An evaluation of environmental plans quality: Addressing the rational and communicative perspectives.

Environmental action plans are important instruments intended to provide sustainable solutions for the most pressing environmental issues. As they should be updated regularly, efforts to evaluate their quality are essential for enabling incremental improvements in upcoming versions. The aim of our study was to systematically evaluate the quality of Romania's Local Environmental Action Plans (LEAPs) by following a theoretical framework that includes principles from both rational and communicative approaches to assessing plan quality. We selected 32 LEAPs and applied an evaluation protocol that enabled a comprehensive assessment of the plans. Our results showed an overall moderate quality of the LEAPs. Although most plans identify many environmental problems in need of solutions, in reality additional urgent environmental problems often exist. Furthermore, LEAPs perform only moderately in identifying tools for implementation provisions and ensuring the participation of the public in the planning process, and they are even weaker in establishing goals and achieving coordination across different governmental levels. Overall the assessment reveals that plans are rarely able to craft an appealing policy message. Our findings could be used as guidance for LEAP coordinating agencies to improve the plans in the upcoming updating processes, as they identify plan weaknesses and suggest ways to achieve high quality environmental plans. Furthermore, our novel plan assessment method based on rational comprehensive and communicative approaches to plan quality evaluation can be adapted easily to other studies.

[1]  David Salvesen,et al.  Assessing the Quality of Rural Hazard Mitigation Plans in the Southeastern United States , 2017 .

[2]  Climate Change Events Induced Risk Assessment and Mapping as a Basis for an Insurance Policy , 2015 .

[3]  V. Popescu,et al.  Collaboration Networks in Applied Conservation Projects across Europe , 2016, PloS one.

[4]  Klaus Krippendorff,et al.  Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology , 1980 .

[5]  Zhenghong Tang,et al.  Linking Planning Theories with Factors Influencing Local Environmental-Plan Quality , 2009 .

[6]  Anna M. Hersperger,et al.  Implementing comprehensive plans: indicators for a task-sheet based performance evaluation process , 2015 .

[7]  Gene Bunnell,et al.  The Effect of Mandated Planning on Plan Quality , 2011 .

[8]  R Core Team,et al.  R: A language and environment for statistical computing. , 2014 .

[9]  R. Potts.  The good, the bad, and the statutory: are statutory or non-statutory natural resource management plans higher in quality? , 2017 .

[10]  P. Berke,et al.  Plan-making for Sustainability: The New Zealand Experience , 2004 .

[11]  S. Brody,et al.  Evaluating California local land use plan's environmental impact reports , 2009 .

[12]  M. Niță,et al.  Need for a cross-sector approach in protected area management , 2017 .

[13]  Philip Berke,et al.  Searching for the Good Plan , 2009 .

[14]  R. Hindmarsh,et al.  Addressing inadequacies of sectoral coordination and local capacity building in Indonesia for effective climate change adaptation , 2018 .

[15]  Eva Lövbrand,et al.  The Road to Paris: Contending Climate Governance Discourses in the Post-Copenhagen Era , 2016 .

[16]  M. Stevens.  Evaluating the Quality of Official Community Plans in Southern British Columbia , 2013 .

[17]  G. Hess,et al.  Effective Protection of Open Space: Does Planning Matter? , 2009, Environmental management.

[18]  G. McMahon,et al.  Evaluating natural resource planning for longleaf pine ecosystems in the Southeast United States , 2019, Forest Policy and Economics.

[19]  S. Buckman,et al.  Overlooking the coast: Limited local planning for coastal area management along Michigan's Great Lakes. , 2018, Land use policy.

[20]  H. Blanco,et al.  The Routledge Companion to Environmental Planning , 2019 .

[21]  Simona R. Grădinaru,et al.  Green infrastructure in strategic spatial plans: Evidence from European urban regions , 2019, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening.

[22]  Richard K. Norton,et al.  Using content analysis to evaluate local master plans and zoning codes , 2008 .

[23]  David Salvesen,et al.  Assessing the Relationship Between Hazard Mitigation Plan Quality and Rural Status in A Cohort of 57 Counties from 3 States in the Southeastern U.S. , 2012 .

[24]  P. Berke,et al.  Do Cooperative Environmental Planning Mandates Produce Good Plans? Empirical Results from the New Zealand Experience , 1999 .

[25]  P. Berke,et al.  Do planners matter? Examining factors driving incorporation of land use approaches into hazard mitigation plans , 2014 .

[26]  Mark R. Stevens,et al.  Measuring and Reporting Intercoder Reliability in Plan Quality Evaluation Research , 2014 .

