ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the emergence of landscapes of obligation through the incremental processes of Treaty of Waitangi settlements aspiring to address indigenous historical claims and, in so doing, giving rise to deontological relations of power through novel forms of customised redress engaging natural resources. These political compacts represent a tacit constitutionalisation of state-indigenous relations in various formats, introducing hitherto neglected voices into managing resources like waterbodies or freshwater resource management and diversifying, as well as enlarging the politically salient res publica (public thing or affairs). This inherent incrementalism is an advantage in its localised flexibility. Yet it also illustrates the challenges posed by politics and the point that purely technocratic understandings of ‘responsibility’ or preferred, generic outcomes must be leavened by the humility of what politics requires in circumstances of ongoing relational complexity in human affairs and logics in policy domains, where differing views wrestle with what is to be done, how and by whom. Because of these conceptual aspects and how they are addressed operationally through negotiated arrangements, these localised narratives are of international salience.
