Collaborative relationships and nature-based solutions: Two flood management cases in Hawaiʻi

Abstract

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) for flooding require collaborative relationships between watershed actors at multiple scales to address a range of implementation barriers, including barriers related to stakeholder coordination and uncertainty. However, strategies to facilitate multi-scalar collaborative relationships in the context of natural-flood management remain poorly defined. This thesis examines relationships between watershed and regional actors involved in the implementation of multiple NbS for flooding in two regions of Hawaiʻi– Southwest Maui and Haleleʻa, Kauaʻi— where land managers, community organizations, and other practitioners are working to reduce the impacts of flooding using a range of strategies, including through nature-based approaches such as the restoration of wetlands, streams, or upland forests. Many involve biocultural approaches, such as the restoration of Indigenous practices including loʻi kalo (taro ponds), agroforests, or loko iʻa (fishponds). Drawing on perspectives of various community-based organizations, scientists, agency staff, and other land managers, these case studies reveal the critical role of structural and cognitive social capital, place-based connections, and bridging organizations in generating and enabling cross-scale relationships between watershed actors. These relationships, in turn, facilitate processes of social learning which support collaborative knowledge production, capacity sharing, and coordination in response to uncertainty and social and ecological fragmentation. The case studies also highlight the ways historical and active political and economic processes hinder collaborative relationship formation and function. In both case studies, forms of land-use change, economic pressures, and demographic shifts have negatively impacted local communities and ecosystems, compromising social cohesion and place-based relationships that inform and sustain community-driven stewardship. In response, community actors are implementing creative strategies that work to address both social and biophysical drivers of flood resilience. To conceptualize collaborative relationships, this study draws on scholarship on adaptive social-ecological system governance, which highlights the ways social capital (composed of trust, reciprocity, reputation, rules, and institutions) operates within and across scales and in various institutional and organizational arrangements to facilitate adaptive, place-based processes of knowledge production and stakeholder coordination. This study also draws on hydrosocial research to highlight the power dynamics and other structural barriers to collaborative relationship formation related to the broader social relations in which NbS are situated. Investigating multi-stakeholder relationships in the case studies through these theoretical frameworks reveals important limitations and possibilities for collaborative partnerships for NbS for flooding. This analysis rejects common framings of NbS as “win-win” solutions, and calls for a more nuanced and situated analysis that embraces the complexity at play in any intervention that requires the coordination of multiple stakeholders, diverse knowledge frameworks, power asymmetries, and multi-scalar governance within complex social and ecological systems. To conclude this study calls for a re-conceptualization of NbS as dynamic, experimental, and often politically-charged sites of both collaborative and conflicted relationality, with the potential to function as sites of social learning, political mobilization, and biophysical intervention. The broader discourse of the social dimensions of NbS, therefore, should not be limited to the social benefits they provide or the participatory methods of their design and implementation. Rather, collaborative relationships between watershed actors at multiple scales should be centered as integral components of natural flood management approaches, and such projects should leverage existing forms of social capital and place-based connection. Finally, NbS projects should embrace the conflict and uncertainty that hinder the formation and expression of those relationships, such as in political contestations, power asymmetries, and conflicting interests. Such instances of conflict and uncertainty should be recognized as an integral component of the upscaling of coordination efforts, which bring into contact a broader set of stakeholders and interests. NbS projects and the networks between them may provide spaces in which such relationship dynamics may find meaningful expression through processes of establishing shared values and goals, building trust, peer-to-peer learning, and capacity sharing.