The quality of district plans and their implementation: Towards environmental quality

:: Since inception of the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA) the issue of sustainable management has dominated planning practice in New Zealand. Over the past decade, councils have wrestled with converting the concept of sustainable management into policy and practice. Implicit to the requirement that district councils develop plans for managing the environmental effects of the use and development of natural and physical resources is the assumption that good quality plans will result in improved environmental quality. The key question to be addressed in this paper is: Do good plans matter? Phase 1 of research on Planning Under a Cooperative Mandate (PUCM) found that the capacity and capability of councils to produce quality plans varied significantly (Berke, et al., 1999). But does the quality of a plan necessarily affect how it is implemented? And does this affect the environmental outcome? Phase 2 of the PUCM research programme set out to examine how the quality of plans may affect the quality with which they are implemented. 1 If funded, Phase 3 will extend the research to include the quality of environmental outcomes. The main goal and aim of the programme is summarised in the boxed insert, followed by the overall PUCM research design in Figure 1 (next page). Measuring the quality of plan implementation is a complex task, and little, if any, attempt has been made in councils to do it. To meet the requirements in section 35 of the RMA district councils must monitor the effectiveness of plans, including the exercise of resource consents. This implies the need to evaluate plan implementation. As yet, however, not much is known about the implementation of plans, even though without effective implementation, plans lose their ability to achieve the environmental goals they - and the community set out to achieve. The PUCM research is the first in New Zealand to attempt a quantitative analysis of the links between the quality of plans produced under the RMA and the quality of plan implementation. Little research on this type of linkage has been done overseas. Dalton and Burby (1994) did, however, try to quantify implementation quality and factors that affect implementation. Following their lead, we assumed that councils having more plan policies and consent techniques in place are better able to manage development successfully. We also tested the assumption that there is a linear relationship between the quality of district plans and implementation. That is, do district plans have a direct bearing on implementation outcomes?