Remember the Flicking Tail of the Lizard: how matauranga Maori is being woven into place-based regulatory decisions in Aotearoa. Te Mana Rauhï Taiao, the Environmental Protection Authority, is adopting a new and comprehensive approach to bringing mätauranga – the Mäori knowledge system – into its regulatory practice. This will potentially have an impact on decision-making on environmental protection in your local area.

Measuring Local Well-being: reflections on the Local Government (Community Well-Being) Amendment Bill. The Local Government (Community Well-being) Amendment Bill is designed to provide local authorities with greater legal freedom to make investments that will raise the well-being of their local community. The legislation is predicated on the assumption that people’s well-being is influenced by their local context. In order to identify the influence of changes in context generated by local investments, it is necessary to recognise that individuals differ in many ways and that the impact of any given investment can vary substantially from one person to the next. Indicators based on collections of individuals miss much of that variation. It is also necessary to recognise the variety of ways well-being can be measured. This short article raises both these issues by exploring three measures of well-being currently available on the 2018 Quality of Life survey.

The Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, in partnership with Victoria University of Wellington’s Health and Wellbeing distinctiveness theme steering group, hosted a symposium on ‘The Four Wellbeings for Local Government’ on 26 February 2019. The symposium heard brief presentations from eight invitees from local government, central government, the private sector and NGOs: Justin Lester, Lyn Patterson, Karen Thomas, Peter McKinlay, Wayne Mulligan, Meg Williams, Danielle Shanahan and Suzy Morrissey. Inspired by these addresses and by the ensuing discussion, this article considers what the reintroduction of the ‘four well-beings’ into the Local Government Act might mean for local decision making.

This article explores the emergence of localism as a key concept in local governance. It distinguishes between devolution, subsidiarity and localism, and examines how current policy development in New Zealand still reflects a very top-down understanding of governance. It then argues that local government has all the powers required to put in place a radical practice of localism and explains how.

This collection is designed to partially address a gap in the academic literature. Whilst decentralisation is frequently included in peace agreements, the actual scope and role of local government is far less frequently discussed. This gap remains despite a considerable literature on local government in developing countries more generally, particularly with regard to decentralisation; but also despite a considerable and growing literature on post-conflict reconstruction. Despite this, very little has been written specifically on the politics of local government and post-conflict. This collection aims to fill that gap, providing a mixture of case study and conceptual material and also perspectives from both academics and policy-makers.