RMA: A better way

Guy Salmon from Ecologic has a good theory on why the Resource Management Act is almost guaranteed to result in delay, cost and failure – it’s an adversarial system, full of mumbo-jumbo and waffle, writes Alan Titchall.

There’s a better way than the RMA, says Salmon, who is the executive director of the Ecologic Foundation, and three of the world’s most successful countries can show us how.

Those three countries are Finland, Sweden and Denmark, which are a similar to New Zealand in size, GDP per capita, and even political systems. And, like us, they’re open export economies with large primary production sectors with similar environmental problems. The huge difference is they seem to have managed to reconcile political and environmental agendas while our projects flounder in a merry-go-round of indecision and dissidence.

Salmon provides the example of our National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management. It was released in July this year and is a work of five laborious years and still yet to get through a board of enquiry. When finalised, he says, it will trigger costly change processes.

Its objective is to: “Ensure the progressive enhancement of the overall quality of freshwater resources, including actions to ensure appropriate freshwater resources can reach or exceed a swimmable standard.”

It’s a pretty waffly document, Salmon points out, with no objective definition of ‘swimmable’, ‘acceptable’ or ‘degraded freshwater resources’, and with no measurement system.

“Europe already has a water resource policy, which is clear and precise – we could have adapted theirs,” he says.

“Ours is fuzzy and enables excessive discretion, which will lead to lots of appeals in the environment court.”

This failure to establish clear objectives, policies and standards is the cause of all those unnecessary delay and costs to projects that have struggled through the RMA system.

“We tend to blame objectors, but you will always have them. The real failure is lack of clear criteria for making decisions,” he says.

In this country, policy is set by political agencies while scientists and sector experts play a secondary role. And we have come to the end of the road with this kind of bumbling resource management system, says Salmon, and we should be looking very closely at those three Nordic countries and learning from their resource management success.

In Finland, Sweden and Denmark, stakeholders get together to collaborate and find a consensus, involving deep immersion in technical information and commissioning independent research. Scientific debates are resolved in roundtable discussions.

This collaborative governance approach creates a supportive climate for implementation (everyone’s already agreed) and increases the influence of science, engineering and rational solutions.

And of those stakeholders who ‘refuse’ to compromise their position to reach a consensus? They’re simply not invited to the next negotiation, forcing radical dissenters into a middle ground.

Salmon says that since the implementation of this mode of resource management in these Nordic counties, the mindset of many people has changed. Individuals and companies are no longer focussed on their own agendas but instead, look at the common good.