Green Planning Reports Archives

Policy Tour to New Zealand, December 2000, “Seeing is Believing”

This document summarizes the series of meetings and presentations that comprised the Resource Renewal Institute’s “Seeing is Believing” policy tour of New Zealand, which traversed the island nation from Auckland to Wellington to Queenstown during the first week of December 2000. The New Zealand policy tour brought together a cross-section of 26 leaders to learn, firsthand, about New Zealand’s unique approach to the long-term sustainable management of the country’s natural and physical environment. Meeting with their counterparts in the government, industry, and nongovernmental organization sectors, the policy tour participants were offered a candid testimony of the successes and shortcomings of New Zealand’s Resource Management Act, and complementary statutes and strategies that collectively govern environmental management throughout the nation.

The purpose of the policy tour was not to promote New Zealand’s environmental policy as a blueprint to be replicated in the United States. Rather, the week-long experience was intended to provide innovative examples of how other nations are grappling with many of the same persistent environmental pressures as are individual states throughout the US. Through a series of widespread economic and environmental reform measures, New Zealand’s approach to conservation and environmental management changed remarkably under the Labour Government in the 1980s. As a result, the current system of environmental policies, plans and regulations is underpinned by such fundamental principles as comprehensiveness, efficiency, integration, consistency, transparency and flexibility. The policy tour offered participants the opportunity to see these principles in action, evaluate their effectiveness in meeting the sustainability goals of the nation, and discuss ways in which such principles might be applicable at the state level in the US.

While reading this report, it may be useful to keep in mind the problems New Zealand was attempting to remedy through the creation of a new framework for environmental management. Reflecting back on the development and subsequent implementation of the Resource Management Act, the Right Honorable Sir Geoffrey Palmer, former Prime Minister and Minister for the Environment stated in a 1995 essay that the RM Bill set out to rectify a number of problems, including:

• there was no consistent set of resource management objectives;
• there were arbitrary differences in management of land, air and water;
• there were too many agencies involved, with overlapping responsibilities and insufficient accountability;
• consent procedures were unnecessarily costly and there were undue delays;
• pollution laws were ad hoc and did not recognize the physical connections between land, air and water;
• in some respects, there was insufficient flexibility and too much prescription with a focus on activities rather than results;
• Maori interests and the Treaty of Waitangi were frequently overlooked; and
• monitoring of existing law was uneven and enforcement difficult.

(Environment—The International Challenge, Geoffrey Palmer, 1995) These conditions, combined with the mid-1980s philosophy of rationalization that was driving economic and state sector reform, set the context for sweeping environmental reforms in New Zealand. This summary report begins with an overview of New Zealand’s approach to sustainable environmental management, with brief mention of the wide-scale reform measures that largely shaped the current iterations of the national policies. A chronological series of summaries is presented of each of the meetings held during the week-long policy tour.

Download report (1.7Mb PDF)