ABSTRACT
At the beginning of this book I suggested that one of the major reasons for writing it was to give planners elsewhere a detailed review of how legislation focused on achieving a limited concept of sustainability called sustainable management had worked in practice. Such a review of the implementation of sustainable management, it was suggested, would give some guidance on the issues that might emerge if a country tried to institute the more ambitious concept of sustainable development. On reflection, New Zealand planners would probably suggest that, after nineteen years of trying to make the environment the centre of all plans and planning decision making, the task requires massive change in all sectors of society and that achieving that change will at best be challenging. If these types of difficulties emerge when trying to institute the lesser concept of sustainable management then it is fair to suggest that they will be substantially magnified if the broader and more encompassing concept of sustainable development is used. Perhaps the original authors of the Resource Management Act (RMA) were sensible to have declined to use sustainable development as the guiding philosophy of the act, even though they rejected it for quite different reasons. Although the RMA has made some achievements in the management of resources such as land, some of these achievements have been slow to develop and have emerged only after years of dispute and near crisis situations. Many have in fact been passed in their achievement by similar approaches and often better legislation that have emerged elsewhere in the world. For instance, East Queensland has been subject to quite comprehensive planning for urban growth management and environmental concerns for almost twenty years, with its outcomes being generally better than those achieved in a similar growth situation
in Auckland under the RMA. If the RMA was cutting edge when it was launched nineteen years ago it is fair to say that the knife is now blunt and dulled. The act’s inability to cope with new issues such as carbon emissions and infrastructure planning suggests that there are very real limits to the breadth of issues a planning act of this type can address. In short, the RMA’s reach has exceeded its grasp and it has largely failed in its attempt to be a single encompassing environmental statute. Nevertheless, the most enduring value of the RMA may be its ability to highlight the practical and practice issues that will emerge from any attempt to construct planning legislation around any concept of sustainability, and in so doing provide lessons for the rest of the world.
