The Resource Management Act, the cornerstone of New Zealand's legislated environmental policy, reflects the mediation of internationally debated constructs of sustainable development and profoundly local meanings of living within nature. The outcome is a made-in-New Zealand approach to conceptualizing sustainable management in national environmental policy. This paper demonstrates how and why the contribution of non-New Zealanders and the first peoples of New Zealand, the Maori, to this conceptualization differ so profoundly from each other. External influences, such as the thinking of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) on defining sustainable development, have the greatest impact in the initial conceptualization of policy formulation. It is through Kingdon's (1984) policy stream, rather than through his other two streams of politics and problems, that outside views weigh in most convincingly. First peoples are positioned to be influential in policy formulation through all three of Kingdon's streams because of their appreciation of locality and long-term commitment to place. These factors are reflective of a philosophy and ideology which is not the bedrock of state legislation about sustainable management.