Institutionalising health impact assessment:the New Zealand experience

Abstract

This paper reviews the development of health impact assessment (HIA) in New Zealand to reveal factors which inhibited its effective institutionalisation until recently. It considers how differing views of HIA have affected the institutionalisation process, and assesses the longer-term prospects for HIA in policy- and project-level assessments. There is lack of a clear statutory mandate for considering health impacts under the Resource Management Act, although HIA and closely related health risk assessments have been carried out under other legislation, including the Biosecurity Act. Consequently, different understandings of the nature and purpose of HIA have developed, associated with different practitioner communities, often operating in isolation from other practitioners and the wider impact assessment community. The renewed effort to mobilise HIA has emphasised policy-level application in central government; the Ministry for Health now has an HIA Unit, and statutory recognition of the process is promised in the new Public Health Act.