One ahupuaʻa, one manager.

On July 8 the Governor signed House Bill 2218 into law as Act 203. It passed both chambers unanimously.¹ It received modest coverage, and I think it is among the more consequential things this Legislature has done in years.

The Act authorizes the Board of Land and Natural Resources to enter into community co-management agreements with qualified community-based organizations, and to dispose of public land by such an agreement.² It adds definitions to chapter 171 of the Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes describing co-management as a collaboration that allocates management functions, responsibilities, and rights of entry and use over a defined co-management unit.³ Agreements may run up to sixty-five years.⁴

The Legislature’s own findings state the reasoning plainly: that explicit co-management authority honors the Native Hawaiian concepts of mālama ʻāina and ahupuaʻa-based management, and that grassroots communities across the State — Hāʻena, Pūpūkea, Moʻomomi, Kīpahulu, Hoʻokena, Kaʻūpūlehu, Kealakekua — have spent decades caring for these places while collaborating with agencies.⁵ Or as the finding puts it directly, the State alone cannot sustainably manage the State’s public trust resources.⁶

What Act 203 supplies is not new practice. It is a legal container for practice that already exists. I want to argue that Kalihi should build one.

The problem is not neglect. It is fragmentation.

Consider a single ahupuaʻa from the ridge to the reef, and count the managers.

The forested upper valley is some combination of state forest reserve, watershed partnership, and private ownership. The stream is regulated by one agency for instream flow, another for water quality, a county department for drainage and flood control, and no one in particular for whether anything lives in it. The lower reaches run through channelized concrete built for a different purpose. The estuary and nearshore waters answer to yet another division. Any loko iʻa in the system sits under conservation district rules administered by a separate office again.

No individual agency is failing at its assignment. The assignments are the problem. Each has jurisdiction over a segment of a system that does not have segments. Sediment from an unmanaged upper valley becomes a nearshore water quality problem three miles and four agencies away, and nobody owns the sentence that connects those two facts.

The ahupuaʻa was a solution to exactly this. It was not primarily a spiritual concept, though it carried spiritual weight. It was a management unit drawn along the lines that water actually follows, administered as a whole, by people who lived in it and depended on its output. It was, in the plainest modern terms, a functioning economic cooperative with a watershed for a boundary.

Act 203 now lets us re-establish that boundary as a legal one.

What a Kalihi co-management unit could do

Forest. Restore native canopy in the upper valley, and — this is the part that usually gets left out of restoration proposals — plant food. ʻUlu, kalo where the water allows, ʻōhiʻa and koa where the elevation suits, and a working understory. A watershed that produces breadfruit is a watershed with a constituency. Where forest reserve land is held privately and the owner wants to sell, a co-management entity is exactly the counterparty that should be at the table.

Stream. One manager from the headwaters to the mouth: flow, riparian planting, invasive removal, sediment, and the sequence of decisions that either does or does not let native stream life complete a life cycle that runs from the ocean to the upper valley and back. Right now those decisions are made in different buildings by people who have never had to reconcile them.

Loko iʻa. A 1990 statewide survey identified 488 fishpond sites, many degraded and some beyond recognition.⁷ The regulatory obstacle to bringing them back has been substantially addressed. Practitioners had reported that assembling the necessary state and federal permits could take years and sometimes decades.⁸ In response the State built Hoʻāla Loko Iʻa, a programmatic general permit consolidating what had been five separate permits into a single application processed by DLNR’s Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands, designed against no fewer than seventeen distinct state and federal regulations.⁹ Act 230 of 2015 then waived the Department of Health’s 401 water quality certification for projects permitted through the program.¹⁰ The result: average processing time fell from many years to under a month.¹¹

That is a solved problem waiting for someone to take it up.

The reason to hold all three in one entity is not administrative tidiness. It is that they are one system. You cannot restore a fishpond downstream of a stream you do not manage, below a forest you do not manage. Every restoration group in Hawaiʻi knows this, and until Act 203, the law offered no way to act on it.

Why a cooperative

Here I want to make an argument that is more contested than the rest of this piece.

Most community stewardship in Hawaiʻi is organized as a nonprofit, and that form has served well. But a nonprofit is structurally a recipient — of grants, of contracts, of philanthropy — and its sustainability is a function of somebody else’s giving cycle. That is a fragile foundation for a sixty-five-year agreement.

A cooperative is structurally a producer. Members hold shares, participate in governance, and share in surplus. If an ahupuaʻa entity restores a loko iʻa and sells fish, manages a forest and sells ʻulu or timber or carbon, maintains a stream corridor under contract, and trains and employs people to do that work, then it has revenue that is not contingent on anyone’s grant cycle — and the people doing the work have an ownership stake in the ʻāina’s productivity rather than a job on a grant line.

This is also the older arrangement. The ahupuaʻa distributed both the labor and the yield across the people living within it. Reconstituting that as a cooperative is less an innovation than a translation.

The accountability question, taken seriously

Anyone who has watched public land transfers should ask what prevents a co-management agreement from becoming a sixty-five-year giveaway.

Act 203’s answer is a set of conditions: organizations must demonstrate an established stewardship record, submit comprehensive management plans, undergo periodic reporting and evaluation, and operate under agreements that can be amended or terminated. Every ten years, DLNR must report to the Board on whether an organization is meeting the goals of its co-management plan.¹²

That is a reasonable framework, and I would add two things at the entity level rather than wait to be asked. Open books — publish the budget, the sources, and the compensation. And real membership governance, so that the people of the ahupuaʻa can remove the board. An entity that cannot be removed by the community it claims to represent is not community management. It is a lease with better vocabulary.

A disclosure

I am working on establishing a Kalihi Ahupuaʻa Cooperative, with the purposes described above: forest reserve stewardship, stream management, and fishpond restoration. I intend for it to be independently governed, at arm’s length from this office, and I do not intend to hold a position in it that would place me on both sides of a state agreement.

I am telling you this in the same piece in which I am praising the law that would make such an entity possible, because you should know it when you weigh the argument. Act 203 was not my bill — it passed unanimously, on the strength of decades of work by communities from Hāʻena to Kaʻūpūlehu. But I am an interested party in what happens next in this valley, and interested parties should say so in the first instance rather than the third.

What I am pursuing

• A Kalihi co-management unit defined by the watershed, mauka to makai, rather than by existing agency jurisdictions.
• A cooperative structure, so that the people doing the work hold a stake in what the ʻāina produces rather than a position on a grant line.
• Fishpond restoration through Hoʻāla Loko Iʻa, which has already reduced the permitting barrier from years to weeks.
• Native and food-bearing reforestation in the upper valley, structured so the watershed produces something the community eats.
• Acquisition readiness for forest reserve parcels in private hands whose owners are looking to sell.
• Governance conditions I would want applied to myself: published finances, membership control of the board, and removal power that actually functions.

The State has now said in statute that it cannot do this alone. That is an unusual admission and a real opening. The question in front of Kalihi is whether we have an entity ready to accept the responsibility when it is offered.