result, catchment group strategies and mechanisms for collective action do not generally include detailed action plans to address cumulative effects, agreed practices, or any monitoring of farming practices or environmental outcomes. In short, the groups’ actions are largely disconnected from the detail of government policy objectives.

This logic is also evident in catchment groups in other countries. A study of catchment groups in England and Wales found they were similarly disconnected from policy (Cook et al. 2012). Riley et al. (2018) also found similar logics, including a UK farmer who said his neighbors had always helped each other, but he wouldn’t join a program with them on specific practices: “How they manage their land is their own business... I wouldn’t want to be tied together” (Riley et al. 2018:8). As with New Zealand catchment groups, relationship logic dominated management logic. There was no focus on externally-defined environmental objectives, and hence no sense that a common strategy or plan was required. Environmental performance is seen as an individual issue, not a collective one.

Thus, relationship logic helps to explain why catchment groups in New Zealand look different than idealized forms of collective management.

Reconfiguring supply

What then should a government agency do if it wants catchment groups to take a more active role to improve waterways? In a nutshell, agencies can acknowledge and work with relationship logic while also encouraging catchment groups to acknowledge and work with management logic.

The stronger the relationships between catchment groups and their affected communities, the more motivated the groups will be to act. Relational logic also highlights that groups will be more motivated by things that matter to people (e.g., fish and bird populations, water quality for swimming) than by biochemical parameters like nitrogen concentrations. Thus, to encourage more active responsibility-taking by catchment groups, government agencies can support the relationship work of catchment groups with Indigenous groups and other interested parties. For example, agencies can fund group coordinators who can build and maintain these connections.

In our forum, we saw the potential for genealogical narratives and new relationships with tangata whenua to change farmers’ perspectives. One strategy to reconfigure supply is, therefore, to fund tangata whenua so those who want to work with catchment groups are not stymied by lack a of resources. In late 2023, the NZ government allocated NZ$12.8 million to support the capability and capacity of Mâori tribal entities to fulfill their freshwater aspirations (Te Wai Mâori 2023), which could enable more tangata whenua groups to engage with catchment groups. Continued funding will be needed to sustain this.

The collective action supplied by catchment groups in response to external pressure also depends on institutional arrangements and extant ideas about possible new arrangements. Through policies, pronouncements, funding schemes and regulation, governments can promote new institutional arrangements - for example, catchment groups - as a vehicle for collective action by resource users. New Zealand farmers have readily adopted the idea of catchment groups, often with government funding, but have used this new institutional form in different ways than some government officials might have expected.

To encourage a supply of collective management that meets the policy demand, agency officials can promote the benefits to farmers of meeting policy objectives. For example, government can maintain regulatory pressure while offering an easier route for members of catchment groups that are implementing a credible plan to achieve policy objectives.

And agencies can provide financial support for earlier adopters of these new institutional arrangements. At the same time, agencies could signal that regulatory pressure is likely to increase in areas where there is insufficient progress toward policy objectives.

Another strategy for agencies would employ both relationship logic and management logic: providing catchment groups with tools to better understand themselves, their goals and key relationships, and how they can achieve their goals. This approach would use trusted intermediaries and group facilitation techniques to encourage groups to explore and deploy management logic while recognizing the relationship logic that motivates groups (Sinner and Kilvington 2022). A strategy based on trusted intermediaries has shown promise in France, where Del Corso et al. (2017) found that technical advisers’ relationships with farmers helped to motivate and guide farmers to accept the management logic of a program to reduce chemical use. Other studies (Yoder 2019, De Vries et al. 2019, Kirk et al. 2022) have also highlighted that trusted intermediaries can help to socialize support for policy objectives and management actions among farmers, suggesting that relationship and management logics are not mutually exclusive.

Reconfiguring demand

These strategies do not guarantee success, of course. If farmers do not act quickly enough or if improvements are not observable or measurable in the short-term, those affected by diffuse pollution may get frustrated and pressure politicians to tighten regulation of farming practices. Tighter regulation that does not recognize a role for catchment groups could undermine the work of those groups: farmers would be less inclined to work collectively to find a local solution because the government has already told them what is required - why do more?

There is a related risk of trying to make catchment groups into servants of the state. Curtis et al. (2014) described how Australian Landcare groups were demotivated by a series of policy changes designed to make the groups more accountable for policy outcomes. The demand for, i.e., government expectations of, catchment groups also needs to change. Catchment groups have their own goals; most were not established to implement government policy. This underlines the importance of government agencies understanding their own logics as well as the logics of farmers and others involved in catchment groups, so that funding and regulatory mechanisms can work with these logics rather than against them.

Our findings extend those of Whaley et al. (2020), who noted that local groups have more complex motivations than the single purpose often assumed by funding organizations. They argued for moving away from a list of success factors and a preoccupation with organizational form, and instead focusing on local relationships and how these affect the performance of management functions. While Whaley et al. (2020) were concerned primarily with rural development in low-income countries, our work shows that the lessons are also relevant for agencies working with catchment groups in places like New Zealand. To bridge the gap between supply and demand for catchment groups, agencies should seek to understand the limitations of their own logics and objectives, as well as what catchment groups care about, and find ways to work with them toward common objectives.

CONCLUSION

Theories of collective action have paid insufficient attention to relational elements of human motivation, including how relationships affect subjective identify and perceptions of costs and benefits. Paying more attention to the logics of those involved with catchment groups helped us to understand why this collective action did not take Ostrom-esque forms of collective management.

Regulatory pressure can motivate collective action by farmers. But this does not ensure that farmers will attempt collective management of diffuse pollution; for this they would need to see meeting policy objectives as a critical factor in meeting their relationship needs, including improving the public image of farming. Salience is necessary, but how it gets mobilized depends on local context and bricolage.

Government agencies wanting to encourage collective management should seek to understand resource users’ values, perspectives, and logics so that policy can be designed to invoke these values to motivate action. Equally, if farmers want to reduce intrusive regulation while also protecting local habitats and species, they need to understand the values, perspectives, and logics of government and of other local interests. Governments can assist this process by supporting the relationship work of catchment groups and providing resources to help groups in their journey of self-discovery. In settler-colonial landscapes, this should include providing resources for Indigenous peoples to participate more actively in these conversations.

Ultimately, we do not expect that all catchment groups in New Zealand will adopt a collective management approach to environmental externalities of farming. Even in such a relatively small country, the local conditions - social, cultural, personal and political - are diverse. We expect that catchment groups will be equally diverse as they navigate complex ideas and relationships to forge their own institutional identities in challenging and changing environments. Some groups may evolve collective strategies that effectively coordinate individual action to address concerns of instream interests and the state, while others do not. Government policy that seeks to work with catchment groups to advance water management objectives will need to work with the conditions of supply rather than expect farmers to meet an idealized demand for collective management.

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