Pacific Studies Journal
Abstract
This article explores competing discourses of sustainability in New Zealand’s South Island. As active resource managers, high-country pastoralists’ conception of “country” contests predominant reductive and binary models of production/ conservation and economic resource/visual resource and suggests a more complicated dynamic between scientific and cultural paradigms of sustainability than has been acknowledged. This dynamic is captured in the internationally driven top-down concept of equitable sustainable land management with a dual commitment to both cultural and ecological diversity as defined locally, formulated as part of the United Nations Rio Declaration of 1992, agenda 21, chapter 13. I examine an emergent high-country “land ethic” by exploring textually and ethnographically the legislative arenas within which discourses of sustainability have been defined and by examining the relationship of economic, ecological, and community sustainability to “country.” The article elicits the cultural components of a remarkably transnational and yet strategically local high-country understanding of sustainable land management.
Recommended Citation
Dominy, Michèle D.
(1999)
"LEGISLATING A SUSTAINABLE LAND ETHIC FOR NEW ZEALAND,"
Pacific Studies Journal: Vol. 22:
No.
3, Article 5.
Available at:
https://digitalcollections.byuh.edu/pacific-studies-journal/vol22/iss3/5
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