Sustainability and Indigeneity

Abstract

In the lead up to the Rio Conference on Environment and Development 1992, New Zealand enshrined the concept of the sustainable management of natural and physical resources in statute law by enacting the Resource Management Act 1991. Implementing the concept of sustainable management in domestic law gave rise to a tension between anthropocentric and ecological approaches for implementing the statute that were not resolved by the Courts until 2014. However, the adoption of an ecological approach to implementing the statute did not assuage the desire for statutory reform unlocked by the previous debate. Most recently, the reform trajectory has resulted in Parliamentary scrutiny of an exposure draft Bill that replaces the concept of sustainable management with a new concept of the welfare and wellbeing of the environment rooted firmly in indigenous perspectives on earth governance, guardianship, and intergenerational equity. My paper will critically interrogate the implications of adopting the concept of the welfare and wellbeing of the environment for the future of sustainability, and what implications this approach could have for environmental law generally in the Anthropocene both comparatively and internationally.