Te Rā Whakamana: When Policy Advisory Systems Meet the Wall of Implementation: Eppel (2011, 2013, 2014)

12/08/2025

I use the Land and Water Forum to show that sophisticated, plural advisory systems already exist in Aotearoa, and that this one failed because it was never connected to the people who would have to deliver its advice.

Te Rā Whakamana is a regular series in which I examine what happens after policy is announced. It draws on research and writing that follows the slow, often invisible work of delivery, where systems hold or fracture and where legitimacy is earned (or lost) in context. Today I use the Land and Water Forum to show that sophisticated policy advisory systems, which bring non-state actors systematically into policy advice, already exist in Aotearoa, and I argue again that our current debates about lobbying distract us from the harder task of connecting these advisory systems to implementation capacity.

Last week I argued that Aotearoa is having the wrong argument about lobbying. Our discourse is dominated by moral panic over corporate capture and misses the operational reality of contemporary governance, which is that policy advisory systems are already plural, distributed, and sophisticated. Since they exist and will continue to, I thought it more useful to examine what these systems look like when they are functioning than to argue the point again.

The Land and Water Forum, which operated between 2009 and 2017, rewards a close look. When you look closely at what it was, as opposed to how it is often remembered, a different picture emerges, one that says something important about how policy advisory systems already function in Aotearoa and why our current debates about lobbying and influence may be missing the point.

The Forum brought together organisations from agriculture, the environment, science, academia, and recreation, as well as Iwi and Māori interests. It went well beyond the usual stakeholder consultation exercise; as Elizabeth Eppel* documents, what emerged was more systematic and sophisticated than we typically acknowledge when we discuss how policy advice is made.

In Eppel’s (2011) words, “Nearly 60 important stakeholders in water management joined this Forum – farmers, foresters, Fonterra, recreational and environmental NGOs, miners, tourism operators, power generators, irrigators, academics, scientists, and iwi – and they were seen to do so spontaneously, on their own motion” (p. 1). This was a systematic integration of diverse expertise into coherent policy advice, and I would not describe it as random consultation or democratic theatre.

When you step back and consider what this represents, it becomes clear that we were watching something significant unfold. The Forum operated as what Jonathan Craft and John Halligan (2020) call an “assemblage of advisory units and practices” (p. 37), a system that brought state and non-state actors together to provide coherent policy advice. For seven years it worked beside traditional departmental advice and produced four major reports containing more than 150 recommendations across freshwater policy.

Throughout those seven years the Forum modelled a form of advisory sophistication that our current lobbying debates barely acknowledge, and yet the seeds of its failure were being sown at the same time, because it was never connected to the implementation systems that would have to carry its recommendations forward.

The Forum made visible a decisive break from the “traditional” advisory model that Craft and Halligan (2020) describe, the closed circuit of departmental advice to ministers. In its place was an emergent system of multiple actors, contested advice, and flexible sources of expertise (Craft & Halligan, 2020, Table 1.2, pp. 53–54), in which policy advice was a deliberately constructed ecosystem where state and non-state actors worked as peers to generate solutions, rather than a sealed bureaucratic product.

Environment Minister Nick Smith established the Forum in 2009 in direct response to the failure of traditional advisory mechanisms to address freshwater management. As Christine Cheyne (2017) documents, the Resource Management Act had become “the focus of intense criticism for institutionalising an adversarial approach to decision-making characterised by high litigation costs and lengthy delays” (p. 1), while failing to address freshwater degradation. The Forum’s design reflected an intuitive understanding of what contemporary advisory systems require.

The Forum operated under the independent chairmanship of Alastair Bisley, an example of what Craft and Halligan (2020) identify as the need for a “different skill set” in “aggregating and brokering community and interest-group aspirations” (p. 37). Having had the opportunity to see Alastair Bisley work, I would describe what he did as the professional orchestration of an advisory process that recognised the complexity of contemporary governance, and certainly not as ministerial capture or bureaucratic control.

Perhaps most interesting is that the Forum’s consensus requirement put productive pressure on participants to collaborate. As Bisley put it, quoted by Eppel (2013, p. 2), collaborative governance “takes out the middle man and puts the onus of finding a way through a complex issue or series of issues on the stakeholders themselves: the people and organisations whose interests, conflicting or coinciding or complementing each other, give the problem its complexity. They have to deal with each other directly, not through an intermediary, and they have to take the responsibility of reconciling the various things that they want.”

