Citizens increasingly want to become active participants in urban planning and governments increasingly put in effort to ensure inclusive planning processes. This paper analyzes the institutional work that underlies the attempt to institutionalize a more active role of citizens in urban planning. It draws on a case in which a group of citizens aims to […]
Spatial planning is increasingly gaining renewed attention as an invaluable tool for addressing all kinds of socio-environmental issues. However what planning is and could be in contemporary society often differs from those forms of planning that classic readings on planning elaborate on. The Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory therefore presents a timely and very welcome […]
This special issue of Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning draws the attention to ongoing concerns about the management of natural resources (NRM): their exploration, extraction, processing, and commodification is still happening in ways that are perceived to be socially unjust and ecologically unsustainable. The special issue seeks to highlight how the Foucaultian notion of power/knowledge remains […]
In this paper, we present a conceptual framework extending Foucaultian insights on the relations between power and knowledge to link up with current insights into studies of natural resource management (NRM) and more broadly environmental studies. We classify discourses in NRM according to understandings of social–ecological systems and argue that grasping those larger contexts can push […]
Place branding strategies are increasingly used to promote cities, regions and national parks. In this paper we analyse the evolution of landscape governance in three Flemish regions to discern the virtues of these place branding strategies in relation to other forms of environmental policy and spatial planning. In all three regions state led policies and […]
Resilience has become a key concept in the sciences and practices of environmental governance. Yet governing for resilience is a major challenge because it requires governance systems to be both stable and flexible at the same time. Achieving a productive balance between stability and flexibility is a key challenge. The concept of “institutional work” is […]
“This paper offers a response to a claim in Planning Theory that “there is no planning—only planning practices“. “When a highly esteemed colleague as Prof Alexander looks back at his distinguished career and observes a stockpile of problems in the planning discipline, to the extent that both planning and planning theory seem to lose their unity and validity […]
Understanding how institutions change is critical to improving environmental governance at all scales. In this paper we explore the concept of ‘institutional work’ within broader theorising about institutional change and evolving governance. Institutional work focuses on the role of actors in creating, maintaining, or disrupting institutional frameworks (Lawrence et al., 2009. It is a concept […]
Last weekend I had the pleasure to be invited to join a conference on rural innovation organized by the Alberta Centre for Sustainable Rural Communities (ACSRC) and Battle River Alliance for Economic Development (BRAED). The conference offered community development professionals, councilors, mayors, and a range of other people actively involved in governing the rural areas, […]
Trust has become an important issue in governance. It plays an important role in the interactions and negotiations between different actors.To organize new governance arrangements and to restore trust in spatial planning, contracts are often seen as vital policy instruments. The relations between contracts and trust are regularly studied from various perspectives. In this article, […]