Growing Apples and the 'Growing Pains' of Restructuring for New Zealand's Pipfruit Industry

Numerous urgent issues face New Zealand's pipfruit industry at the close of the decade. Oversupplied and competitive global markets, shifting policy environments, and industry ‘clawback’ place increasing pressures on pipfruit's single desk marketing system. This paper identifies the importance of interregional production dynamics and some policy challenges surrounding discourses of globalisation, sustainability and restructuring.     

Insights from past and present social science literature on the (unequal) development of New Zealand's rural communities

A review of social research on rural New Zealand undertaken as part of the National Science Challenge (NSC 11) “Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities” allows a fresh look at rural development within the context of New Zealand's colonial history. The research suggests that government development programmes and legislation privileged those responsible for producing the bulk of New Zealand's export income. Cultural attitudes, structural inequalities and a failure to understand how the character of, and social relations in, rural areas have changed has impeded particularly Māori economic growth, the participation of women, and non‐farm sectors of rural society, to the detriment of all.     

On Geographic and geography

New Zealand Geographic is one of a number of geographical magazines published in the English‐speaking world that make little or no reference to work by academic geographers. It recently launched a New Zealand Geographic Trust to promote research into ‘New Zealand's life, culture and sciences’ and collaborated with four other publishers of geographical magazines to raise awareness of climate change: the work of academic geographers is again ignored. This exclusion of academic and school geography from such enterprises raises important issues regarding the discipline's public profile in New Zealand and suggests the need for greater public engagement activity by the country's geographers.     

Splitting a northern account of New Zealand's neoliberalism

This review responds to Richard Peet's ‘policy regimes’ account of New Zealand's neoliberal experiment published in this volume of the New Zealand Geographer. It welcomes Peet's intervention, especially its comparative approach and its political economy focus, but suggests further insight may have been gained from closer engagement with the work of New Zealand geographers. The review argues that Peet misses opportunities to learn from the New Zealand case. The review subjects a ‘northern’ account of southern experience to a critique by ‘splitting’, a characteristically southern approach to analysing social change from the Antipodes that pays close attention to the situatedness of knowledge production.     

Landscape Change and Environmental Histories

Historical geography was once a popular element of university curricula in New Zealand. It was also a conspicuous focus of research. Today however there is only one identifiable course in historical geography in New Zealand's university calendars – at Massey – and few writers have maintained an active research interest rooted in the sub‐discipline. This Comment suggests some reasons why now is a good time for New Zealand's geographers to reassess this state of affairs, and outlines five themes that might be pursued in the construction of more explicit historical geographies at the start of the third millennium.     

Putting together the pieces of the puzzle: Traces of New Zealand in international school geography textbooks

How does a fairly remote space (the islands of New Zealand) contribute to the development of geographical literacy in the geography textbooks of post‐socialist (Romania), Western (Germany) and post‐colonial (Mexico) countries? A four‐step analysis of three textbooks of international selection revealed different regionalisation cultures combined with traditional and recently implemented educational paradigms of geography education and led to a similar result. Despite the many ways in which New Zealand's geographical distinctiveness could be used to enhance geographical literacy, there are few operationalisations of educational targets that might contribute to sustainable long‐term learning. Further, these results also offer a possible explanation for the absence of the ‘southern lands’ on students' cognitive maps of the world.     

Restructuring Governance of New Zealand Seaports: Geographical Impacts of Corporatisation

This study examines the rationales for and geographical outcomes of the post 1988 changes in port governance in New Zealand and their implications from a policy perspective. The study offers insights into the interrelationship between global processes and local places in the context of economic deregulation, a devolved infrastructure planning mandate and intra‐industry competitive dynamics. A trend towards port concentration consequent on globalisation has been long recognised in the international literature. In New Zealand, the trend towards port concentration can be described as selective, limited primarily to import trade while export trade is more dispersed. This new port geography is part of wider political and socio‐economic development geographies of the national and global hinterlands and forelands these ports interact with.     

Sustainable Utilisation of Fisheries as Governmentality: Constraining the Potential for Ecosystems‐Based Management?

