In the twenty-five years Dr Marie Doole has examined environmental regulation – as a practitioner, academic, policy advisor in local and central government, NGO analyst, and now independent researcher – one question has driven her work: why do our aspirations for environmental protection so rarely translate into actual environmental outcomes?
“It became very quickly evident to me in my career that our aspirations for the environment were virtually never met in environmental legal systems,” she says. “And I became quite interested in why. Why the gulf? Why the difference between aspirations and outcomes?”
This deceptively simple question has led her to the conclusion that most environmental regulators feel but few can articulate with clarity: the gap between aspiration and outcome is not simply an accident of poor design. It is the cumulative and intentional effect of power being systematically concentrated in the hands of those who benefit from environmental degradation.
That process has a name. It’s called regulatory capture. And what makes Doole’s work distinctive is that she has moved beyond diagnosis to intervention. This is a story about how capture works in practice – how it accumulates across the policy cycle, how regulators can recognise it, and what tools exist to manage it.
“Regulatory capture has always been this kind of nebulous, slippery concept,” she explains. “Many were not quite sure what it meant or where the edges were. But they knew when something felt off. It wasn’t quite corruption, but something was wrong.”
“Regulatory capture has always been this kind of nebulous, slippery concept… It wasn’t quite corruption, but something was wrong.”
In partnership with the Australasian Environmental Law Enforcement and Regulators neTwork (AELERT) – a membership network of over 100 environmental agencies across Australia and New Zealand – Doole has helped develop a toolkit that regulators can use to identify, understand, and manage capture risk within their own organisations. Meanwhile, she has run training tailored for regulators to support these outcomes and build their confidence.
And these tools and strategies are being tested under pressure: New Zealand has passed the Regulatory Standards Act and introduced the Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill. Australia is grappling with resource management reforms. The UK is navigating post-Brexit environmental governance.
For regulators trying to do the right thing, the moment is acute.
The dye in the river
To understand what Doole means by regulatory capture, abandon the mental image most people carry: a corrupt official accepting a bribe, a revolving door between regulator and industry, a flagrant conflict of interest. Those exist, but they represent the visible tail of a more insidious phenomenon.
Doole describes capture using a metaphor developed in her 2024 paper “Navigating Murky Waters: characterising capture in environmental regulatory systems.” Imagine the policy-making process as a river. At various points – during agenda setting, consultation design, policy drafting, regulatory strategy development, and implementation – vested interests can inject influence.
“The undue influence injects dye into the river such that it changes its colour progressively over time,” Doole explains. “And of course, once dye goes into water, it’s quite hard to get it out.”
The metaphor matters operationally. Capture accumulates. It changes the water itself. A regulator might inherit a system where the foundational choices have already been shaped by undue influence. By the time a frontline compliance officer is trying to enforce a rule, the game is already partially lost.
This reframing alleviates much blame from the frontline. Those environmental regulators are not usually failing because they lack integrity or capability. They are often constrained by systems shaped upstream by forces they didn’t choose.
“If you’ve got very narrow, targeted consultation focused almost entirely on vested interests and no one else outside that tent, that’s a real red flag,” Doole says. “By the time you get to the auditors on the front line, the horse has bolted.”
Reading the orange flags
Doole has identified specific points in the policy cycle where capture is particularly likely, and the “orange flags” that signal it is happening. Some are structural: Does your regulator’s governing board consist entirely of active industry participants? Some are cultural: Can factual information that contradicts the minister’s preferred outcome travel up the chain of command? Some are operational: Is enforcement on politically powerful industries lighter than on others?
The AELERT Regulatory Capture Toolkit, released in September 2024, operationalises this thinking. It’s designed to be self-diagnostic: an agency can work through a structured self-assessment and identify vulnerabilities. The toolkit stratifies risk across three levels – frontline staff, people managers, and executive – and recognises that different levers for mitigation are available at each level.
“There is a collective responsibility,” Doole explains. “If all your activity to mitigate capture is happening at a staff level and the upper two tiers are aggravating the risk, then that’s a systemic problem that needs to be addressed.”
Early adopters have been engaged. Doole has presented the toolkit at AELERT member meetings and at a workshop in Queensland. “Everyone’s got a story,” she says. “Everyone recognises it as a problem. Ask any regulator. Every damn day, they say.”
The wellbeing cost
One aspect of regulatory capture that rarely appears in academic literature is its effect on the people inside regulatory organisations. Doole has identified it as a critical factor, particularly in environmental regulation where the gap between mandate and outcome is largest.
