Implementing Sustainability : The New Zealand Experience

New Zealand’s Resource Management Act was the first and most extensive attempt to institute sustainability at a national level, covering all resources from land to water. This book provides a comprehensive account of the challenges of implementing sustainability. It offers a practitioner’s insight into the RMA and spells out the lessons that can be applied to planning systems of other countries.

New Zealand’s Resource Management Act (RMA) was hailed as a radical new approach to planning that would both achieve better environmental outcomes and benefit developers by working rapidly and more efficiently.

This book examines the lessons that can be learned by planning practitioners across the world. It focuses on the realities of implementing the RMA for the planning profession, the community and the political system within which planning must always operate.

Offering a practitioner’s insight, the book looks at those strategies and techniques that have proved successful, and spells out what can be applied to the planning systems of other countries.