This paper examines the constitution of ‘sustainable management’ within the context of the New Zealand marine environment. Firstly this paper examines the difference between ‘sustainable ecosystems’ and ‘sustainable utilisation’. The distinction is important if we are to make sense of the different ways in which various stakeholders (fishers, fisheries companies, scientists, fisheries managers and environmental groups) use ‘sustainability’ in the management of New Zealand's marine environment. We then examine how contestation results in sustainable management becoming a governmentality. We propose that such contestation transforms stakeholders into subjects whose everyday practices and relationships are influenced by seemingly incommensurable understandings of the lexicon that surrounds sustainable management. We conclude try considering how the potential revelation of new unknowns may be needed in order for disparate stakeholders to forge a unified approach to New Zealand's marine management.     

Lessons for New Zealand from Britain's Foot and Mouth Epidemic

This paper explores some implications for New Zealand's rural community of Britain's foot and mouth epidemic in the light of growing international trade and travel, and changes in New Zealand's rural society. The paper includes ecological mapping with a projected/likely spatial distribution of an epidemic in New Zealand, and an assessment of the possible institutional and social responses in the wake of a disease outbreak. It notes the course of the epidemic in Britain, and possible differences and similarities in institutional response frameworks between Britain and New Zealand.     

Social Democracy and Contextual Unemployment: New Zealand Labour in 1990

This paper examines the spatial implications of social-democratic policy transformation. It does so by exploring the political consequences of residential contextual unemployment engendered by a Labour government which had once been dedicated to maintaining full employment. Faced with economic crisis, as Przeworski's model predicts [Capitalism and social democracy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1985)], New Zealand Labour, beginning in 1984, abandoned its traditional social-democratic statist policies, including the maintenance of full employment, and allowed unemployment to skyrocket under its stewardship. This meant subjecting its supporters to significant contextual cross-pressures, since many residential neighbourhoods became characterised by both high concentrations of Labour partisans, and by those recently unemployed by Labour's new market-liberal policies. Using original survey data merged with New Zealand census data, empirical findings show that residual partisan loyalties and a lack of a major party alternative constrained respondents' partisan disaffection, while channelling their disillusionment into both minor party voting and systemic, governmental criticisms - likely fuelling New Zealand's drive for electoral reform and a new system of proportional representation.     

Using open‐ended geographic information system assessments to allow students to construct relevant geographies given the internationalisation of tertiary education in New Zealand

The geospatial skills shortage in New Zealand requires the development of more undergraduate geographic information system (GIS) courses. However, the internationalisation of New Zealand's tertiary education system has resulted in an increasingly diverse tertiary student population, which makes it challenging to teach GIS in a way that maximises relevance to all tertiary students. One approach to this challenge is to make use of the recent proliferation of openly available GIS data, and to internationalise GIS curricula by using open‐ended assessments that provide students with the opportunity to learn GIS by constructing their own geographies of relevance.     

Realistic Sustainability? Urban Transport Planning in Wellington,New Zealand

Urban transport systems have key roles in supporting environmental sustainability. New Zealand's transport planning arrangements are promoted as a model by agencies such as the World Bank. This paper explores the New Zealand transport planning framework using a case study of the Wellington region's strategic balancing of transport modes and projects. The paper argues that despite some positive rhetoric, concerns about the sustainability of transport planning in Wellington remain. The paper concludes by discussing the need to reassess New Zealand's national framework, and identifies some directions for reform.     

Vulnerability of pastoral farming in Hawke's Bay to future climate change: Development of a pre‐screening (bottom‐up) methodology

Although future climate change will significantly affect New Zealand's climate, how regional climates will be changed remains highly uncertain. As a consequence, pre‐screening sensitivity analysis is recommended for climate‐sensitive activities. A ‘bottom‐up’ approach intended to serve this purpose in the context of non‐irrigated pasture is developed and demonstrated in the Hawke's Bay context. This is achieved using a simple daily water balance model to simulate near‐surface hydrological processes and empirical relationships between transpiration and pasture dry matter production. The Hawke's Bay case study indicates that the methodology has merit and is worthwhile pursuing nationally (with refinements).     

Air Pollution Exposure Index for New Zealand

This study proposes a regional air pollution exposure index (RAPEI) for Auckland, Canterbury, Otago and Wellington regions. The air pollution index multiplies an emission index (NOx emissions kg/annum), a surrogate for ambient air pollution levels, with a population density index (people per sq km), a surrogate for population exposure. Census Area Units (CAUs), and subsequently defined “key areas” within a region are ranked from 0 to 16. This is one method of investigating the effectiveness of air quality monitoring networks and identifying urban exposure airsheds in New Zealand. Results verified New Zealand's urban exposure airsheds and highlighted areas that may be potential “hot spots” in terms of relatively high ambient air pollution levels and potentially high population exposures. It is possible that these areas should be closely monitored. The GIS‐based maps also show New Zealand's permanent and temporary air quality monitoring stations.     