[27]  L. Band,et al.  Local comprehensive plan quality and regional ecosystem protection: The case of the Jordan Lake watershed, North Carolina, U.S.A. , 2013 .

[28]  Programs of Change: Stockholm—Rio De Janeiro—Johannesburg—Rio+20 , 2018 .

[29]  Mark R. Stevens,et al.  Plan Quality Evaluation 1994–2012 , 2014 .

[30]  Janet Crawford,et al.  Evaluating the Outcomes of Plans: Theory, Practice, and Methodology , 2010 .

[31]  M. Artmann.  Institutional efficiency of urban soil sealing management – From raising awareness to better implementation of sustainable development in Germany , 2014 .

[32]  Gavin Smith,et al.  Planning for Resiliency: Evaluation of State Hazard Mitigation Plans under the Disaster Mitigation Act , 2012 .

[33]  Simona R. Grădinaru,et al.  The quality and implementation of local plans: An integrated evaluation , 2019 .

[34]  D. Geneletti,et al.  Ecosystem services in urban plans: What is there, and what is still needed for better decisions , 2018 .

[35]  M. Conroy,et al.  Planning process influences on sustainability in Ohio township plans , 2016 .

[36]  O. Bastian,et al.  Using the Concepts of Green Infrastructure and Ecosystem Services to Specify Leitbilder for Compact and Green Cities—The Example of the Landscape Plan of Dresden (Germany) , 2017 .

[37]  Marko Lovrić,et al.  A Grounded Theory approach for deconstructing the role of participation in spatial planning: Insights from Nature Park Medvednica, Croatia , 2018 .

[38]  Zhenghong Tang.  Evaluating local coastal zone land use planning capacities in California , 2008 .

[39]  Luis Enrique Sánchez,et al.  Reforming EIA systems: A critical review of proposals in Brazil , 2017 .

[40]  Yoichi Kaya,et al.  Prove Paris was more than paper promises , 2017, Nature.

[41]  Simona R. Grădinaru,et al.  Is urban green space per capita a valuable target to achieve cities’ sustainability goals? Romania as a case study , 2016 .

[42]  Patrick M. Regan,et al.  Quality of national adaptation plans and opportunities for improvement , 2018, Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change.

[43]  Jeffrey L. Cruikshank,et al.  Breaking Robert's Rules: The New Way to Run Your Meeting, Build Consensus, and Get Results , 2006 .

[44]  L. D. Hopkins,et al.  Urban Development: The Logic Of Making Plans , 2001 .

[45]  H. Kim,et al.  An Evaluation of Local Comprehensive Plans Toward Sustainable Green Infrastructure in US , 2018, Sustainability.

[46]  L. Susskind,et al.  Factors driving collaboration in natural resource conflict management: Evidence from Romania , 2018, Ambio.

[47]  Sustainable land use under different institutional settings , 2008 .

[48]  David J. Connell,et al.  Better Than Good: Three Dimensions of Plan Quality , 2018, Journal of planning education and research.

[49]  William C. Baer,et al.  General Plan Evaluation Criteria: An Approach to Making Better Plans , 1997 .

[50]  T. Fischer,et al.  Evaluation of the environmental impact assessment system in Iran , 2019, Environmental Impact Assessment Review.

[51]  Danielle Spurlock.  Do mandates matter for plan quality? Jurisdictional aggregation for a watershed level comparison , 2018 .

[52]  Dave Guyadeen.  Evaluating the Quality of Municipal Official Plans in the Ontario-Greater Golden Horseshoe Region, Canada , 2019, Journal of Planning Education and Research.

[53]  Matthew L. Malecha,et al.  Plan integration for resilience scorecard: evaluating networks of plans in six US coastal cities , 2018, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management.

[54]  Darrel Ramsey-Musolf.  According to the Plan: Testing the Influence of Housing Plan Quality on Low-Income Housing Production , 2017 .

[55]  Yongsung Park,et al.  Multilateral governance for climate change adaptation in S. Korea The mechanisms of formulating adaptation policies , 2017 .

[56]  Bastion Zeiger,et al.  Toward sustainable development: A methodology for evaluating environmental planning systems , 2018, Sustainable Development.

[57]  Dave Guyadeeen,et al.  Evaluation in Planning: An Investigation into Plan Quality and its Application to Official Plans in the Ontario-Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) Region , 2017 .

[58]  P. Berke,et al.  A comparison of local hazard mitigation plan quality in six states, USA , 2014 .

[59]  A. Petrișor.  Using CORINE data to look at deforestation in Romania: Distribution & possible consequences , 2015 .

[60]  V. Popescu,et al.  Power, influence and structure in Natura 2000 governance networks. A comparative analysis of two protected areas in Romania. , 2018, Journal of environmental management.