ABSTRACT
New Zealand's brave new world under the Resource Management Act (RMA) has not eventuated. Instead, early enthusiasm for the new planning regime has been eroded by controversy over plans, coupled with persistent public discontent about their administration. The Government engineered 'system change' in the late 1980s, in order to create the intergovernmental structure and partnerships necessary for implementing its new RMA 'mandate'. Although writing plans was a decades-old requirement, too many plan-writers seemed to have forsaken their 'plan organization and presentation' skills. A devolved and co-operative mandate assumes that not only are local governments free to devise the best means, through plans, for reaching the goals in the mandate, but also that they have the capacity to create high-quality plans. While consultation processes were identified and other local, regional, and national plans and policies mentioned, local plans lacked clear explanations of how the objectives and policies of these documents would be taken into account.
