“From the Groundwater Up?” : Analyzing the Collaborative Drinking Water Source Protection Regime in Ontario, Canada in the Context of Theorized Success Factors for Collaborative Water Governance

Abstract

Collaborative approaches to the governance and management of drinking water sources have gained traction in recent decades as constituting a superior, bottom-up alternative to conventional and adversarial forms of governance, which have largely occurred from the top-down. Collaborative water governance enables local stakeholders to work together to more effectively manage water resources at the watershed level, in an inclusive manner that considers the interests of the various users of the resource. However, despite its promise, collaboration can be difficult to effectively achieve in practice, and scholars assert that some of the normative assumptions underlying the concept do a disservice to the difficulties that actors face in this setting. This research addresses this gap through an empirical analysis of the collaborative approach to drinking water source protection planning and governance that was implemented in Ontario through the enactment of the Clean Water Act in 2006. Three factors prevalent in the literature that are thought to underscore successful collaboration were chosen as the basis of this analysis: representation, public participation, and financial capacity. The author first analyzed the Hansard transcripts on the debates on the Clean Water Act, in order to identify the issues and concerns that were raised by Members of Provincial Parliament (MPPs) relating to these factors, and to examine how the legislation was formulated to include these factors in its collaborative mandate. This analysis revealed that elected officials appeared to view these factors as being important for the success of the program, and that in the end, the legislation was strengthened in terms of its collaborative governance elements, at least on paper. The author then conducted a second directed content analysis of the meeting minutes of three source protection committees across the province, to identify how these committees experienced representation, public participation, and financial capacity throughout their respective collaborative processes. This analysis revealed that some of the elements of the legislated process of collaboration, to which the committees were bound, appeared to exacerbate or in some cases lead to fundamental issues throughout the SWP planning processes. This led the author to ultimately question how much authority was delegated to these committees in actuality in order to carry out SWP on the ground, and thus how truly collaborative and “from the ground up” this program was truly intended to be. The findings suggest that greater attention should be paid in future research to the potential implications of particular design features of mandated forms of collaboration on the ability of collaborative organizations to meet their objectives, particularly when collaborative water governance is transplanted to other contexts.