ABSTRACT
New Zealand’s aquacultural development is dominated by marine farming (mariculture), especially shellfish farming. Since 1991, it has developed within the context of world-leading, but substantively different, governance regimes for fisheries and coastal resources. The rapid growth of mussel farming and the associated “race for space” have posed considerable challenges to attempts to develop integrated coastal management regimes and, in 2001, resulted in the imposition of a national moratorium on all applications for new farm sites. The challenges to its development have come primarily from fishery rights holders and recreational and environmental communities. The situation has been clouded further by controversial claims to the foreshore and seabed by the Indigenous people, the Maori.1 The combination of these situational factors makes New Zealand’s mariculture experience of particular interest to nations seeking to implement new aquaculture policy or integrated coastal management regimes.
