RMA delays hold back genuine ‘collaboration’ on water plans

He wants urgency in bringing forward the part of the proposed RMA legislation which deals with those collaborative processes.

A number of regional councils have started to use collaborative processes to get agreements on water management in local catchments. But without legislative changes recommended by the forum, they still also have to go though a Schedule 1 process required under the current RMA. These carry their own ‘consultation’ requirements.

“So it adds to the expense and it means the collaborative process then has to be subjected to another completely different kind of process,” Bisley told Rural News.

“People do these collaborative processes because they think they produce the best outcome but then that outcome is in danger of being upset by a completely different kind of process – so it adds to the cost and decreases the certainty.”

Bisley told the Horticulture NZ conference in Rotorua last month that using collaborative processes, as opposed to ‘consultation’, engages stakeholders directly and it makes them responsible for designing solutions to complex problems. Their interests are at stake.

“Out of that you get recommendations which are not just theoretical, they are tested in the crucible of people’s practical experience, and recommendations which don’t just come from on high but from the very people who are going to have to implement them in practice.”

With collaborative processes “you enormously enhance your chance of buy-in and implementation”. 

“But the collaborative processes we suggested for local decision making are caught up with the wider RMA legislation which the Government has been trying to get up.” 

The Land and Water Forum was given a mandate in 2009 to present the Government with a blueprint for better managing water resources and it produced a first report. It got its second mandate in 2011 and produced two more reports and now again in 2015 it has a third mandate, this time for three years.

The Government has made an important start to implementing recommendations, Bisley told the HortNZ conference. In 2011, immediately after the forum’s first report, it promulgated a National Policy Statement on Fresh Water Management. That provided a national framework but it lacked essential detail.

In 2014, in the light of further recommendations from the forum, the Government revised the national policy statement and brought in a national objectives framework which set bottom lines and helped councils making plans to set objectives for water bodies from which the limits could come. 

The Government has now given the forum a third mandate, for three years, divided into three parts. In the first, for which the forum has just six months, they have been asked to “tell us more about how to grow the economy while managing within objectives and limits”.

Bisley says he does not yet know what the forum’s answers will be because it’s still at work. But he picks it will urge the Government to implement the recommendations from earlier reports it has not yet got to and to do so soon. 

Aside from collaborative processes, they include recommendations on integrated catchment management. “A lot actually lies with industries and with regional councils. But there has been little central guidance yet on how some of that stuff might be brought together,” he says. “Government has not yet addressed the recommendations we made on allocation, and iwi rights and interests still remain to be resolved.”

The forum was now putting in some good thinking on the “systemisation of good practice”. This includes meshing industry standards, some of which are global standards, and Government and regional council requirements. “And what needs to be done at the catchment level which may be important in managing flows and discharges of contaminants and how do we do this in a way which doesn’t place intolerable burdens on individual players.”

He says there is more to do on allocation, on which a number of “terrifically valuable recommendations” have already been made including how to give access to new entrants.