Unsettling openings: collaborative environmental management and Maōri in Taranaki

This thesis explores the politics of collaboration between Indigenous communities and government agencies for environmental management in the context of postcolonial Indigenous development and self-determination. Recent shifts towards participatory and collaborative models in environmental management have often proven insufficient to address justice concerns and satisfy Indigenous aspirations. However, they have allowed opportunities for relationship building and reciprocal learning. The theoretical tools of postdevelopment and postcolonial work allow a nuanced analysis of both the neocolonial limitations and the possibilities of collaboration in environmental management. From this perspective, collaboration involves sites of ongoing dialogue and transformation that reveal the fundamentally unsettled nature of postcolonial relationships and opportunities for mutuality and difference. Significantly, the politics of environmental management is inherently connected with Indigenous development and self-determination. This is not only because participation is often contingent on political and economic resources, but also because questions of historical justice and postcolonial territoriality and coexistence circle in, around and through contemporary Indigenous ambitions in environmental management. -- The focus of this thesis is on how Māori iwi [tribes] in Taranaki, New Zealand negotiate environmental management processes while also pursuing self-determination through iwi development and negotiated relationships with the government. Iwi organisations, whose work is shaped by the legacies of colonial dispossession and goals of cultural revitalisation, seek to assert and maintain their values within, through and beyond the frameworks provided by the nation-state. This work is particularly significant in the context of 'full and final' settlements between Māori and the government for historic grievances and rights over water and Mount Taranaki. Current iterations of participatory environmental management in Taranaki tend to affirm and buttress governmental eminence by including Māori cultural concerns within pre-existing managerial processes; in effect asserting governmental sovereignty over Māori territoriality. Despite this imperfect context, increased interaction has also enabled relationship building and greater mutual understanding. Collaboration, therefore, produces unsettling openings in the complexly entangled rights, responsibilities and relationships that shape postcolonial coexistence, revealing tensions, pluralism and mutuality across common ground.