Freshwater geographies: Experimenting with knowing ...

New Zealand Geographer (2012) 68, 62–66

doi: 10.1111/j.1745-7939.2012.01223.x

Geo-Ed

Freshwater geographies: Experimenting with knowing and doing geography differently Brendon Blue, Claire Gregory, Kiely McFarlane, Marc Tadaki, Petra van Limburg-Meijer and Nick Lewis School of Environment, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract: The fair and effective governance of freshwater is an increasingly prominent issue in New Zealand. Emerging from a complex of cultural, economic and biophysical narratives, freshwater geographies are multiple, varied and increasingly acknowledged as worthy of interdisciplinary scrutiny. In this commentary, we reflect on a series of generative spaces that we – as group of postgraduate geographers (plus supporting staff) – created to engage with the multiplicity of freshwater meanings both within and beyond the academy. Through this evolving epistemic-political project, we significantly reframed our own understandings about what freshwater ‘is’ and how it ought to be governed. By pursuing a deeper understanding of how the world gets made, we expand our ability to know and make it differently. Key words: freshwater, interdisciplinarity, postgraduates, reframing, social learning, workshops.

Freshwater in New Zealand has in recent times become a subject of national debate and a feature of the public-policy agenda. Interventions such as Dr Mike Joy’s1 critique of the status and health of our freshwater systems and more widespread criticism of the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management (e.g. see Sinner 2011) have forced political responses (see Key on BBC Hardtalk2). As postgraduate geographers concerned with freshwater in New Zealand, we are heartened by this politicisation of freshwater and encouraged by the possibilities that it offers to debate issues of water widely and the opportunities it provides to practice an engaged geography. Water shapes landforms and ecosystems, underpins livelihoods and is integral to community identities. Thinking about water raises questions of environmental practices and stan-

dards, economic development, living with biophysical variability and governing human action. If the way we know the world shapes how we make it (and vice versa) (Jasanoff 2004), the ways in which we know our freshwater systems and the ways in which we organise ourselves in relation to them are fundamentally intertwined. The relationships we choose to highlight and perform through our research are situated within many competing ideas about water – what it is, how it ought to be measured and distributed and how it affects the things we care about. Our water research collective shares a concern that top-down, reductionist and technocratic approaches to freshwater governance cannot fairly and effectively engage with the complexity that these issues require, risking opportunities to enhance freshwater systems

Note about authors: Brendon Blue, Claire Gregory and Petra van Limburg-Meijer are PhD students at the University of Auckland; Kiely McFarlane and Marc Takadi are MSc students at the University of Auckland; Nick Lewis is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Environment at the University of Auckland E-mail: [email protected] © 2012 The Authors New Zealand Geographer © 2012 New Zealand Geographical Society

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presented by the political moment. We are determined to ensure that geography makes more of these opportunities by adopting an innovative and experimental approach towards producing knowledge of our freshwater systems and how to work with them. Our view is that such an approach must engage seriously with the multiplicity of meanings that water expresses and generates. In this commentary, we outline our own approach to foster a wider and deeper freshwater conversation as a strategic intervention in this regard. In what follows we detail our organisation of a series of experimental spaces (workshops) in 2011 in which we sought to develop and expand understandings of freshwater as a knowledge object. We invited multiple others to think with us about freshwater systems and the practices required to enhance collective understandings of them. We focus on our tactics, the challenges and successes of the initiative, and what we learned from it. Our objective was to launch an expansionary knowledge network that would circulate understandings within and through other experimental spaces and public geographies. Our provocation is that not only must freshwater be rethought as a knowledge object, but so must the implications of the practices in which we produce freshwater knowledge. Creating new freshwater geographies is not enough; we need to make and perform them differently. Our approach, we feel, offers an exemplar for stimulating disciplinary vitality and contribution across geography’s many knowledge objects.

From experimental spaces to public geographies In March 2011, we attempted to consolidate our concerns through a half-day interdisciplinary workshop on river management within the University of Auckland’s School of Environment. Our explicit aim was to develop a collective understanding around how our school might contribute to academic and practical discussions on freshwater management in New Zealand. The opening presentation attracted just over 30 students and staff with diverse backgrounds, ranging from urban GIS mapping and economic geography to fluvial geomorphology and participatory processes in

