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Despite widespread interest in the notion of sustainability, little progress has been made towards an understanding of its social dimensions. Nonetheless, the concept of `sustainable rural communities' is embedded in popular, policy and academic discourses, where the needs of `rural communities' are usually equated with those of farm families. Our ethnographic research in Northland, New Zealand illustrates thediverse interests to be found within `rural communities'. Interviewsand participant observation were undertaken between August 1995 and July 1996 in the Mangakahia Valley. The increasing divergence in the ethnic, class and occupational makeup of the population has brought with it complexities in terms of what can be said to contribute to `sustainable rural communities'. We suggest that `sustainable rural communities' be treated as a folk category, and instead, social science discourse should resort to the broader concept of social sustainability, which will have a locally defined content, not a universal definition, but will include elements of livelihood, social participation, justice and equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been suggested that regulatory analysis and regulation theoryprovide appropriate foundations for the analysis of the sustainability problematic. We accept these claims and in this paper provide an interrogation, founded in the literature on 'real' regulation, of a judicial decision concerning the allocation of water resources to farm irrigation in Northland, Aoteroa/New Zealand, The fact that 'sustainable management' has been inscribed in that country's resource management legislation has given focus to social contests over the meaning and interpretation of sustainability. We outline the legislative framework and then provide a description of the contests over the allocation of water to dairy pasture irrigation. Competing interpretations of'sustainable management' were at the centre of these contests. We then attempt to characterise 'regulatory space'. In the discussion we emphasise the social construction of sustainability and the legitimation of competing interpretations through the courts and other fora. Wealso refer to the geography of regulation, noting that regulatory processes and their outcomes are defined spatially. Lefebvre's concept of representational space and the Lefebvrian and Foucaultian notion of sites of resistance help us to interrogate competing perspectives on sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]