“The impact on staff wellbeing within a regulator of feeling like you can’t do your job because of external interests can be very significant,” she says.
Environmental regulators are acutely aware of the constraints on their authority. Many entered the profession because they cared about environmental outcomes and effective regulatory implementation. They encounter daily the tension between what regulation should accomplish and what it is permitted to accomplish. When external pressure makes it clear that environmental protection is not a priority, the psychological toll can be substantial.
“Regulators are pretty smart people and they tend to have a lot of personal integrity,” Doole notes. “But putting them in a situation where they can’t exercise that integrity creates stress. It can drive talented people away.”
As capable people leave, institutional capability declines. As capability declines, the vulnerability to capture increases. This is why Doole’s work ultimately comes down to something simpler: creating conditions where regulators can retain their integrity. That means clear strategy, institutional capability, transparency, and protecting staff who are trying to do the right thing.
Case study: the Regulatory Standards Act
When the Regulatory Standards Act received royal assent last November, it marked the culmination of a legislative battle that had consumed New Zealand’s regulatory landscape for years. The bill had been introduced before, battered back, reintroduced, and battered back again. This time, public opposition was unprecedented.
Submissions on the Regulatory Standards Bill numbered in the hundreds of thousands, with overwhelming opposition. Yet it passed, with minimal changes.
To Doole, this fact itself is diagnostic. It is a marker of capture – not of the Regulatory Standards Act as an isolated policy proposal, but of the political and institutional systems that allowed legislation opposed by nearly everyone to become law.
“When you’ve got that level of public opposition, we’re no longer talking about democracy,” she says. “We’re talking about capture.”
“When you’ve got that level of public opposition, we’re no longer talking about democracy. We’re talking about capture.”
The act has some appealing features on the surface. It is designed to improve regulatory quality and stewardship. New Zealand does have a problem with outdated regulation that sits unchanged for decades. But Doole’s concern is with what sits underneath. Three mechanisms stand out:
The “severe impairment” principle, which requires compensation whenever environmental regulation “severely impairs” property rights. The problem is that “severe impairment” has no established legal definition. “Any time you have a concept that has no judicial basis, you have a block of jurisprudence yet to come,” Doole notes.
The focus on cost-benefit analysis sounds reasonable until you’re trying to justify environmental protection against economic interests. “When you’re dealing with public goods and stuff that is free but precious, often the calculations don’t go your way.”
Intervention powers were granted to the Regulatory Standards Board, which can review and in some cases overturn regulatory decisions. This creates what Doole calls a “chilling effect.”
“It’s very unlikely you’re going to get this black-and-white analysis of ‘we were going to do all this lovely stuff, but then the Regulatory Standards Act landed, so we dispensed with it,’” she says. “What happens is those conversations never occur.”
What brings Doole to her most direct critique is that the Regulatory Standards Act itself may be a product of capture. “Where you have parts of legislation that amplify the position of vested interests, they will tend to use it to the maximum degree,” she explains. Regulators by contrast tend to stay in the centre lane.
The timing intensifies this risk. Opposition parties have suggested they will repeal the act if they come to power at the 2026 election. This creates an incentive structure for regulated industries to extract optimal advantage while they can.
The whiplash of reform
In the span of three years, New Zealand has fundamentally reorganised its approach to environmental regulation four times. The Resource Management Act (RMA), which has governed land use and environmental protection since 1991, was initially set to be replaced by two new statutes, the Natural and Built Environment Act (NBA) and the Spatial Planning Act (SPA), passed in 2023. Those replacement laws were then repealed later that year, returning the system in effect to the RMA. Now, two further bills, the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill, have been introduced, proposing yet another restructuring of the environmental regulatory framework.
The cumulative effect is regulatory whiplash: sustained uncertainty about basic systems, frameworks, and expectations. For environmental regulators, this fractures capability as councils and agencies must rebuild expertise from scratch with each legislative reset. Regulatory posture is destabilised – when the rules are changing constantly, regulators become cautious, interpreting rules narrowly and postponing difficult choices. Political risk becomes unpredictable, making it harder to attract talented people to regulatory roles or justify long-term capability investment.
The proposed Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill introduce significant architectural changes, including a centralised national environmental compliance regulator. Doole sees both promise and risk. A larger role for a national regulator could theoretically provide more consistent enforcement, more specialised expertise, and insulation from local political pressures.