Transformative tans? Gendered and raced bodies on beaches

Abstract: In this paper I examine the intentional act of transforming the colour of one's skin – sun‐tanning – by Pākehā at three New Zealand beaches: Papamoa, Mount Maunganui, and Takapuna. Recent debates about the construction of whiteness are outlined before discussing the historical significance of beaches and sun to New Zealand's leisure culture. This paper seeks to de‐naturalize whiteness through the disclosure of gendered leisure practices of tanning. Empirical material reveals that Pākehā, who actively seek brown skin, negotiate a number of racialized and gendered ‘truths’ as their sun‐tan transforms their bodies. I conclude by arguing that geographers need to be more attentive to the ways in which place constructs particular forms of gendered whiteness.     

Remote sensing methods to detect land‐use/cover changes in New Zealand's ‘indigenous’ grasslands

We compared four remote sensing methods to detect changes in New Zealand's grasslands (image differencing, normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) differencing post‐classification and visual interpretation). The visual interpretation resulted in the best classification results, with a 98% overall accuracy when compared with ground‐truthed data. The tests on automatic classification (image differencing, NDVI differencing) and post classification had much lower accuracies, ranging from 47% to 56%. In the New Zealand grassland landscape, automatic detection methods were not able to differentiate between variations of soil moisture and vegetation phenology from variations in land‐use change. This, in combination with topographic effects, which have hampered the automated mapping of vegetation, is the main reason why visual interpretation of high‐resolution imagery is still needed.     

Fragmented Urban Spaces? Ethnic Residential Areas in New Zealand Cities, 1996

Residential segregation of ethnic groups is a major feature of cities in multi‐cultural societies such as New Zealand's. Measuring the degree of segregation has been the focus of much attention over the last half century, but there are difficulties with comparative studies using most of the measures adopted. An alternative procedure which classifies residential areas according to a homogeneity‐heterogeneity continuum is applied here to 1996 census small‐scale data for each of New Zealand's 33 main urban areas, to identify the degree of segregation of various ethnic groups. It reports that most New Zealanders from all ethnic groups (defined by self‐identity) live in mixed rather than exclusive residential areas. The main ethnic enclaves/ghettos are occupied by Maori and Pacific Islanders, and are entirely concentrated in the North Island, especially in urban areas which have substantial Polynesian populations.     

Recent changes to conservation of New Zealand's native biodiversity

Abstract: This article examines recent changes to conservation in New Zealand. The argument is influenced by practical experience over the past 15 years, first as conservation planner employed by the Department of Conservation, then as an environmentalist involved in community conservation projects. The development of public‐private partnerships in conservation action over the past 15 years is reviewed. These changes point to the configuration of new landscapes, although the diverse and uncoordinated nature of many contemporary initiatives suggest that future biological communities will comprise a diversity of hybrid mixes from predominantly native to fully non‐native species.     

New Zealand geography: Sharpening the focus,raising the profile

Geography seems to be in good hands in New Zealand's schools and universities, but we cannot afford to be complacent. What are the key priorities for further strengthening geography in New Zealand in the years ahead? The New Zealand Geographical Society has to play a crucial role by helping to bring together geographers in the different sectors, as well as in promoting New Zealand geography internationally, and raising its profile in the media. Most of all, we need to demonstrate the vibrancy, significance and relevance of geography to the wider community.     

HABITAT ISLANDS AND THE PRESERVATION OF NEW ZEALAND'S AVIFAUNA*

ABSTRACT. Numerous avifauna species face extinction on New Zealand's two main islands, owing largely to forest clearance and to introduced mammals. In response, New Zealand selects certain offshore islands for the relocation of threatened native birds, first purging them of mammalian predators. Over the past few decades, this procedure has evolved to become fairly successful. Protected habitat “islands” within mainland forested areas are also being created, but with success less certain. As historic habitats are lost, small biopreservation islands may become a standard mechanism for protecting threatened species, a process that can be termed the “miniaturization” of nature.