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resource management. To encourage discussion, we divided the workshop into small discussions focused on three themes: biophysical understandings, governance of freshwater and values (socio-economic aspects). This was an intuitive rather than strategic move. We focused attention on rivers, taking for granted a shared political position on their intrinsic worth based on shared environmental values. We presumed from this a collective mandate to think and act politically. We also presumed that discussions would focus on geographical contributions around place and scale and that our challenge would be to integrate these contributions after the fact. Each of the groups, however, elaborated very different conversational trajectories, leading to a highly animated reporting back session that forced us to confront the need to generate a collective position. The discussion confirmed that the practice of organising a series of workshops gave us a mandate to constructively question the ways in which we are ‘knowing’ rivers in various institutional settings. However, it also highlighted for us that we could not presume a collective ‘political project’ (see Larner et al. 2007). Rather, cross-group alignments had to be negotiated and understandings developed. We came to recognise that knowing rivers differently lay at the heart of our challenge and our mandate to engage in the process of setting questions and agendas in New Zealand freshwater. Our own learning through the workshop highlighted the need to reframe both our thinking and the structure of the workshop as a generative space. The ways in which we organised discussion were not necessarily ‘natural’ or given; rather, they represented just the kind of presumptive thinking we were out to contest. Keen to continue revising our project into something ‘different’, we invited the original participants (and interested others) to a second, more open workshop in which we tried to move beyond categories and thinking locked in by our shared educational experiences around rivers to identify questions that might open up new ways of thinking about freshwater. By this point, we had begun to imagine a third, more ambitious workshop in which we would assemble policymakers and other researchers from around New Zealand. By asking ourselves ‘how we are knowing our

© 2012 The Authors New Zealand Geographer © 2012 New Zealand Geographical Society

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rivers?’, we began to see a new world, potentially new understandings and new ways of engaging the public. In our second workshop, we hoped to test the capacity for innovativeness in new questions. Intriguingly, this move to openness became divisive in itself. We struggled to find a shared language within which to have these discussions, structure the workshop and imagine its conversations and to escape established knowledge dynamics. In short, this workshop became fractured by sub-disciplinary debates and interest politics. It confirmed the deep challenge of capability building, if this is understood as capacity for collective thinking and action (see Le Heron et al. 2011). By this stage, we were committed to, and had negotiated funding for, a public workshop. Between the second and third workshops, we worked hard to shape individual and shared reflections on ourselves, our individual goals, motivations, roles and values into a ‘political project’. We began to recognise that this could be achieved by emphasising commitments to becoming something other and committing to a political project of opening out rather than closing down to a vision of a future and a plan for freshwater. This common will to make new worlds required new ways of knowing, multiple engagements and new practices. We agreed that knowledge and the actions that create, justify and support its use are fundamentally intertwined; this gave us a political project of engaged knowledge production. This third workshop in October 2011 was themed ‘Freshwater Geographies’. We invited academics, researchers and practitioners from around New Zealand, each of whom challenged established freshwater practices in different research and management settings. We had an explicit ‘agenda’: to advance a researchled freshwater politics, empowered and sustained through the development of new collaborative practices. We sought to highlight the role of practice and agency in framing problems and approaches to freshwater in New Zealand. Our experiment with knowing differently had transformed into an experiment in doing differently. In the workshop, we asked participants to introduce themselves and their personal values and attachments to freshwater, in an attempt to make explicit the multiplicity of value around

freshwater. We used these readings of freshwater in research and professional work to understand our freshwater engagements as situated personally and institutionally. This not only generated discussion about individual action but also highlighted possibilities to build collective agency and spaces for intervention. The approach attempted to decentre the prior political and institutional projects that participants brought to the workshop from their work and researcher subject positions, allowing a concentrated focus on values and practices and the cultivation of a workshop collectivity (although it emerged this was not entirely possible). One outcome of this collective agency was an open letter to New Zealand’s three main political parties in the run up to the election, asking how they were addressing a range of the concerns emerging from the discussion.3 The exercise reminded us of the value of dialogue and exchange and the fashioning of expansionary networks in enabling reframing of understandings and issues as well as the content of conversations. We extended not only an epistemic and political community of practice but also the reach of ‘doing’ differently.

Actions, outcomes and the politics of possibility We are confident that our capacity to conceive and initiate the workshops has been enabled by geographical thinking about intellectual and institutional capability and practices of engaged scholarship (see Le Heron et al. 2011). They owed much to an emerging commitment to communities of learning and practice that cross student–academic–professional boundaries and were supported by the School of Environment and staff within the school. As students, we are able to commit without the burdens of institutional expectations and career politics of academic geographers or the many time and epistemic constraints of professional geographers. We are able to invest the energy and take the ‘professional’ risk to try ‘something different’. We needed no permission to undertake this initiative, which gathered momentum through the injection of ideas and energy from supporting staff and other postgraduate students along the way. By enthusing staff (and later, professionals working with


