Five marine reserves opened along New Zealand’s southeastern coastline on July 1, 2026 C.E., under a co-management model that gives the regional Māori tribe Kāi Tahu shared decision-making authority alongside the Department of Conservation. The network, called Te Au Roa o Te Rakihouia, is the first in the country to be co-managed by Indigenous people and the government through joint governance and a shared marine ranger team — and conservationists hope it points toward a better way of protecting the ocean.
At a glance
- Māori co-management: The five reserves are the first in New Zealand co-managed by an Indigenous tribe and the government using shared decision-making and a joint ranger team, with Kāi Tahu and the Department of Conservation holding equal authority.
- Marine protected area: Together the five reserves cover 119 square miles (308 square kilometers), protecting seabed habitats, offshore canyons, rocky reefs, tidal lagoons, and kelp forests in New Zealand’s far southeast.
- Marine rangers: A team of six full-time rangers, employed through the Kāi Tahu tribal council, is conducting ecological monitoring, species restoration, and community education — with research partnerships extending to the University of Otago.
The network’s name refers to the long wake of Te Rakihouia, a Kāi Tahu ancestor who explored the waters of the South Island. That ancestry is central to what makes this effort different from most marine conservation programs.
A decade of grassroots work
The process began in 2014 C.E. with a roughly 15-member forum drawing from conservation, commercial fishing, recreational fishing, tourism, and science. Edward Ellison, a Kāi Tahu leader and one of the network’s six governors, served as the forum’s deputy chair. One of his early conditions was that all forum meetings be held in marae — Māori gathering places — to ground the process in how Kāi Tahu work together.
“That set a really great base and people felt comfortable and understood,” Ellison told Mongabay. “We were an important part of the forum as a result.”
After nearly four years of planning and community consultation, the forum submitted two alternative network proposals to the government. In 2019 C.E., the government chose the larger plan, which outlined 12 protected areas in total. Nine days before the October 2023 C.E. general election, the then center-left government formally approved six marine reserves. When power shifted to a center-right coalition, the new government continued the process — and five of the six reserves opened on schedule.
What co-management actually looks like
This is one of many ocean and marine protection milestones worldwide, but few have built Indigenous governance so directly into their structure. Kāi Tahu and the Department of Conservation share authority over the reserves rather than one party consulting the other. The marine ranger team is employed through the Kāi Tahu tribal council and works alongside government staff — not for them.
Brendan Flack, a customary fisheries guardian for the Kāti Huirapa sub-tribe and leader of the ranger team, told Mongabay that rangers are hired based on skills, knowledge, and experience — not tribal membership alone. The team has already harvested giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) in partnership with a University of Otago researcher, testing it for bioactive compounds. They’ve also worked to remove wakame (Undaria pinnatifida), an invasive seaweed. The goal is to develop high-value products from these materials to fund the program’s long-term expansion.
Chris Hepburn, director of the aquaculture and fisheries program at the University of Otago and co-coordinator of the research partnership Te Tiaki Mahinga Kai, said the ranger positions provide “a pathway into research or conservation or restoration” in a region where employment options are limited.
The broader research evidence supports the model. A 2024 C.E. systematic review published in One Earth found that the more authority Indigenous people and local communities held in conservation initiatives, the better the outcomes. That finding echoes Ellison’s experience — and his long-standing frustration with how that authority has historically been denied.
A contrast with top-down conservation
In 2015 C.E., New Zealand’s then Prime Minister John Key announced the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary at a United Nations meeting, drawing international praise. But the plan was developed with relatively little consultation with Māori groups whose fishing rights — enshrined in law decades earlier — the sanctuary would have violated. It never came into effect.
Te Au Roa o Te Rakihouia grew from the opposite direction. Ellison, who told Mongabay he has long opposed no-take marine reserves because of their history of restricting Indigenous fishing access, nonetheless helped shape this one.
“This is the only example of its type in the country and … could well be quite a good model going forward,” he said. “It’s taking the best out of our legislation that we can and making it work in a way that carries the spirit of us exercising our rakatirataka, which is authority, and kaitiakitaka, which is guardianship.”
The Māori people descend from Polynesian settlers who migrated to New Zealand many hundreds of years ago and carry a deep tradition of ocean stewardship. For Ellison, the reserves are also about preserving that knowledge for coming generations: “The purpose is also to retain memory, location, kōrero associated with these places, and build on that going forward for future generations.”
Unfinished work
The network’s completion remains some way off. A legal challenge by the Otago Rock Lobster Industry Association, centered on one reserve called Te Umukōau, led to a December 2025 C.E. settlement requiring a “limited reconsideration” of that reserve’s boundaries. No final decision has been released and no opening date has been set. The five Type 2 mixed-use protected areas and a kelp protection area — six of the 12 planned zones — also have no timetable for finalization.
Coverage figures tell their own story. The five open reserves together cover about 0.01% of New Zealand’s waters. With this addition, 0.46% of the country’s waters are highly protected and 20.38% have some form of protection. The world’s nations agreed in 2022 C.E. to effectively conserve 30% of land and sea by 2030 C.E. — the 30×30 framework. Ellison acknowledged that “strong commercial interests” will make ocean targets hard to reach. But he expects the reserves to generate baseline data on what happens when habitats are protected versus commercially fished, with positive spillover effects for fisheries beyond their borders.
Globally, outcomes like this one are consistent with what researchers have found in Pacific Island nations building community-led marine protection: conservation works better when the people who know a place best are the ones with authority over it. New Zealand’s southeastern waters may now offer one of the clearest examples of what that can look like in practice — and one of the most concrete Indigenous rights wins in ocean governance anywhere.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Mongabay
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Papua New Guinea establishes Western Manus Marine Protected Area
- Samoa protects 30% of its ocean with community-led marine reserves
- The Good News for Humankind archive on marine conservation
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