Trust is the foundation for regenerating Aotearoa's ocean through Authentic Collaboration
The journey toward regenerating our ocean begins not with policy or technology, but with trust. This fundamental insight, drawn from personal experience, contemporary leadership frameworks, lived experience and the wisdom of systems change, offers a pathway through the complexity that surrounds ocean care in Aotearoa New Zealand. There’s been a fair bit about trust on LinkedIn recently and along with some good and not so good experiences recently, and some systems change training I’m doing, the thoughts presented here have evolved.
Stephen M. R. Covey's work on trust provides a powerful lens for understanding what genuine collaboration requires. Trust, he argues, operates through four core elements: integrity and intent (character), alongside capabilities and results (competence). When these elements align, trust accelerates action. When they're absent, every initiative drags under the weight of suspicion, competition, and bureaucracy. This "speed of trust" framework resonates deeply with the realities of marine work in New Zealand, where the sheer quantity of legislation, (more than 25 pieces relevant to the ocean), and the diversity of those who care and/or are affected, create a particularly fraught environment for true co-laboring.
“The journey toward regenerating our ocean begins not with policy or technology, but with trust. ”
I named my business F.L.O.W. Collaborative after the US Chef’s Collaborative that I was fortunate to experience early on in my WWF international career. I saw how, along with many other strategies, leading chefs contributed to driving change in fisheries and aquaculture. The F.L.O.W. stands for Fisheries. Livelihoods. Ocean. Wellbeing. It might as easily stand for Futures. Love. Ocean. Wellbeing. Yes, fisheries have made the greatest changes to marine ecosystems to date, but sedimentation, pollution and climate change are now also massive challenges and a lot harder to address.
Recently I listened to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, speaking about what he’d learnt about trust and that challenges conventional assumptions. Initially nervous about launching an open-edit encyclopedia, Wales "assumed we were going to have to lock things down." Instead, he discovered that "trusting people does work… Trusting in human decency and the willingness of people to volunteer to do something that's useful really did pay off". This leap of faith, trusting others to carry the kaupapa forward without needing to control every outcome, mirrors what genuine ocean collaboration demands. Clare Bradley, the CEO of AgriSea recently spoke about this at the Seaweed Summit using the Common Ground collaboration framework. She illustrated that collaboration is not about using someone's logo for funding applications or branding partnerships for optics. It is about shared purpose and reciprocity, building relationships before outcomes, and championing each other's mahi.
Yet this level of trust cannot exist without the inner work. The Collective Change Lab's profound observation that "most of our world problems are collaboration and relational problems across cultures with the earth" points to something deeper: unresolved trauma keeps us fragmented. Mental models are not merely intellectual constructs, they have physiological roots in our neural pathways. The brain's capacity to change, to literally rewire itself by creating new neurological pathways while pruning those we no longer use, offers hope. Norman Doidge describes this in fabulous detail in his two books that brought me immense hope for behaviour change, The Brain that Changes Itself and The Brain’s Way of Healing. When we choose not to enact certain defensive behaviors, we free up "real estate" in our brains for new ways of being. This embodied understanding forms the foundation upon which genuine collaboration can emerge.
I had a profound realization about the relationship between trauma and ocean healing work a year or so ago talking to a senior Māori marine researcher about the Te Ao Māori concept of utu. Often thought of simplistically as revenge, it is the far deeper concept of reciprocity, the notion of giving and receiving. It’s easy to understand what taking from the ocean means. We take kaimoana, we take goods off ships, we take communication that comes through undersea cables, we even take every second breath of oxygen from the ocean. It is far harder to be clear about what we can each truly give to the ocean. In simple terms, we can donate money, we can do beach cleanups, we can become ocean literate, we can take only our recreational fishing-bag limit, we can choose sustainable seafood, we can write submissions. Yet fundamentally, what I realized was that in order to give, one has to believe one has something to give. And in our trauma-soaked society, families and ancestries, often people don’t believe that they do. Often people come from a place of deficit to start with. This is why I’ve enrolled in the Collective Change Lab Healing Centered Systems Change training that builds on the Systems Sanctuary MasterClass that I’m also doing. It’s also where a beautiful phrase I co-created with a colleague some thirty years ago has been a foundation of my career: “People Healing Nature Healing People” i.e. care for the earth (and ocean), and you are caring for yourself. Heal the earth (and ocean) and you are healing yourself.
