ABSTRACT
Any analysis of planning for the rural sector in New Zealand must take account of six aspects of the nation’s experience that together make it unique – the overwhelming importance of pastoral farming in the agricultural economy; the long-term reliance on rural exports to generate foreign exchange; the country’s colonial experience; the nature of the political pressure groups generated by the dominance of rural production; the existence of a distinctive attitude to land and its use by Maori people; and the rapid, perhaps unprecedented, transformation of the New Zealand economic environment since 1984.
