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Arguments about risk and uncertainty are prevalent in marine decision making. Different, often invisible, starting positions of those involved - regarding world views, academic disciplines and positionality - are often responsible. Broadly agreed collective outcomes depend on uncovering these influences. In this article we prioritise navigating multiplicity and plurality rather than constraining them. An iterative cycle of reflection and an openness to make changes are central. However, such a cycle must consider how risk assessment tools open or close possible futures, how evidence is best presented to decision makers, and how mātauranga Māori is reshaping risk perceptions and is the decisive intervention in creating improved decision-making spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent environmental events in land, coastal and ocean domains in Aotearoa have raised serious questions about risks and uncertainties connected with natural resource decision‐making at all levels and in all places. Evidence from consenting processes associated with proposed investments in seabed mining of Chatham Rock Phosphate and sub‐division development at Okura, Auckland City, illustrate the presence and nature of three key but often invisible influences – personal positionalities, discipline assumptions and worldviews – affecting decision processes. Readers are invited to go on a 'risk journey', of discovery, to help develop their capabilities to engage in investment decision‐making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reinterprets rent as geographical rent and argues that it can be mobilized as an asset to drive regional development in the form of geographical rent platforms (GRPs). Framing diverse regional development initiatives in Kaikōura, New Zealand (Aotearoa) as GRPs, the paper illustrates the potential of collectively developed and oriented place-based initiatives to enact futures from regional resourcefulness. It has particular value for rethinking regional development in rural regions and where Indigenous peoples are leading development initiatives; but by asking unfamiliar questions in an unfamiliar place and developing a novel analytical framework, it aims to reinvigorate regional development approaches everywhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role and purpose of community engagement as a learning and teaching strategy within higher education geography. It explores different interpretations of the concept of community engagement and illustrates different examples of this kind of learning through six case studies drawn from Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA. Key factors which can lead to success in community engagement and also some of the risks and challenges are discussed. Geographers are encouraged to become involved in this kind of experiential learning and to share practice across a wide range of institutions and countries. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table, and 3 notes.)

Aotearoa New Zealand is a nation of promise, potential and enigma: it was the first country in the world where women gained the vote in 1893 and now boasts the youngest woman world leader in 2017. It is also a postcolonial nation where structural racism, homophobia, and sexism persist, yet it has also given legal personhood to a river. Our Country Report foregrounds Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship that responds to, reflects, and sometimes resists such contrasts and contradictions at the national scale. We employ the lens of the 2017 national election to critically engage with current gendered and indigenous politics in the country. Analyzing these politics through three 'feminist moments,' our paper highlights the breadth and scope of current Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship and directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2004, a controversy arose in Aotearoa New Zealand's coal mining sector that involved Powelliphanta augusta, a species of land snail. This paper considers that controversy in terms of emergent assemblages involving the snail, the mining industry, the Department of Conservation, political action by environmental non‐government organisations, and public expressions of environmental and other values. Three sets of relations embedded in those assemblages are examined—those related to positioning and organising nature; values, politics, and power relations; and human and non‐human materialities. Those relations illuminate how a protracted controversy and its objects form a "social test bed" for contested views in legislation and guidelines dealing with economy, conservation, and restoration. To assess the dynamics, complexities, and contingencies of such relations, attention is paid to the controversy's detailed time line and legal framing, as well as to ontological shifts of snail and habitat and snail metrics. This analytical focus highlights the shifting quality of ideas about how the snail and its habitat are understood as entangled in fraught and mutating strategies of translocation that are played out in a particular regulatory setting. It also provides insights into international geographical efforts to re‐shape environmental governance and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors emphasize the need for agricultural research in New Zealand to be informed by a full recognition of a wider set of explanatory contexts. They note that biological dynamics and social values should inform research into agricultural questions, regulatory interventions and funding streams. They suggest shifting from considering agriculture as the dominant rural land use of the country. Also cited is the influence of agricultural production on changes in the socio-political and ecological environments within New Zealand.