3 October 2025
A collaboration between environmental politics researcher Ann Brower and illustrator Jean Donaldson. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.
He didn’t quite know what to wear to submit to parliament, so he wore a three-piece suit. Duncan was one of the three of us standing in front of about ten MPs, asking them to change the definition of a riverbed.
A few of them appeared to still be awake. It had been a long day of submissions. Behind the parliamentarians were ministry officials, and off to the side was the public gallery. About 40 people had shown up to hear submissions on the legislation that would replace the Resource Management Act. For the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, that’s a pretty good turnout. I recognised a couple of my former students in the gallery, now working in resource management agencies.
In rooms like these, many little details are hashed out that have enormous implications.
***
This is how change happens. Back in the summer, we had brought together a group of scientists interested in braided rivers to write a submission for the Natural and Built Environments Act. We held a workshop, got together, and changed the law.
We managed to unite researchers from several universities, staffers from regional councils, Crown Research Institutes, various ministries, Fish and Game, environmental groups, lawyers and and. Some of them had been working on braided rivers and the law since the 1990s. There were decades of experience in the room.
***
Braided rivers are quintessentially New Zealand, yet visible from space. They are as physically fragile as they are biologically diverse. And they move. They snake and twine across the gravel. They rise and fall. Their banks bloom with life and dry and dessicate. They are topologically, geologically, ecologically, economically and legally complex.
Like Schrodinger’s cat, they are neither land nor water, but both at once.
And they often flow through land that is used for intensive agriculture. Artificial stop banks are built, and artificial boundaries are bioengineered. Buildings and equipment are installed on land that could become river at any moment.
And when the river floods … you can see where this is all heading.
The problem is that the land that belongs to the river is not defined or protected in any legal sense. Existing law seeks to separate land from river, because riverbed is a fundamental concept in resource management in Aotearoa.
The difference between land and riverbed is profound in our environmental law. Ground disturbance and many kinds of development are innocent until proven guilty on land, but guilty until proven innocent on riverbed.
The Resource Management Act defines riverbed as the land covered by water at the river’s fullest flow without overtopping its banks. So what is wet is river and what is dry is land.
This is what we managed to change in the Natural and Built Environments Act. Braided rivers were exempted from the old and ill-fitting definition of river.
It was getting into late afternoon on the Friday before submissions were due, and – like is often the case – no-one could remember the password to the social media account. We wanted to make our submission public so that other submitters could build on our work in their submissions. Plagiarism is a dirty word in academia, but a useful ally in making change.
We eventually found the password, and the submission was published to the Fish and Game social channels. By about six o’clock, I had officially submitted it. That brings us back to the room we started with, as Duncan stood in front of the Parliamentary Select Committee, sweating nervously in his three-piece suit.
His sharp sartorial style must have helped us, because our wording was accepted, and the land that belongs to the ever-changing braided rivers was better recognised in law.
That is, until the Natural and Built Environments Act was repealed later that same year.
Ann Brower is a principal investigator at Te Pūnaha Matatini who leads the Braided rivers: The land the law forgot project.
Jean Donaldson is a designer and illustrator who works with Toi Āria: Design for Public Good. She is based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. You can see more of her work at jeanmanu.nz.
Jonathan Burgess is an award-winning communications specialist who specialises in translating technical detail for a general audience.