Submission on the draft Economics and Business Curriculum 2026

Alongside Regenerative Economics (international) we are pleased to submit our feedback on the draft Economics and Business Curriculum to the Ministry of Education.

Our submission expands on these key concerns:

• The curriculum invokes wellbeing as a central goal throughout but does not give students any framework to use. He Ara Waiora and the Living Standards Framework are government frameworks designed for this purpose and should be named explicitly.

• The relationship between economic activity and Earth systems is not established. Ecological limits appear as measurement problems or policy considerations, not as material constraints on what is economically possible.

• Households and unpaid care are absent. The curriculum lists market systems, government provision, community-based approaches, and te ao Māori frameworks as resource allocation systems, but not households, despite households being one of the most significant provisioning institutions in any economy.

• The te ao Māori integration is strong in knowledge content but not yet operational as analytical practice. There is no expectation that students assess policy or resource use decisions against the obligations of kaitiakitanga, manaakitanga, and whanaungatanga as evaluative frameworks.

• The capabilities framework does not include normative or value-based reasoning, and the AI content lacks critical perspectives.

We hope the Ministry of Education incorporates this feedback to strengthen students' understanding of how healthy social and ecological systems support our ability to meet all our human needs.