The Institutionalisation of Sami Interest in Municipal Comprehensive Planning: A Comparison Between Norway and Sweden

Strategic environmental assessment in Swedish municipal planning. Trends and challenges

ABSTRACTSpatial planning using a landscape approach has been recognized as being essential for reconciling ecological, cultural and socio-economic dimensions in sustainable development (SuD). Although embraced as a concept, there is a lack of planning tools capable of incorporating multi-level, multifunctional and multi-sectoral perspectives, especially in a rural context. The departure point in this paper is the legal requirements for municipal comprehensive planning (MCP) in Sweden and an e-mail survey about incentives, stakeholder involvement, policy integration and implementation in MCP in all 15 Swedish mountain municipalities. The purpose of this explorative study is to examine whether MCP could be a tool in planning for SuD. Results indicate a general lack of resources and a low status of MCP that affect, and even limit, stakeholder involvement, policy integration and implementation. However, legal requirements for MCP are targeted at SuD, and municipal personnel responsible for planning appreciate the potential of MCP. Therefore, there is potential to develop the MCP into an effective landscape planning tool. To accomplish this, the status of an active planning process has to be raised, the mandate of the local planning agency has to be secured, and residents and land users have to be involved throughout the planning process.

Today, spatial planning is expected to deliver climate adaptation and to manage, merge and balance various societal interests and priorities. To what extent proactive shaping of change is enabled by spatial planning practice is less explored. This paper illustrates how the ideals and ambitions of climate adaptation are manifested in waterfront spatial planning via a case study of Norrköping, Sweden. Based on interviews with spatial planners and politicians responsible for strategic urban development planning, our study identifies a divergence in ambitions, approaches and positions. In local development plans, the position taken has less to do with climate risk severity than with an area's perceived political and economic attractiveness. When perceived attractiveness is low, precautionary climate adaptation serves as a pretext not to develop, whereas high perceived attractiveness leads to negotiated pragmatism allowing continued waterfront exploitation. We also identify a fragmentation in spatial planning, with weak interplay between municipal comprehensive planning and local development plans, resulting in ad hoc, case-by-case planning. Furthermore, different planning actors are organizationally compartmentalized, creating unfortunate intra-sectoral silos. We conclude that the integrative, proactive and reflexive potentials of spatial planning to deliver climate adaptation have yet to be realized.

At the international policy level, there is a clear link between access to information about forests and the work towards sustainable land use. However, involving forests in planning for sustainable development (SuD) at the Swedish local level, by means of municipal comprehensive planning (MCP), is complicated by sector structure and legislation. Currently, there is a gap or hole in the MCP process when it comes to use and access to knowledge about forest conditions and forest land use. This hole limits the possibilities to formulate well-informed municipal visions and goals for sustainable forest land use as well as for overall SuD. Here we introduce an approach for compilation and presentation of geographic information to increase the preconditions for integrating forest information into Swedish MCP. We produce information about forest ownership patterns and forest conditions in terms of age and significant ecological and social values in forests for a case study municipality. We conclude that it is possible to effectively compile geographic and forest-related information to fill the hole in the municipal land use map. Through our approach, MCP could be strengthened as a tool for overall land use planning and hence as a base in SuD planning.

This article explores how local economies are conceptualised in municipal comprehensive plans from 14 Swedish municipalities experiencing long-term population decline. Using qualitative text condensation, the analysis examines how a ‘good’ local economy is framed and what resources are seen as central to it. While growth remains a dominant but ambiguously defined goal, the plans also emphasise sustainability, diversification, localisation, and community resources. The discussion identifies productive ambivalences around growth, dilemmas of diversification versus specialisation, and limitations of localism, suggesting these tensions can serve as entry points for rethinking economic development in shrinking rural contexts.