What made the Forum particularly sophisticated was its approach to knowledge. As Eppel (2014) notes, effective water governance requires both “hard factual knowledge from scientific monitoring programmes and softer social knowledge and values” (p. 71), and the Forum’s design recognised that “a government body alone cannot have sufficient knowledge or resources for the effective governance of fresh water and that a more participative process is needed” (Eppel, 2014, p. 71).

This reflects something fundamental about contemporary policy problems. As Eppel (2013) observes, “In reality, water governance is a multi-actor process that takes place across a number of action arenas and many government and non-government organisations are involved” (p. 12). The Land and Water Forum systematically recognised that reality through a process that brought “new information and resources to a stalled policy-making process” and showed “how governance processes might work differently and more effectively” (Eppel, 2013, p. 12).

For all its sophistication, the Land and Water Forum failed. As Cheyne (2017) documents, drawing on Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s analysis, “Less than half of the 153 recommendations of the Land and Water Forum have been included in the reforms” (p. 3), and that selective implementation undermined the whole advisory process and led key environmental stakeholders to withdraw in 2016.

What becomes apparent when examining this failure goes beyond the usual explanations about political will or competing interests. The Forum operated in isolation from the regional councils, compliance officers, enforcement agencies, and community organisations that would be expected to deliver any policy outcomes, and seven years of sophisticated consensus-building produced recommendations that were then handed to implementation systems that had played no part in developing them and felt no ownership of their content.

Eppel (2014) identifies the underlying challenge: “The water governance regime operating today has resulted from the repeated interactions between complex human and natural systems over nearly 200 years since first European settlement” (p. 72). In my view, advisory systems that ignore these embedded implementation realities will tend to fall short, however sophisticated they are.

The Land and Water Forum gives a useful lens on our current debates about lobbying and influence. While we spend considerable energy on moral panic about corporate capture, we have concrete evidence that sophisticated advisory systems already exist, function at scale, and can produce systematic policy advice that goes far beyond anything contemplated in our concerns about Federated Farmers.

The Forum ran for seven years, which shows that advisory ecosystems can be orchestrated to support governance. Its eventual failure had little to do with democratic purity or inappropriate influence and a great deal to do with the disconnection between a sophisticated advisory process and the messy realities of implementation.

What the Land and Water Forum perhaps shows most clearly is that non-state actors already influence policy, systematically and at considerable scale, so that whether they should do so is no longer the question before us.

The more productive question is whether we will learn to connect these advisory ecosystems to implementation capacity, or keep building sophisticated processes that produce elegant recommendations and change precisely nothing.

*We are fortunate to have scholars like Elizabeth Eppel, who have been documenting these collaborative governance realities for years. Her careful research deserves more attention. I will cover her work on collaborative governance in an upcoming Cases for the Practical State.

References

Baines, J., & O’Brien, M. (2012). Reflections on the collaborative governance process of the Land and Water Forum (Publication No. CR 122). Ministry for the Environment.

Brower, A. L. (2016). Is collaboration good for the environment? Or, what’s wrong with the Land and Water Forum? New Zealand Journal of Ecology, 40(3), 390–397. https://doi.org/10.20417/nzjecol.40.42

Cheyne, C. (2017, June 28). Can collaboration trump adversarial environmental planning? Insights from New Zealand’s Land and Water Forum and proposed statutory collaborative planning process [Paper presentation]. International Conference on Public Policy, Panel T02P09, Collaborative Governance and Deliberative Policymaking in Comparative Perspective, Singapore.

Craft, J., & Halligan, J. (2020). Advising governments in the Westminster tradition: Policy advisory systems in Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. Cambridge University Press.

Eppel, E. (2011). Illustrative case: Land and Water (Protection and Use) Forum. In Future state 2: Experimentation and learning in policy implementation: Implications for public management. Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.

Eppel, E. (2013). Collaborative governance case studies: The Land and Water Forum (Working Paper No. 13/05). Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.

Eppel, E. (2014). Improving New Zealand water governance: Challenges and recommendations. Policy Quarterly, 10(3), 66–73. https://doi.org/10.26686/pq.v10i3.4501