Examines the history of how New Zealand’s institutions for nature conservation have developed.

Summary
To understand New Zealand approaches to nature conservation it is instructive to look back in order to appreciate both current institutional designs of rules and organisations and, to some extent, social attitudes towards human-nature interactions.This article examines four features, which, it is argued, have given rise to the governance arrangements that exist today. These are: the context of New Zealand’s development as a recently settled country; colonial and subsequent ‘nation-building’ institutional ideas overabout 150 years, up until the mid-1980s; institutional design and reorganisation flowing from a radical reordering in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and a recent re-emergence of Mäori values and interests in management and governance.These influences, both individually and collectively, help explain current New Zealand approaches to governing human-nature interactions. Furthermore, they may provide indications of what lies in the immediate future.