how local authority planners manage the COMPLEXITY OF SPATIAL PLANNING

Sammanfattning

Abstract for an individual paper to track 11: Land use policy and governance HOW LOCAL AUTHORITY PLANNERS MANAGE COMPLEX CONTEXT OF SPATIAL PLANNING Societal policy making can in the perspective of meta theory of social constructionism be seen as competition between different strong discourses. One of current the main policy discourses for spatial planning is sustainable development, in official context defined as ecological, so-cial and economical sustainability. In a power perspective these three dimensions can be char-acterised as competing discourses. New requirements are also held on the local authority planners to work in open processes with a growing number of actors and stakeholders. In the planning processes is also dealt with great volumes of basic data where epistemological and technical knowledge that must be co-ordinated with the actor’s values. The paper is based on an investigation of how political and societal activities on the Euro-pean, national and local level is influencing the local authority spatial planning processes and how planning administrations and planner officers manage this complex context of planning. The main research question: What happens when political visions, objectives together with values from a wide number of actors and stakeholders are implemented in local authority spa-tial planning? The entire investigation is made in two parts of case studies in Sweden. The first one is made as a multiple-case study of twenty planners most of them in local authorities of different sizes and different geographic locations in Sweden. The second one is a deeper case study of the planning organisation in one middle-sized local authority with underlying units of two plan-ning processes. The investigations are implemented with qualitative research methods through interviews of the main actors and document studies. The empirical findings are interpreted in an abductive way. The findings from the current study is relevant partly for planning education getting students conscious about the complex context in practice and partly for practitioner getting deeper in-sight in the background of some problems they are involved in their daily work

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https://res.slu.se/id/publ/1379