Matunga argues that indigenous planning is a distinct tradition, not a participation technique bolted onto mainstream practice: it is older than the profession, grounded in indigenous knowledge, cosmology and law, and directed at the wellbeing of a people in a place across generations. Its unit of concern is the ancestral territory - catchment, coastline, river and sacred site - held by kin-based collectives with obligations of guardianship (kaitiakitanga) rather than by owners with development rights. Planning is therefore an expression of self-determination and of treaty and title rights, using the community's own institutions, decision protocols and time horizons. He offers a framework of indigenous planning traditions, processes and outcomes that can operate alongside, and negotiate with, the settler statutory system.
It gave a scattered practice a coherent theoretical foundation and pushed planning schools and statutes to recognise indigenous plans as plans, not consultations - visible in iwi and hapu management plans under New Zealand law, tribal and Nunavut land-use planning, and Australian native-title agreements. It also introduced legal personhood for rivers and country, and long-horizon custodial obligation, into mainstream environmental and regional planning.
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