The Interactive Business Case Approach for Multiple Land Use: More Efficiency, Less Costs!

Abstract

This paper describes Interactive Business Case Approach (IBCA) in a participatory planning setting concerning multifunctional land use, as an instrument for climate adaptation strategies. Multifunctional land use is an solution to optimize the use of scare spatial resources, especially in densely populated areas such as the Netherlands. Multifunctional land use is also a strategy to deal with the effects of climate change and social economic trends. The goal of IBCA is to provide an approach to handle the complexity of multi functional land use. Due to different stakeholders, each with their own perspective, interest and different gains on the short and longer term. IBCA brings the short and longer-term interests together by creating business ideas, business cases and business plans together with stakeholders. The approach focuses on the opportunities by which the concept of multifunctional land use can give added value to the area. Stakeholders become shareholders, and mutual gains become small cooperation’s or companies. The IBCA is applied to different scale projects in The Netherlands. One project focused on the whole province of Noord-Brabant, especially the sandy rural regions. The other project focused on a large-scale construction project of Rijkswaterstaat, which comprises the extension of a ship lock, and broadens a busy waterway. It showed that IBCA poses challenges to both content (planning and design) and process (governance). New combinations of agriculture, ecology and leisure also require new coalitions of stakeholders, supported by new financial, legal or policy instruments. The advantages and disadvantages of the application of IBCA on different scales is compared in a SWOT analysis which is then compared with the Mutual Gains Approach.