But the consolidation also introduces new vulnerabilities. A smaller number of decision-makers becomes easier to influence. A single institutional failure becomes a system-wide failure. The transition itself creates years of uncertainty and institutional disruption.
Environmental compliance monitoring and enforcement data suggests regional councils have increased enforcement activity substantially in recent years, yet compliance rates remain low across key sectors. Politically powerful industries continue to top prosecution figures. That gap suggests that something deeper than enforcement intensity is at work. A national regulator will inherit this gap. If it’s not resolved, centralisation may simply relocate the problem without solving it.
It is also not the only institutional change underway – local government faces considerable reform beyond the compliance role, the details of which are unclear. Combined with a tapering of their role through legislative change, and financial interventions such as rates caps, the volatility will tend to aggravate the risk of regulatory failure.
This is the interpretation regulators must grapple with: whether structural reform can succeed where behavioural change has been difficult, or whether the reform itself creates new opportunities for capture in the very institutions designed to resist it.
What regulators should do now
When asked what environmental regulators across New Zealand, Australia, and the UK should prioritise in the immediate term, amongst the churn, Doole offers three things.
First, strategy. Be explicitly clear about what you are trying to achieve and why. When an organisation lacks a clear articulation of purpose and strategy, it becomes vulnerable to drift. “Be able to tell the story of why you’re doing what you’re doing,” Doole says. “Every regulator should be brave enough to do that.”
Second, capability. Invest in people. Build expertise. Create systems that allow subject matter experts to influence how the organisation works. “Your ‘risk-based approach’ should be based on evidence not reckons, and linked to the aims of the regime.”
Third, transparency. Be honest about what’s working and what isn’t. Publish your compliance monitoring and enforcement metrics. Tell the public what you’re doing and what results you’re achieving. Legitimacy – the sense that a regulator is doing the right thing for the right reasons – is one of the few defences against capture.
“Get the basics right,” Doole says. “Strategy. Capability. Transparency. Protect your staff. Stay evidence-based.”
Choosing independence
Understanding where Doole is positioned requires understanding why she left government. She has worked inside the Ministry for the Environment in policy design and regulatory strategy roles. She has sat in Select Committee hearings. She has worked in the drafting of law and regulation. She has seen firsthand what it takes to navigate the political process of regulatory change.
“When I emerged from that period of time in central government, I realised there still hadn’t been much effort to address regulatory capture in New Zealand,” she says. “Yet when I looked around, I noted its increased prevalence very clearly. I think we’ve fallen from grace considerably. If New Zealand cannot better moderate the power of vested interests on environmental legal systems, I think our current adverse trajectories will continue and probably accelerate.”
The decision to go independent in early 2024 was deliberate. It was partly about freedom to speak without institutional constraint. But it was also about intellectual work – being able to spend time understanding a problem deeply without the pressure to produce immediate policy solutions.
“I suppose it struck me that if nobody else was going to pull capture apart and give practitioners a way of thinking about it, I might as well have a punt at giving this murky boogeyman a bit of a face.”
The work has given her certain convictions. She believes environmental protection and the integrity of regulatory systems are intimately linked. She believes power and influence matter more than most policy analysis acknowledges. She believes regulators are trying hard to do good work, and many of them are failing not because of personal shortcomings but because they are constrained by systems designed, often unintentionally, to constrain them.
“Regulation is fundamentally about behaviour change. And humans are really hard to change the behaviour of.”
“Regulation is fundamentally about behaviour change,” she notes. “And humans are really hard to change the behaviour of.”
Why this matters now
Dr Marie Doole is speaking at a moment of considerable pressure on environmental regulation. The Regulatory Standards Act is now law. The Planning and Natural Environment Bills are in Parliament. The Resource Management Act’s era is ending.
At the same time, the tools she has developed – the framework for understanding capture, the AELERT toolkit, the research on compliance monitoring and enforcement – are finding audience among regulators who recognise that something is profoundly wrong with how their systems are functioning.
“I’ve realised that power and influence is so important, particularly in environmental law,” Doole reflects. “But we had relatively nascent systems for describing that and doing anything about it.”
That gap – between recognising the problem and having tools to address it – is narrowing. But it is narrowing at precisely the moment when the political and institutional pressure on environmental regulation is highest.
For regulators trying to do the right thing, that may be the most important work happening in the regulatory ecosystem right now.
“Strategy. Capability. Transparency,” she says. “And remember that in every regulatory failure, there’s usually someone inside trying to do the right thing.”