Moving from vision to action- integrating ecosystem services in the Swedish local planning context

Readiness and planning for more wind power: Municipalities as key actors implementing national strategies

To mitigate forest fragmentation, it is critical to investigate the factors that contribute to it. Considerable research examines various factors shaping forest fragmentation, but these studies have not typically identified land use planning as an important factor. Our study helps fill this gap in the literature. To examine the influence of land use planning on forest fragmentation, we assessed the quality of 29 municipal comprehensive plans with respect to forest protection in Wisconsin, U.S.A., a sample drawn from a spatial analysis of forest fragmentation dynamics from 2001 to 2011. We found that the comprehensive plans of communities that have experienced lower-than-expected forest fragmentation change were, on average, of significantly higher quality than those of the communities that have experienced higher-than-expected forest fragmentation change during this period. We conclude that the quality of community-based comprehensive plans, especially the strength and breadth of policies addressing forestland, matters in mitigating the fragmentation of forestland.

Rural areas supply the planet's natural resources while simultaneously harbor refuges for most of the world's remaining biodiversity and intact, resilient ecosystems. Since traditional extractive activities must increasingly co-exist with non-exploitative activities such as tourism and conservation, sustainable land use planning is essential for managing trade-offs between incompatible interests in rural areas. With "communicative planning" being promoted since decades, participation is considered crucial for reconciling different planning interests. However, the implementation of participation remains patchy and uneven, not least in sparsely populated regions with low capacity where participation could be a game-changer. Here, we consider municipal comprehensive planning as an existing arena to explore participatory planning approaches potentially capable of simultaneously managing competing land uses and promoting sustainable development in sparsely populated rural contexts. Collaborative work between researchers and public managers resulted in the co-development of an approach based on qualitative village- and interest-based focus groups that facilitated the formulation, negotiation, and legitimization of concrete and detailed local guidelines that prioritize between different land uses. Consequently, the resulting comprehensive plan draft was more readily adopted than the output of a traditional planning process. We found that citizens in sparsely populated municipalities seem willing to actively contribute to rural development processes if they have significant influence.

Some commentators suggest that comprehensive planning is indispensable for smart growth (that is, less auto-centric development). This paper argues that municipal comprehensive plans, like zoning, are merely a tool that can be used to support sprawl as easily as smart growth. Thus, planning, although desirable for a variety of reasons, is not absolutely sufficient or necessary for smart growth.

Applying an anti-adultist theoretical framework, this paper utilizes content analysis to assess youth representation within Maryland county and municipal comprehensive plans. All county plans reference youth, but over a quarter of municipal plans omit any reference to adolescents. Nearly half of the plans (45.80%; n = 60) reproduce adultist views of young people, while a small fraction (7.63%; n = 10) incorporate anti-adultist perspectives. Most plans (73.28%; n = 96) acknowledge the need for distinct youth services. However, nominal recognition of youth without meaningful youth empowerment falls short of anti-adultist praxis. Planning scholars and practitioners must grapple with adultist bias to foster youth inclusion and recognize youth as valuable community members with needs and preferences that are distinct from other age groups.

Public participation was introduced in the period 1970–1975 at all planning levels of the Danish planning system, i.e. for regional and municipal comprehensive planning and for local district plans and urban renewal plans. This article focuses upon why public participation was introduced at all planning levels, how it was introduced, the distribution and quality of participation, and the progress in quality. Special emphasis is given to the handling of the “agenda problem”, i.e. who decides what is on the agenda when a planning proposal is discussed in public. In conclusion, some prevailing problems and perspectives are outlined.

Management of risks in societal planning – an analysis of scope and variety of health, safety and security issues in municipality plan documents

In Italy, the transformative predictions of the municipal urban planning instruments are very often far away from the socio-economic dynamics. In fact, the political component considers the oversizing of urban transformative projections as a solution to improve the situation of the territories in crisis for several aspects. This work analyses the projections of the urban planning instruments in force in the coastal municipalities of Emilia-Romagna. The work aims to highlight how the planned urban areas can change the future settlement structure in the case study area.

Uses of the word ‘landskap’ in Swedish municipalities’ comprehensive plans: Does the European Landscape Convention require a modified understanding?