Sustainability, water resources and regulation

• Published in: Geoforum 1998, Vol.29 (1), p.51-68
• Main Authors: Cocklin, C., Blunden, G.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: environmental law; indigenous relations; regulatory analysis; resource management; sustainability; water resources
• ISSN: 0016-7185; 1872-9398
• DOI: 10.1016/S0016-7185(97)00017-1

It has been suggested that regulatory analysis and regulation theory provide appropriate foundations for the analysis of the sustainability problematic. We accept these claims and in this paper provide an interrogation, founded in the literature on ‘real’ regulation, of a judicial decision concerning the allocation of water resources to farm irrigation in Northland, Aoteroa/New Zealand. The fact that ‘sustainable management’ has been inscribed in that country's resource management legislation has given focus to social contests over the meaning and interpretation of sustainability. We outline the legislative framework and then provide a description of the contests over the allocation of water to dairy pasture irrigation. Competing interpretations of ‘sustainable management’ were at the centre of these contests. We then attempt to characterise ‘regulatory space’. In the discussion we emphasise the social construction of sustainability and the legitimation of competing interpretations through the courts and other fora. We also refer to the geography of regulation, noting that regulatory processes and their outcomes are defined spatially. Lefebvre's concept of representational space and the Lefebvrian and Foucaultian notion of sites of resistance help us to interrogate competing perspectives on sustainability.