Who are you planning for? Wellbeing and the Resource Management Act
The concept of ‘wellbeing’ gets top billing in section 5 (the Purpose) of the Resource Management Act (RMA) 1991. However, the act of actually enabling people and communities to provide for their social, economic, and cultural wellbeing through resource management processes and procedures can be extremely fraught and highly emotive.
In this instalment of our series on New Zealand’s wellbeing framework, Planalytics’ team member, Lucy, shares her take on what wellbeing means in an RMA context and explores the emphasis that the Randerson Report places on wellbeing and what this may mean for the planning profession in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Section 5 of the RMA directs decision-makers under the Act to provide for people to use, develop, and protect resources in such a way that enables their social, cultural, and economic wellbeing. So, undoubtedly, wellbeing is at the heart of the RMA. However, unfortunately for us planners (who tend to really appreciate solid definitions of important terms), wellbeing is not defined in section 2 of the RMA. In fact, according to my word search of the Act, the term wellbeing only appears once (in section 5 as mentioned).
Unsurprisingly, despite the prominence of wellbeing as a concept, it’s not something planners as a profession in New Zealand have done a terribly good job of delivering. You will probably be able to call to mind several examples from your own backyard or work experience illustrating the fact that, in spite of our best efforts, we struggle to implement and achieve sustainable management. And the Randerson Report (the recently published comprehensive review of the RMA) is clear - the blame for this under-performance doesn’t lie with Part 2 of the RMA, but rather with the humans and institutions charged with administering the Act. To summarise the Randerson findings, traditionally, resource management plans failed to set sufficiently strong environmental limits; and whatever environmental limits were set have been chipped away as a consequence of the ‘overall broad judgement approach’ taken before the King Salmon case.
What has the environment ever done for us?
In order to get under the hood of wellbeing in the context of the RMA, I find it helpful to think about what natural and physical resources (which is what is sought to be managed by the RMA) do for us; what contributions they make to our wellbeing, either in their innate, undeveloped state, or also in their developed and/or protected state. Here are just a few that leap to mind: ecosystem services; enabling cultural, social, and recreational activities and uses; providing resources to enable for food production, industrial uses, housing, and all the other features and components that contribute to a community. You’ll have many more. The list of what the environment does for us, and our wellbeing, is endless.
But often it can seem that one community’s wellbeing is another’s economic loss or cost (and vice versa). And at the heart of this dichotomy is the concept of values. As 2019’s Environment Aotearoa report explains, ‘we all have our own sets of values and preferences, so coming to a shared view about value is often challenging. Similarly, the way people assign value to the many ways we connect with nature also varies across monetary, quantitative, and qualitative approaches’.
Providing for wellbeing seems to come at a cost, whatever way you look at it or enable it. And the cost is frequently our natural environment. As Randerson explains, ‘degradation of our natural environment is reducing ecosystem resilience to system shocks that can radically alter the flow of ecosystem services, affecting associated livelihoods and the wellbeing of communities’.
A new dawn for Wellbeing?
In some areas of resource management, however, the concept of wellbeing appears to be undergoing a renaissance. The 2020 National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management not only seeks to provide for the wellbeing of the freshwater resource to be managed under the RMA, but prioritises this requirement over the health needs of people and the ability of people and communities to provide for their social, economic, and cultural wellbeing now and in the future.
The draft National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity recognises that the health and wellbeing of Aotearoa’s terrestrial environment, its ecosystems, and unique indigenous vegetation and fauna, are vital for the health and wellbeing of the wider environment and communities.
At the heart of both of these NPS documents lies the notion that the relationship between the health of our environment and the health of people and communities is symbiotic. One simply cannot do without the other.
A new dawn for planning?
In a recent article, Associate Professor Caroline Miller of Massey University’s School of People, Environment and Planning, shared her view that many of the recommendations in the Randerson Report promise a new commitment to wellbeing. And I think the signs are good, just on the numbers alone. The report mentions ‘wellbeing’ a whopping 86 times, and identifies wellbeing as one of the eight principles of decision-making: the future resource management system enables effective use, allocation, and development of the natural and built environment to provide for the wellbeing of current and future generations.
In the urban space, Randerson considers that to achieve good environmental outcomes and make the greatest contribution to the overall wellbeing of communities, urban planning should be more focused on setting the high-level patterns of land use for urban development and less focused on ‘developing the elaborate and overly complex regulatory controls that are characteristic of current district plans’. For any planner that has struggled to see the lasting link between achieving wellbeing and a side yard setback calculator will probably welcome this direction.
Ultimately, says Randerson, resource management is about both ‘protecting the environment and enabling development within clearly defined environmental limits to support social, economic, environmental, and cultural wellbeing now and in the future’. This means stepping away from the time-honoured framing of environmental and development interests as being in competition with one another. The suggested purpose for the new Natural and Built Environments Act reflects this approach by supplementing the current concepts of wellbeing, sustainability, and managing adverse effects on the environment with a new focus on restoring and enhancing indigenous biodiversity and ecosystems and promoting positive outcomes for the environment as a whole.
In my view, the Randerson Report provides an incredible opportunity for planners and related professions to grasp the nettle of providing for wellbeing, and demands us to consider and imagine new ways of doing things in the future. The type of change the Randerson Report demands isn’t going to be easy, and it’s going to take time. But, by embracing and leading change, resource management planners could very well end up supporting the wellbeing of the planning profession, now and in the future.
We would love to hear your views on the topic of wellbeing and the RMA, and how you are feeling about the recommendations in the Randerson Report. What opportunities can you see? What are going to be some of the challenges? Get in touch!
The illustrations used in this article are sourced from a webinar on the topic of ‘the RMA and wellbeing’, delivered by Lucy to Massey University’s School of People, Environment and Planning in early September 2020.