First Nations and Adaptive Water Governance in Southern Ontario, Canada

• Main Author: Dyck, Thomas
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholars Commons @ Laurier 2017
• Subjects: Adaptive Governance; Institutions; Multibarrier approach; Water; First Nations; Canada; Environmental Studies; Human Ecology; Human Geography; Nature and Society Relations; Place and Environment
• Online Access: https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/1923; https://scholars.wlu.ca/context/etd/article/3032/viewcontent/Thomas_Dyck_Dissertation_Defense_Revisions_April_30_2017.pdf

Water quality and quantity are prominent concerns for First Nations across Canada. The federal government shares the responsibility with First Nations to ensure water resources on-reserves meet the needs of First Nations. Federal approaches have been predominantly technical, focused on addressing issues related to infrastructure, maintenance, training, and monitoring. This approach is important. However, water issues concerning First Nations go beyond technical issues and relate to inadequate participation in decision making, poorly defined roles and responsibilities, and approaches to managing water resources on-reserve that have not accounted for local context. These issues parallel historical nation-to-nation (i.e., First Nations and federal government) governance challenges in a broader range of social and economic development settings. The purpose of this research was to examine the potential emergence of adaptive forms of water governance in three First Nations contexts in southern Ontario to ameliorate current limitations in practice. The key objectives that guided this research were to: (1) characterize and assess water management and water governance in the three case studies using the multi-barrier approach for drinking water safety; (2) identify and critically examine institutional attributes and conditions (i.e., capacity) that facilitate or constrain adaptive forms of water governance in each of the case study sites, with particular reference to opportunities for analytic deliberation, institutional variety, and linkages across scales; and (3) examine the multi-level institutional setting of the case studies for empirical evidence of adaptive water governance and to identify opportunities to foster it. Three First Nation communities were the setting for this research: Six Nations of the Grand River, Oneida Nation of the Thames, and Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation. The research involved actors both on-reserve and off-reserve including representatives from federal, provincial, and ...