This paper examines freshwater management in New Zealand’s South Island region of Canterbury where New Public Management (NPM) has been the dominant governance paradigm for 30 years. After 30 years of dominance environmental governance is shifting towards a “post-NPM” style in New Zealand (Duncan and Chapman, 2010), inpart by transitioning towards collaborative governance. This paper investigates one local government’s efforts to manage freshwater in a period of transition from NPM to collaborative governance. Following Paul Culhane (1981) we focus on local government’s struggles for authority and autonomy. The NPM and collaboration literatures propose different degrees of authority and autonomy in policy creation. The NPM literature argues that policy is often captured by vested interests, and as such, politicians should retain a high level of autonomy which is exercised through a hierarchical bureaucratic decision-making structure (Boston et al., 1996; Flinders and Buller, 2006). By contrast, the collaboration literature argues that public, private, and community actors ought to be engaged within the decisionmaking process, and that neither actor ought to dominate the others (Emerson et al., 2012; Purdy, 2012; Weber, 2003). Given this, we ask: 1) how did the Environment Canterbury Regional Council (ECRC) try to attain authority and autonomy over freshwater from 1999 to 2010; 2) did these attempts succeed and; 3) what do the attempts and their degrees of success reveal about NPM, post-NPM collaborative governance, and freshwater management in New Zealand? The paper proceeds as follows: Part 2 describes the methods. Part 3 constructs a conceptual framework through which to evaluate the empirical resources we draw on. Part 4 presents the case study. Part 5 links the theory with the case study results and discusses. Part 6 concludes (Table 1).

۲٫ Methods

This paper employs a qualitative case study examining the ECRC between 1999 and 2010 (Yin, 2013). The first author collected the primary data through semi-structured interviews and the secondary data from an analysis of archives and documents. After a preliminary literature review of secondary resources such as newspapers, magazines, and journals, key stakeholders were identified who contributed to, or were affected by, decisions, processes, and actions in Canterbury’s freshwater politics (Freeman, 2010). Twenty-nine stakeholders were interviewed in which, following Gillham (2005), confidentiality and anonymity were offered.