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Project Details
Project status
In progress
Research Framework
Pou Titirangi
Research Duration
July 2025 to July 2028
Project Overview
The importance of community inclusion is recognised across a wide range of environmental issues. Communities are often the lead observers, active users and caretakers for their local landscapes.
Yet, relatively little attention has been given to the possibilities of community inclusion in pest management, where technical experts lead decisions on what species are pests and the best approaches to managing them. At the same time, communities are relied upon to undertake significant parts of pest management, often voluntarily.
This doctoral research asks: Should Aotearoa New Zealand’s pest management system be more inclusive of communities, and if so, how? Through a combination of document analysis, interviews and a survey, this research will consider how communities are currently included in the pest management system, the extent their views and values are included in pest designations, and how communities are leading pest management outside the system.
The research will focus at a regional level on the Waitaha Canterbury region, since most statutory pest management processes in Aotearoa New Zealand are governed at the regional scale.
Why This Matters
Communities play a relatively peripheral role in pest management in Aotearoa New Zealand, with decision-making dominated by technical experts. Yet ‘what is a pest’ is highly contested and can be a source of fierce debate. Communities can also have considerable local knowledge about pest species and their management, as well as significantly contributing to efforts to manage them. It therefore matters how, and on what terms, communities are included within the pest management system.
There is relatively little known about the status quo of community inclusion in pest management in Aotearoa New Zealand. This research will to provide an important stocktake of how processes of community inclusion in pest management are undertaken, and whether this reflects the procedures that laws and policies state. This research also aims to understand if, or how, pest management could benefit from processes that enable greater community inclusion.
Project Objectives
The core question asks: Should Aotearoa New Zealand’s pest management system be more inclusive of communities, and if so, how?
This will take into consideration:
- How the community views and values about pests are included in official pest designations;
- Existing mechanisms for community inclusion in the pest management system, and their outcomes; and
- Pest management work by communities outside the system, and the interactions between these community-led initiatives and the pest management system.