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freshwater) and by mobilising their commitments to students, we were able to draw together researchers whose divergent interests ordinarily constrain them from working closely with one another (e.g. a fluvial geomorphologist and health geographer). Geography’s breadth of interest and practices of engaged critical scholarship and knowing by doing (Le Heron & Lewis 2011) further resourced our project, as did the enthusiasm, expertise and connections of key academic champions within the school and beyond. As student–academics, we recognised an obligation to ask new and novel questions, the privilege to engage in multiple and even unusual ways and the challenge to display the imagination, skill and courage to act and take geography into new spaces. Our experiences also highlight the value of experimentation and flexibility in opening up new spaces for different conversations around freshwater. Critical reflection on the outcomes of the first workshop allowed us to move beyond our original categories, reframing our goals and the questions we asked. We engaged with processes of reframing in the following workshops, drawing on the idea of ‘different ways of knowing’ to challenge the way we know freshwater and promote a shift away from predetermined institutionalised problem framings. We sought to engage with difference by targeting individuals from academic and practitioner communities with backgrounds in natural and social sciences and experience and expertise with different freshwater issues. Fostering an interdisciplinary culture (see Oughton & Bracken 2009; Shove 2011) promoted the emergence of new insights as we began to ask new and different questions about freshwater collectively. The workshop process highlighted that our problem framings are built around specific sets of experiences and ways of knowing, challenging us to rethink the institutions and commitments that we work within. Considered reflection on the performance of particular problem framings raised through our conversations highlighted that knowing and doing are inextricably linked. For instance, the extent to which ‘freshwater values’ are things that can be measured, balanced and optimised is very much contingent upon how researchers reify these notions through our practices to produce ‘evidence for policy’, and how values

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are then given effect to in policy and planning documents.

Conclusion Our intervention has taught us a number of lessons. It has helped us to realise that debates around the nature and domain of geography and its relationships with freshwater and interdisciplinary inquiry are simultaneously practical, ethical, political and theoretical. If ‘geography is what geographers do’ (cf. Le Heron & Lewis 2011), we ought to think about the freshwater geographies (and geography) we want to make and that we think are meaningful contributions to local and global knowledge making. We have enjoyed some success in bringing together different ‘ways of knowing’ around some communal tables. We attribute much of this success to having cast our initiative in a coherent and provocative political and disciplinary project that was supported by staff from a variety of sub-disciplinary backgrounds: not only a departmental fluvial geomorphologist and urban hydrologist, for example, but also a cultural geographer and a pair of economic geographers, one of whom challenged us to convince him why he should care about rivers. Diversity and the will and capacity to mobilise it in knowledge production are resources. Our project taught us that as we search to foster generative conversations across the social and natural sciences, it is important to not only think about our collective capacity (potential) to do these things, but also about our capability to get them done. The experience confirmed for us that it is time to rethink what we are doing with freshwater, and what we ought to be doing instead. Our initiative is one of several novel forums to stimulate different conversations on freshwater management and governance.4 Freshwater systems are complex weaves of multiple socionatural processes and their material manifestations. In the New Zealand context, freshwater is an increasingly significant policy concern. The recent FRENZ sandpit exercise provides evidence that ‘innovative’ processes are now being taken seriously in research funding and policy at the national scale.5 Importantly, the challenges of generating a collective subjectivity that would sustain the momentum of work-


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shops 1 and 2 so as to bring workshop 3 to fruition, taught us that much of the work of these spaces takes place beyond the room in contests over ideas and the establishment of connections and mobilisation of support. Arguably, the stage is set for new narratives of interdisciplinary thought and praxis that will give substance to such exchanges. Our experience echoes Schoenberger’s (2001) observation that rather than letting ‘interdisciplinary happen to us’, we can and should develop and promote practices that help shape what interdisciplinary might mean and how it could be done. It also confirms that geographers are well placed to do this. Finally, we are led to reflect that the politics of water are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to know it and practice it into relevance. Over the year, we have come to feel that the biggest measure of meaning in our attempts to reframe freshwater is not the distance between what is known or unknown, or even necessarily the number and diversity of people in a room. Rather, if we can converse to expand our personal and collective repertoire of actions – as well as equip ourselves to pursue them – then perhaps, collectively, we can perform a new freshwater politics for this complex, changing world.6

Acknowledgements Special thanks to Gary Brierley and Richard Le Heron, who have contributed enormously to our efforts and encouraged us at every step, and to the School of Environment for its funding and support for our initiative.We thank all of our fellow participants who have journeyed with us across these experiments and for many more yet to come.

Endnotes 1 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10721337 2 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/ 9480610.stm

3 http://www.env.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/news/ template/news_item.jsp?cid=443024 4 For example, the Land and Water Forum (http:// www.landandwater.org.nz/) 5 http://www.frenz.org.nz/Sandpits/ Sandpit1FreshwaterResources.aspx 6 One new space for developing a progressive networked politics is through a series of Freshwater Geographies Sessions at the NZGS Conference in Napier, December 2012. The effort aims to help develop conversations across freshwater from the natural and social sciences, with an explicit emphasis on expanding the scope of freshwater praxis. All welcome.

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