Te Waihanga / New Zealand Infrastructure Commission has published Sapere’s landmark study into the costs of consenting infrastructure projects under the Resource Management Act (RMA), a project that involved undertaking interviews and financial analysis on 186 infrastructure projects and international benchmarking.

Our team’s conclusions? The RMA imposes significant costs on infrastructure developers (a median 5.5% of a project’s budget), smaller projects face disproportionate costs, consenting is becoming more complex and costly, and New Zealand is at the upper end of approval costs compared to overseas. Our analysis and insights can be found on the Infrastructure Commission website.

Our team included David Moore, Jeff Loan, Sally Wyatt, Kelvin Woock, Sally Carrick, and Zabard Hartmann.