Enhancing source water protection and watershed management: Lessons from the case of the New Brunswick Water Classification Initiative

Source water protection varies by locale, and approaches and experiences are accumulating in response to concerns about drinking water safety. Learning lessons and transferring them from experiences elsewhere is a well-established practice for addressing water governance challenges. In response to the need to enhance source water protection policies and initiatives and a growing interest in modes of governance in which government and non-government actors collaborate, this research investigated and derived lessons from the Water Classification Initiative in New Brunswick, Canada. The research specifically aimed to describe the development of the initiative, analyze structural relationships among actors involved in the initiative and describe the successes and challenges experienced. Investigation of the Water Classification Initiative illustrates how key aspects of source water protection identified in the literature (e. g. watershed as a focal scale, collaborative approaches, incorporation of science and local knowledge) can be incorporated into policy, how capacity may be built or constrained in the context of government-led collaborative approaches, and how social network analysis offers a powerful tool to understand interactions among those involved in a policy process. Learning from these insights offers an opportunity to advance the development of new approaches as well as to enhance existing source water protection policies.