Adapting strategic infrastructure planning: process interventions for sustainable development

Abstract

Almost three decades after its rise, sustainable development remains difficult to realize in practice. Worldwide, in critical sectors such as water, energy and transport, investments in conventional—often unsustainable—infrastructure continue, while the adoption of sustainable alternatives remains too slow. Among a range of socio-institutional impediments, processes of long-term strategic planning for public infrastructure represent a major challenge for sustainable development. Scholars explain this challenge with respect to the dominance of traditional planning approaches, arguing that the predictive, reactive and incremental planning culture, which is entrenched in today’s planning practice, cannot address the wide range of uncertainties and complexities that need to be dealt with in the context of sustainable development. On the other hand, the new generation of long-term planning approaches, which provide better understandings of the implications of uncertainties and complexities, have had limited uptake in practice. The literature, however, often takes a normative stance in advocating alternative planning approaches, without explaining how radically different planning approaches can find their way into the well-established conventional modes of practice. Against this backdrop, this PhD thesis aimed to theoretically and empirically understand the perceived challenges of strategic infrastructure planning in the context of sustainable development, and to translate this knowledge into process interventions for adapting the conventional strategic planning toward improved outcomes for sustainable development. This could also be considered as capacity building in the ongoing planning practice for the uptake, or mainstreaming, of alternative approaches. The first phase of this research involved mapping the development of the strategic planning scholarship over time, in order to identify the path-dependent attributes and the carriers of strategic planning processes that could undermine alternative solutions. The second phase involved an empirical investigation of the planning practice. Using the case of water resources planning in Melbourne, Australia, the research revealed planning problems that thwart the vision of sustainable development and impede sustainable infrastructure investments. In the third phase, based on the insights from the previous phases, two standalone, yet complementary, planning interventions were developed and tested in real-world planning contexts in Melbourne’s water sector. The first intervention aimed at improving planners’ reflexivity with regard to the limits of traditional planning approaches and building capacity for alternative approaches. The second intervention focused on enabling the systemic diagnosis of impediments to sustainable infrastructure delivery as part of the strategic planning process. This thesis is one of the first studies at the interface of strategic planning science and practice in the context of sustainable development. It therefore contributes to our scholarly understanding, as well as practical abilities, toward realizing sustainable development.