Revitalising Te Taiao: How to co-design a place-based approach to support purposeful change and resilience

Aotearoa-New Zealand and international examples were reviewed by the project team with a range of criteria detailed to allow for an analysis of what were the key insights and enablers of successful place-based pilots in terms of projects that support land use and land management changes, value chain and in-market initiatives that enhance the resilience, health and prosperity of our whenua, Te Taiao and tangata.

What the project team learnt from hui and kōrero, and the examples of successful place-based pilots were key insights that will make success possible and achievable. Each key insight is described in this report and referenced by two examples that support its relevance:

1. A Treaty of Waitangi lens is foundational to project design
2. Te Taiao as a basis for change
3. Respecting all knowledges
4. Tikanga/values
5. People and community-led change
6. People and place – sense of place, belonging and wellbeing
7. Collaboration and participation (kotahitanga), including highlighting power imbalance and
   protecting interests
8. Leadership and management (mana rangatira/mana whakahaere)
9. Changing economic models
10. Interconnected solutions
11. Inputs – resources including funding and information e.g., spatial data

While an individual pilot can be incredibly successful in a particular context, location, space, and time, this does not mean it will necessarily be successful at a broader scale or over the long term. Both scaling up and out are needed to achieve widespread and significant systems change and to extend the success of pilots to other locations. Key insights for supporting this scaling are ensuring the OLW programmes:

• Explicitly fund scaling activities
• Support and understand people and place
• Support changes in capacity, regulatory and financial frameworks, markets, infrastructure, and mindsets
• Support action from farm, orchard, or business-level to country-level
• Bring people on the journey – scaling involves facilitation of learning, navigation, decision-making, collective action, and negotiation

As well as identifying insights for successful pilots and their scaling, this report begins to recommend the selection criteria and an evaluation process for identifying place-based pilots. The criteria and evaluation processes were designed to specifically give effect to te Taiao, te ao Māori and mātauranga Māori to identify projects.

Overall, the report provides a pathway of understanding to a range of insights and perspectives that relate to land use and management change and scaling, including non-Māori and specific Mātauranga examples.