This chapter draws on research addressing an identified need within Australian seed banks for guidance about institutional processes to effectively manage the risks surrounding Indigenous cultural knowledge and seeds. The chapter begins by describing seed bank performance as part of a social responsibility system, where there is a need for institutions to respectfully engage with communities, the people that make up those communities and the knowledge those people hold. The challenge introduced in the first part of the chapter is for governance arrangements to facilitate seed bank practitioners' appreciation of seeds and seed data as being socially grounded, linking Indigenous people, their traditions, knowledge and landscapes. This emphasises the cultural importance of knowledge linked with a biophysical seed sample. The potential erosion of traditional knowledge and cultural integrity associated with seed collection and banking processes prompts questions about developing governance arrangements within seed banks to create synergy rather than conflicts with Indigenous people about seeds and associated knowledge. The law has a part to play in facilitating the transmission of reliable information between parties involved in such transactions.

This review examines the proposed social contract to improve water management in the Canterbury Region of New Zealand. This contract defines expectations of resource access and use, forming a boundary of responsibility between entitlement holder and society. The type of expectations may range from community wellbeing to freedom of private interests. In effect, this creates a tension between other regarding action for resource stewardship and the freedom to self-manage a resource entitlement with minimal accountability. The tension is embedded in western liberal legal frameworks that simultaneously seek enforcement of stewardship obligations while protecting the freedom of private interests in resources. In Canterbury a collaborative resource management strategy for water, supporting a legal social contract shows the tension in practice.

The 'Environment Canterbury (Temporary Commissioners and Improved Water Management) Act 2010 (NZ)' (the ECan Act) was introduced to address concerns about the allocation, use and management of water in the Canterbury Region (NZ). The Act emerged amid increasing demands upon water resources and an interest in reform. A principle tool for achieving improvement is to adopt the Canterbury Water Management Strategy and its preference for obligations defined by a social contract. This article examines the social contract as a means to improve water management. The contract defines expectations of resource access and use, forming a boundary of responsibility between entitlement holder and society. Such reforms illustrate a tension between resource stewardship and private interests that is likely to generate conflict. In resolving such conflict, examples show that the legal framework is likely to favour the protection of private interests. This draws the effectiveness of a social contract into question. The article concludes with the version of improved water management that is likely to be favoured by the ECan Act.

Integrated governance arrangements to implement sustainability attempt to redefine the nature of human-environment interaction and foster more environmentally and socially beneficial outcomes from the use of resources. In this chapter, stewardship is examined as a foundation for resource management arrangements that connect natural resource use with landscape ecological limits and the social wellbeing of communities. The objective of the chapter is to evaluate catchment or watershed management approaches in four case studies that define stewardship expectations regarding resource user rights and interests. The evaluation adopts a model of stewardship to interrogate and extend resource user accountability for sustainability in a defined catchment or watershed.