\section{Conclusion}

To summarise, there is little opportunity for the general public to
influence the decision on resource consent applications, because only
a fraction of them is publicly notified.  The decision whether to
notify or not is made by the council and depends on the quality and
coverage of the local plan.  Overall, plans are of medium to poor
quality, making it difficult for planners to evaluate a proposal and
its accompanying assessment in the intended spirit of the policies.

More importantly, however, the implementation of a plan is influenced
by the responsible council's capacity and the attitude of the council
officers assigned to evaluate resource consent application.  Councils
are subject to capacity bottlenecks which give rise to an
implementation gap, i.e. the use of less sophisticated procedures and
methods than declared in the plans.  As a result, inadequate
assessments of environmental effects are more likely to pass through
the review stage.

Since consultation is not a mandatory part of the resource consent
process under the RMA, non-notified applications may never be exposed
to much needed independent scrutiny.  Notified applications with
assessments that are hard to understand for lay people may require
members of the public to gain access to expert knowledge and
professional representation to have their concerns heard and accepted
as valid.

Grinlinton's statement seems to imply that councils are purposefully
negligent in the evaluation of applications that are expected to have
economic benefits, or at least accept this bias.  This analysis,
however, suggests that this is not the case.  While it may be true
that individual councils are primarily interested in the economic
effects of a proposal and only take a secondary interest in the
environmental or social impacts, it seems that the two major
difficulties in consent processing are a lack in the capacity to
implement plans and a history of underestimating the size of the group
of `directly affected' persons.  As a result, the ability of the
general public to participate in the decision-making process under the
requirements for consultation laid out by the RMA is severely limited.