Strategic thinking and the environment: Planning the future in New Zealand?

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The environmental rationale for adopting a strategic approach to the environment is compelling. But other‐than‐environmental considerations must always play an important role in adoption of environmental strategies, or green plans, and must affect their substance. The political demand or support for strategic environmental planning is nowhere very strong. A strategic environmental plan adopted by New Zealand in 1995, and developed in the context of broader strategic policy efforts, offers insight into the significance and potential of strategic environmental policy making. Its claims to the contrary, New Zealand's Environment 2010 Strategy was politically feasible because it is strategic in only a limited sense and because it is subsidiary to the overriding goal of economic growth. The ultimate significance of New Zealand's environmental strategy and similar efforts in other nations, then, may lie primarily in their potential for further amendment and development.