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The Breaking Wave: Oceans Reform in Aotearoa New Zealand – Appendices

By Greg Severinsen, Raewyn Peart, Bella Rollinson, Tracey Turner and Phoebe Parson
May 2022

Over the past 18 months, the Environmental Defence Society (EDS) has been conducting a first principles policy project looking at the future of our oceans management system. The purpose of the work is to encourage and support a wide-ranging conversation in advance of government reform efforts, and to present a number of ways in which the country could do things differently in the future. We are deliberately not making recommendations (we anticipate a phase 2 of the project in which we do that). For now, all options are on the table for discussion, be they a collection of small-scale changes or a staggered programme of revolutionary reform.

The appendices of The Breaking Wave elaborate on some of the things discussed in the main report. These include a description of (1) the current oceans management system, (2) Aotearoa New Zealand’s international legal obligations under the law of the sea, (3) the potential for the proposed Strategic/Spatial Planning Act to be used as a vehicle for marine spatial planning, and (4) the oceans policy process of the 2000s.