What is co-governance? You’d struggle to find someone who could tell you what it is, given the range of meanings people ascribe to it. Well, instead of mindless waffle, here’s the definitive statement from someone who negotiated a lot of co-governance agreements.
Since the late 1990s, governments have agreed in some major Treaty of Waitangi settlements to create boards formed of local government and iwi representatives to manage significant environmental features. These were originally called “co-management agreements”.
The idea was to help resolve long-standing treaty grievances by providing a defined role for iwi to reconnect them with a lake or a river. If we want to get technical, we can go back to article 2 of the treaty, which guaranteed Māori rangatiratanga over their