Approaching Sustainability:Integrated Environmental Management and New Zealand's Resource Management Act

Julie Frieder is a social research analyst with the Calvert Group, a Bethesda, Maryland-based mutual fund company that specializes in socially responsible investing and sharedholder advocacy. Prior to her position with Calvert, she served in the Policy Office of the United States Environmental Protection Agency where she worked on a variety of projects aiming to improve the effectiveness of the national environmental regulatory framework while reducing the cost and burden to the regulated community and enhancing accountability. Frieder also worked for 18 months as the Eco-Efficiency Task Force Coordinator for the President's Council on Sustainable Development, the U.S. organization charged with developing a national action plan for sustainable development, in response to the Rio Earth Summit. During her Ian Axford Fellowship, Frieder was based at the Ministry for the Environment in Wellington, and spent time among the Taranaki and Auckland regional councils and the Tasman District studying the theory and practice of New Zealand's Resource Management Act (RMA) and developing recommendations to improve RMA's implementation and effectiveness. She shared her findings throughout the country and had the wonderful opportunity to return one year later as a speaker at the Resource Management Association's conferenece. The title of Frieder's report is "Approaching Sustainability: Integrated Environmental Management and New Zealand's Resource Management Act."

Abstract

New Zealanders love the outdoors, and for good reason. Aotearoa is remarkably beautiful, rugged and accessible. Almost every one of New Zealand's 3.6 million citizens has a personal relationship with nature: a place, a river, a coastline, valley or mountaintop. New Zealand Maori, the tangata whenua, or people of the land, trace their genealogical links to the Earth Mother and Sky Father. Many New Zealand Pakeha, or people of European descent, identify with their pastoral and farming ancestors who subsisted off of the land from the early 1800s. In this small country, comparable in area to the UK or the state of Colorado, place names are familiar, the local news is national, and people feel close to the environment. Accordingly, there is a perception that New Zealand is a nation of environmentalists. While this perception could be harnessed to protect the environment, instead it seems to perpetuate denial about the very existence of environmental problems and the need for environmental laws.

The Resource Management Act is New Zealand's principal environmental legislation. Designed to deliver superior environmental protection with greater economic efficiency and public accountability, the RMA is a masterful piece of legislation. It advanced New Zealand's reputation of "clean and green" when it was enacted in 1991, but 7 years hence, its merit is the subject of a heated public debate.

The greatest threat to sustainability in New Zealand is that political wrangling will short-change the RMA before the realisation of its long term benefits. This paper evaluates RMA implementation and recommends steps to improving RMA practice through the adoption of integrated environmental management (IEM). IEM is an approach that can deliver both better environmental outcomes and greater economic efficiency.

IEM is neither well understood nor systematically practiced. The economic, political and social changes of the 1980s left a reform culture and a system of accountabilities that cares more about legal requirements than the quality of environmental outcomes. Preoccupation with economic efficiency threatens to make RMA implementation an exercise in cost minimisation rather than an exercise in integration which simultaneously promotes good business and good environmental practice.

Barriers to integrated environmental management are not insurmountable. New Zealand has a history of looking for institutional and legislative fixes. Improvements to RMA implementation will come not through institutional reform, but from people through leadership, vision, cooperation and kaupapa. The Act was boldly conceived. It must be boldly implemented as it was envisioned: in an integrated fashion, by focusing on outcomes and by employing a full range of policy instruments to respond to the issues, priorities and values of New Zealand's varied communities.

Table of contents

Preface
Abstract

Introduction

Part 1. A look at the Reform

Economic Liberalisation
State Sector Reform
Local Government Reform
Cultural Reform: The Forgotten Sector
Resource Management Reform

Part 2. Integrated Environmental Management in Theory and Practise

The Theory

Resource Management Act
What is Integrated Environmental Management
Integrated Environmental Management under the RMA
Benefits of Integrated Environmental Management

The Practise

Case Study Methods
Taranaki Region
Auckland Region
Tasman District

Part 3. Getting from here to there

Is Integrated Environmental Management Understood?
Is Integrated Environmental Management Happening?
Evidence of IEM in planning
Evidence of IEM in implementation
Evidence of IEM in monitoring
Drivers of Integrated Environmental Management
Barriers to Integrated Environmental Management
Recommendations

Conclusion

Acknowledgments
More acknowledgments
Bibliography

Approaching Sustainability

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