New Zealand's planning revolution five years on: A preliminary assessment

Abstract

It is now five years since New Zealand radically changed its environmental planning regime by introducing the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA). The RMA swept away the entire tradition of town and country planning which New Zealand had inherited from Britain, replacing this with an integrated framework for resource management that attempts to emphasize efficiency, sustainability and public participation in the new system of development control. These new emphases of the RMA reflect the agendas of New Zealand's green and New Right lobbies which gained political influence during the 1980s. However, the green and neo-liberal agendas which the RMA attempts to embrace are potentially contradicto..