In May 2000, the Canterbury region’s local bodies operating through the Canterbury Forum  commissioned the Canterbury Development Corporation Ltd (CDC) to co-ordinate the development of a Canterbury Regional Economic Development Strategy (CREDS), ‘Creating Tomorrow’s Canterbury’.

Two significant catalysts prompted the process:

• A desire and commitment early in 2000, on the part of the Canterbury Forum, for local government to provide leadership and focus to regional economic development, recognising that only by taking a wider regional perspective could appropriate responses be made to the challenges posed by an increasingly global economy.

• A clear signal from the then new Labour-Alliance coalition Government that it wanted to increasingly work in partnership with those regions of New Zealand who could clearly demonstrate a broad based strategic approach to their regional future.  Such regions would be able to identify regional initiatives that would benefit from central government funding input on the clear understanding that measurable outcomes would be delivered.

While a significant number of projects and activities resulted from the 2000 strategy, the document and its action framework suffered from being too high-level in its focus.  This was a result of trying to capture and address issues of region-wide significance to the exclusion of projects that would have meaning and measurable impact at local and sub-region levels.

The 2005 update of CREDS has a dual role:  

1) providing strategies and an action framework to address the major region-wide issues identified in the consultation process.  

2) serving as the regional economic component of the Councils’ Long-Term Council Community Plans (LTCCP). 

The Action Framework includes responses to issues at the individual district and sub-region level in the form of stand alone strategic plans for those areas.  As such, CREDS 2005 provides a ‘top down, bottom up’ strategic commentary and action agenda for Canterbury and its constituent districts and cities. The CREDS 2005 also recognises the importance of the Ngai Tahu and Maori input.