Perspectives, values and decisions
Why perspectives belong in this standard
- A cultural process is caused by people, so every part of it is somebody's decision. Explaining the decision means explaining what the decision-maker valued.
- A perspective is a body of thought, a theory or a worldview built up over time, which shapes what a group values and how it interprets evidence.
- A viewpoint is not the same thing. A viewpoint is one person's or group's opinion about one issue; a perspective is the wider way of seeing that produces it.
- Perspectives are examinable at Level 3 — AS91429 papers have repeatedly asked for TWO different perspectives and why people hold them — and they make AS91427 answers far stronger.
- Naming perspectives stops the answer becoming a moral argument. The point is to explain why reasonable people disagree, not to decide who is right.
The perspectives in the invented Te Rapanui case
- An economic perspective treats land as an asset that should be put to its highest-value use, and sees conversion as the rational response to a price signal. Held by investors, many farmers and some in the district's business community.
- An environmental or ecological perspective treats the catchment as a system with limits, and sees the 31 per cent fall in summer low flows and the rise in nitrate from 2.1 to 6.8 mg/L as evidence a limit has been passed.
- A kaitiakitanga perspective, held by mana whenua, frames the Rapanui River as a taonga and an ancestor with its own mauri, so a fall in river health is a failure of an obligation rather than an acceptable cost.
- A community or social perspective focuses on whether the district has more people, work and services than it did — the school roll from 96 to 310, the 1,240 jobs — and weighs those against rents up 78 per cent.
- These are not four opinions about one question. They are four different questions about the same basin, which is why the disagreement does not resolve by adding data.
How perspectives shape the process, not just react to it
- Each element of the process is controlled by someone acting from a perspective. The consent is issued by a council balancing statutory duties; the capital is committed by lenders assessing risk; the plant is built by a company assessing supply.
- Show the perspective inside the decision. The 2017 cap was not a change in the science — the trends had been visible for years. It was a change in which perspective carried the most weight in a statutory process.
- A change in perspective is a temporal variation. In the invented basin, the same council consented a scheme in 2001 and capped consents in 2017, and explaining that shift is explaining the process.
- Perspectives also explain the spatial pattern. Farmers above the pipeline are not less commercially minded; they are outside a boundary drawn by a decision made from a different perspective.
- This is a link between elements, which is exactly what the standard's insight definition rewards.
Using perspectives in the written answer
- Give each perspective a group, a value and an interpretation. Who holds it, what they think matters, and what they therefore make of the same evidence.
- Use the same piece of evidence twice. The 6.8 mg/L nitrate figure is a compliance margin to one group, a trend line to another, and evidence of harm to a taonga to a third. One figure, three readings, is the fastest demonstration of perspective there is.
- Do not caricature. No perspective in a real dispute holds that the environment does not matter or that jobs do not matter; they differ on what to do when the two conflict.
- Do not award a winner. AS91427 asks you to explain how the process operates and what it does, not to decide whether it should have happened. The evaluating standards are AS91431 and AS91428.
The link back to the exam
- Perspectives are not a separate paragraph to bolt on. They are the reason each element of the process behaves as it does, so they belong inside the explanation.
- The strongest use of a perspective in this paper is to explain a turning point — why a decision changed when the underlying facts did not.
- On the MAP / DIAGRAM page, a perspective can be an annotation. Consent capped here in 2017 after the council weighted river health above further conversion is a legitimate annotation and it carries a lot.
- Keep it evidenced. A perspective claimed without a decision or a figure attached is an assumption about what people think.
Worked Example
Worked example
Explain how the perspectives of different groups have shaped the operation of a cultural process you have studied.
Answer:
Step 1 — pick a decision, not a group. The decision is the 2017 cap on new water consents in the invented Te Rapanui Basin, because that decision changed the process more than any other.
Step 2 — state what did not change, because this is what makes it about perspective.
The evidence had been available for years. Median groundwater nitrate had been rising steadily from 2.1 mg/L in 1995, and summer low flows had been falling. Nothing new was discovered in 2017; what changed was the weight given to that evidence in the decision.
Step 3 — set out the perspectives that met in that decision.
- The economic perspective, held by many farmers and lenders, treats water as an input to be allocated to its most productive use, and points to 210 farms, 1,240 jobs and $1.6 bn of investment that a cap freezes in place.
- The ecological perspective treats the catchment as a system with a limit, reads 6.8 mg/L and a 31 per cent flow reduction as evidence that the limit has been reached, and holds that further allocation compounds a problem already in the aquifer.
- The kaitiakitanga perspective, held by mana whenua, treats the Rapanui River as a taonga with its own mauri, so declining river health is a breach of an obligation rather than a cost to be traded off.
Step 4 — explain how the decision resolved them.
The council could not satisfy all three, and it did not try to. It capped new consents while leaving existing ones intact — a decision that protects the position of those who converted before 2017 and prevents anyone else from doing so. That is not a compromise between the perspectives; it is a choice about when the balance changed.
Step 5 — draw the conclusion.
The turning point in this process was not technological, hydrological or economic. It was a change in which perspective carried statutory weight, and the whole shape of the graph after 2017 — 2,000 ha of growth in seven years, against 47,000 ha in the eleven before — follows from it. A cultural process runs at the speed its decision-makers' perspectives allow, which is why two districts with identical soils and rainfall can have completely different histories.