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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Fish and boats: Fisheries management issues in Northland

New Zealand fisheries management has been the focus of a great deal of research, largely because of the early, and very successful, introduction of a neoliberal property regime in the country's commercial fisheries. Less attention has been paid to the other management activities of New Zealand's Ministry of Fisheries. This paper outlines the fisheries management issues arising over the last decade in the region to the north of Auckland and the practices of the Ministry as it worked to address them.     

End of an Era? Population Geography in New Zealand at the Turn of the Century

Research into and teaching on population issues in New Zealand's university geography departments is at a crossroads. A significant cohort of New Zealand population geographers who gained their graduate and post-graduate training during the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly diminishing as a result of retirements and late career shifts. In the much more competitive university environment of the 1990s staff are either not being replaced, or their positions and programmes are being reshaped as part of radical restructuring of the social sciences and humanities. This paper reflects on recent developments in population geography in New Zealand, highlighting the contributions made by three of the country's most prominent researchers and teachers in what is fast becoming a dying field of discourse in university geography departments. The paper concludes on an ambivalent note about prospects for geographers in the era of sub-replacement fertility and the heightened attention that will be accorded to migration processes.     

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.     

Matching New Zealand Rural Development Policy to a Changing Clientele

In responding to the needs of a broader rural clientele, MAF's rural economic development work has moved beyond a single sector approach to one which recognises all rural economic activity. New Zealand's approach to rural economic development lags behind those of most OECD countries. An official rural development policy, sponsored by MAF, is needed to ensure that there is adequate co-ordination with other agencies' activities, and that government works in partnership with rural people to ensure their goals are realised.     

Placing Geography's Institutions into Geographic Pedagogy: Colearning and Coproduction of Knowledge as Strategy to Do Geography Differently

This article discusses New Zealand geography's recent engagement in institutional regeneration that is aimed at redeveloping the knowledge claims its geography community can make. This engagement has led to new levels of understanding among many New Zealand geographers of colearning and coproduction of knowledge as geographic processes involving knowledge, power, and authority relations. The article briefly outlines two linked trajectories: those relating to the gradual recognition of institutional collapse, and the commitment to remaking a new and generative institutional framework, and the uptake of ideas from international geography that helped with prioritizing revisioning and institutional regeneration. Lessons from New Zealand geography's sobering institutional experiences and new efforts at collective learning and activity to extend the spheres of geography's action are salutary for international geography.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Purely Xenophobia or Confusion Over Planning Procedures?

Getting approval to invest in New Zealand's tourist sector is a risky business. A comparison of the Hopai Bay Resort proposal (of the Marlborough Sounds) and the Millbrook Country Club, Queenstown reveals much ambiguity in New Zealand's planning practise.     

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.     

Tramper perspectives on New Zealand's Great Walks in a time of transition

‘Great Walks’ are highly managed multi‐day experiences established within New Zealand's national parks. We examine their history and promotion asking ‘How have the contexts for recreational walking in the New Zealand wilderness changed?’ and ‘How are these changes regarded by trampers as practitioners of backcountry walking?’ To address these questions, we draw on 703 responses to an online survey. We note a mixed regard for Great Walks among trampers. Some consider the wilderness experience as undermined by the popularity of these branded experiences while others note that they cater for a range of users, despite high costs reducing effective accessibility.     

River Dog: Re‐imagining and re‐representing the environment and de‐idealising the rural in New Zealand film

The depiction of pristine countryside in New Zealand film has engendered a cultural disconnection with the environmental stories within the landscape. In this essay, we briefly examined the meaning of rural New Zealand landscape and its role in film. This research was done in part by making a short documentary, River Dog, a film about the rural New Zealand landscape. The character, plot and underlying message of River Dog were framed within visually relevant archetypes to form a constructive environmental message. Here, we examined River Dog's use of empathetic storytelling, an approach used to communicate an environmental issue without promulgating science or politics.