Evolutions in estuary governance? Reflections and lessons from Australia, France and New Caledonia

Abstract

Estuaries are cradles of life for the communities who live around and within them. They are valued in multiple ways for the services they provide to humans, including food production, recreation, water purification, navigation and amenity. Various groups of stakeholders all place different importance on these values, how their needs and practices interact, and what it means to effectively manage an estuary towards a range of desirable goals. This typically creates value conflicts over how estuaries should be managed. Navigating such conflicts requires governance arrangements and methods that allow multiple parties to find a common path forward. Using Evolutionary Governance Theory (EGT) and a hybrid analytic framework incorporating aspects of multilevel/multi-scalar governance, risk governance and territorial intelligence theory, this paper explores the (co-) evolution of governance processes by analysing lessons learnt from action in and observation of estuaries in Australia (Lower Hawkesbury), France (Thau) and New Caledonia (Thio). A multi-method research approach to data collection was used and comparative analysis across the three estuaries undertaken to understand the evolutions in each of their governance systems. From this analysis, several reflections and lessons for the governance of other land-sea systems emerge on: the importance of boundary organisations and boundary negotiations in re-defining integrated approaches to land-sea governance; how particular information systems or models, as well as discourses from other key actors shape co-evolutions of estuarine governance; and that risks or shocks still appear to be the catalysers of new forms of collective action and major reconfigurations and evolutions of estuarine governance.

Trajectory of a coastal social-ecological system: analyzing co-evolution and regime shifts in the Thau lagoon (Mediterranean Sea, France), 1970–2018

“…The methodology we used to analyze the long-term trajectory of a coastal SES enabled us to show a succession of sanitary or ecological crises and management adaptations. Similar successions of crises leading to adaptations of local management methods have been highlighted in other estuarine systems in Europe and in Pacific regions (Daniell et al 2020).…”

Complex drivers of primary production along an anthropised estuary (Seine estuary—France)

“…Estuaries are highly dynamic systems at the interface of freshwater and marine systems. They provide important ecosystem services including supplying and cycling nutrients (Basset et al, 2013), recreational facilities, water purification (Daniell et al, 2020), fisheries (O'Higgins et al, 2010), estuaries also play a role in carbon cycling (Chen and Borges, 2009), and the environmental degradation of these ecosystems will affect these services (Barbier et al, 2011). A major cause of the observed environmental problem in estuaries is "cultural eutrophication" (referred later as eutrophication) (Rabalais et al, 2009;Smith and Schindler, 2009), defined as a syndrome in aquatic ecosystem associated with overproduction of organic matter induced by uncontrolled growth of primary producer due to human-induced inputs of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) (Nixon, 2009;Pannard et al, 2017;Le Moal et al, 2019).…”