Melanie Mark-Shadbolt
Melanie Mark-Shadbolt (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa Tāmaki nui-a-Rua, Te Arawa (Ngāti Kearoa Ngāti Tuarā), Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Raukawa (Ngāti Huia), Rangitāne (Hurunui-o-Rangi), Ngāti Rārua Ātiawa) is an Indigenous environmental advocate, environmental sociologist, and specialist in Māori environmental policy, governance and system change.
She is co-founder and Tumu Whakarae of Te Tira Whakamātaki, a national pan-Māori environmental and research organisation working across biosecurity, biodiversity, climate resilience, emergency response, and seed and biobanking.
Mel has spent much of her career working at the messy intersection of policy, science, mātauranga Māori and implementation. From 2018–2023 she worked inside the Crown, including as Deputy Secretary Māori Rights and Interests at the Ministry for the Environment, where she was involved in major environmental and resource-management reform.
Her work now focuses increasingly on a deceptively simple question: why, after decades of strategies, engagement frameworks and good intentions, are our systems still struggling to produce different outcomes for te taiao?
Mel has also served as Director Māori for the Biological Heritage National Science Challenge and currently chairs the B3 Better Border Biosecurity Collaboration Council and is Pou Whakahaere for the Hatural Harads and Resilience Platform. She received the Public Policy Award at the 2021 Women of Influence Awards, has a number of biosecurity awards, and was made a Companion of the Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2026.
Beyond Engagement: Māori Power, Policy and the Messy Business of System Change
Aotearoa is not short of engagement frameworks, strategies, partnership principles or good intentions. Yet too often, Māori engagement still happens without meaningful shifts in power, decision-making or outcomes for te taiao.
Drawing on her experience working both inside and outside the Crown, including during major resource management reform, Melanie Mark-Shadbolt reflects on what Māori-Crown policy processes can teach us about the harder work of system change.
This keynote explores the opportunities the Crown misses when engagement is mistaken for participation, and the opportunities Māori can also miss when the pursuit of perfect policy, precise language or greater authority collides with political reality. In a three-year electoral cycle, time is itself a policy variable.
Mel asks what it takes to recognise an imperfect but useful policy window, when ambiguity can create space for future evolution, and when compromise risks entrenching the very system we are trying to change.
Ultimately, system change is not achieved when a strategy is written or a hui is held. It becomes real when power, institutions, incentives and everyday practice change and when those changes survive the people and governments that created them.