Ken Piddington

Position

Senior Associate

Key Duties

Ken Piddington comes from a lengthy career in public policy at the national and international level. Initially, he was recruited to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and had a brief secondment to The Treasury before working overseas on trade and economic policy in Brussels, London and Geneva. After 1971, he spent a period serving in the Pacific, during which he helped to establish the Forum Secretariat, the Forum Line and the South Pacific Regional Environment Program. Returning to Wellington, Ken switched his focus to the national policy agenda, particularly issues of environmental policy and the planning process. He became the first Director of the NZ Planning Council in 1977, Commissioner for the Environment from 1980 to 1986, and then head of the Department of Conservation for its first two years.

A call from the World Bank in 1988 triggered a career shift back to international work and a series of different challenges, such as the establishment of the Global Environment Facility in 1990 and the directorship of the new Department of Environment.

In partnership with colleagues at Waikato University, Ken is currently pursuing a study of resource-use taxation, drawing on the current surge of international work on environmental tax reform. The aim is to prepare a roadmap for environmental tax reform (ETR) in New Zealand, and summarise the main issues and options for any policy movement in that direction.

This links with the possible use of taxes in the revised approach to Climate Change Policy, which has been a focus for Ken’s interest over 20 years. He acted as IPS co-ordinator for the successful conference Climate Change and Governance: Critical Issues for New Zealand and the Pacific, which was staged by Victoria University in March 2006.