The concept of "islands of coherence in a sea of chaos," articulated by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine, provides a systems perspective on transformation: "When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order". Coherence comes when there is trust, trust of oneself, coherence within oneself, alignment of values with those we're working with in teams in good collaborations, whether within an organisation or across multiple organisations. But we don't need perfect alignment on everything. The perfect does not have to be the enemy of the good, as it so often has been to date in marine conservation and management in New Zealand. Collaborations can occur within an explicit band where we align around a particular purpose without requiring agreement on everything.
“Care for the earth (and ocean), and you are caring for yourself. Heal the earth (and ocean) and you are healing yourself.”
This insight proves particularly relevant for ocean regeneration. Rather than waiting for a comprehensive marine spatial planning process, currently unlikely in my view, given the complex legal arena, meaningful change will come through coastal communities taking forward the care of their places below mean high water. The Predator Free movement offers instructive lessons: it succeeds because it has a clear mission, layers of intervention stacked in particular places, and crucially, resourcing between interventions to allow collaborations to emerge well, as I wrote recently about this for The Royal Society.
Ocean regeneration demands similar thinking. We need to stack interventions in the same places: kina barren removal plus recreational and commercial fishing controls plus sediment controls on adjacent land plus terrestrial riparian restoration plus monitoring plus beach cleanups plus sewage management plus regenerative ocean businesses plus ocean literacy of all involved. These layered approaches would give those places the maximum opportunity to recover and regenerate. In my mind, true regeneration occurs when enough pieces are present that they start working together again, when the system begins to heal itself.
The distinction between restoration (fixing) and regeneration (achieving self-sustaining recovery) matters deeply. Consider the Raglan Harbor success, where addressing catchment sedimentation allowed seagrass to return. Or the collaboration at Ōnuku (Akaroa), where the Christchurch City Council ranger, Environment Canterbury personnel, the builder, and the community board chair all recently spoke about their involvement in the Te Kori a Te Kō restoration vision alongside Ngāti Irakehu. These examples demonstrate that trust-based collaboration, i.e. what the Common Ground framework describes as moving from competition through coordination to genuine integration, can produce tangible, sustained results.
Yet the marine arena presents unique challenges. The physical intensity of working underwater, the salt and weather and waves, the diversity of people who care about and depend on the ocean economically, the strong politics surrounding any ocean issue, and the critical land-sea interface all demand extraordinary collaborative capacity. This requires practitioners doing their own life journey work, their own healing work, alongside the collective labor.
The hierarchy from coordinate to cooperate to collaborate, from simple administration to cooperation on shared agendas to true co-laboring, reflects increasing depth of potential impact and resources required. Co-laboring demands that individuals engage their own personal work, acknowledging that we all carry our own histories and sometimes traumas. Working alongside other humans is inherently messy work. We're all always at different points on our personal journeys. It is ironic how often collaborations succeed when people have a portion of their job descriptions allocated to it yet building collaborations is only rarely budgeted for.
Wales's first rule of trust, be personal" reminds us that "trust is won and lost on a one-to-one basis". Every interaction matters. Every time we listen to our bodies and honor our boundaries, every time we champion another's mahi rather than extracting their ideas, every time we choose transparency over control, we either build or erode trust.
The potential emerging through initiatives like The Aotearoa Circles’ Blue Economy programme of work and collaborations between ocean governance research, environmental legal work, and communities across the motu offers tremendous hope. Local blue economy clusters, as championed and demonstrated by Moananui and now being taken forward by Nelson Regional Development Agency, show how collaborative models can bring success. These are islands of coherence forming in the chaos.
We all also know that what is needed most is sustained investment in building the shared bridging space for change, funding that resources the layering of interventions in places over a meaningful timeframe, probably a decade to produce verifiable change under water. The single beneficiary of marine restoration is the ocean itself, which nobody owns. This demands new models, perhaps regional ecosystem-based trusts where multiple coastal communities receive benefits from restoration investments, blending philanthropic, local government, central government, and community funds.
The path forward requires accepting that 80% of something is better than 100% of nothing, a wisdom that comes with lived experience. It demands listening to our hearts, honoring when collaboration feels aligned and when boundaries are needed. It requires the courage to hui on challenges, to learn from what went wrong, and to trust others to carry the kaupapa forward.
Most fundamentally, regenerating Aotearoa's ocean requires each person involved to do their own inner work while simultaneously building trust across difference. Only then can we create islands of coherence capable of shifting the entire system toward a regenerative future where our ocean, and all who depend upon it, can truly flourish.
