ABSTRACT
Novel governance experiments in Aotearoa New Zealand are transforming public, government, and scientific understandings of water. In particular, initiatives driven by Māori are building upon relational understandings of rivers as entities that are more ancient and powerful than people, viewing water and rivers as the lifeblood of society and the land with lives and rights of their own. Within these relational ways of knowing and being, a river—or another body of water—can simultaneously be an ancient kin, a revered elder, and a living entity.
Māori perspectives offer the prospect to reframe natural resource ownership, governance, and management. A key strand of the government approach is Te Mana o te Wai—The Charisma of Water, a national korowai (cloak) that frames and informs the trajectory for immediate and future policy development and regional freshwater planning. This concept encompasses the integrated and holistic health and wellbeing of waters as a continuum from the mountains to the sea. Fundamentally, it is about a hierarchy of obligations that puts water first. Te Mana o te Wai, and other novel experiments, demonstrate how Māori epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies influence how we view the life and death of rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand.
