Compact City Development and the Challenge of Environmental Policy Integration : A Multi-Level Governance Perspective

Sustainable urban development entails integration of environmental interests into decision-making at the local level. To achieve this, higher tiers of government may compel municipalities to explicitly consider environmental objectives or even prioritize them by demanding compliance with national standards, thus, at least theoretically, restricting local government's room to manoeuvre in balancing all relevant interests. This paper explores the extent to which national standards narrow the range of local options and what this means for sustainable urban development. Adopting a multi-level governance perspective on three cases of inner-city redevelopment, we find that environmental standards are either not problematically restrictive or, if they are, sectoral policy offers ways to circumvent them. From a sustainability perspective, this may lead to undesirable outcomes. A combination of approaches may solve this predicament.

[1]  Harriet Bulkeley,et al.  Unpicking Environmental Policy Integration with Tales from Waste Management , 2008 .

[2]  V. Simeonova.  Environmental Policy Integration in Urban Spatial Planning: the Approach of Rotterdam , 2006 .

[3]  Hens Runhaar,et al.  Sustainable Urban Development and the Challenge of Policy Integration: An Assessment of Planning Tools for Integrating Spatial and Environmental Planning in the Netherlands , 2009 .

[4]  Michael Breheny,et al.  Urban densities, local policies and sustainable development , 1998 .

[5]  H. Saarikoski,et al.  Practical integration of river basin and land use planning: lessons learned from two Finnish case studies , 2010 .

[6]  J. Newig,et al.  Environmental governance: participatory, multi-level - and effective? , 2009 .

[7]  S. Shmelev,et al.  Sustainable cities: problems of integrated interdisciplinary research , 2009 .

[8]  Sara Tyskeng,et al.  Environmental Integration and Policy Implementation: Competing Governance Modes in Waste Management Decision Making , 2009 .

[9]  A. Jordan,et al.  Environmental policy integration: a state of the art review , 2010 .

[10]  Miriam Weber,et al.  Environmental Policy Integration: The Role of Policy Windows in the Integration of Noise and Spatial Planning , 2010 .

[11]  William R. Sheate,et al.  Strategic approaches and assessment techniques: Potential for knowledge brokerage towards sustainability , 2010 .

[12]  Reinhard Steurer.  Sustainable development strategies , 2008 .

[13]  Eivind Hovden,et al.  Environmental policy integration: towards an analytical framework , 2003 .

[14]  Måns Nilsson,et al.  Framework for analysing environmental policy integration , 2003 .

[15]  B J M Ale,et al.  Tolerable or Acceptable: A Comparison of Risk Regulation in the United Kingdom and in the Netherlands , 2005, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[16]  Michael Breheny,et al.  Urban compaction: feasible and acceptable? , 1997 .

[17]  G. D. Roo.  Environmental conflicts in compact cities : complexity, decisionmaking, and policy approaches , 2000 .

[18]  Abdelillah Hamdouch,et al.  Policy integration strategy and the development of the ‘green economy’: foundations and implementation patterns , 2010 .

[19]  Olivia Bina.  Strategic Environmental Assessment , 2008 .

[20]  Andrew Jordan,et al.  The Governance of Sustainable Development: Taking Stock and Looking Forwards , 2008 .

[21]  L. Janssen-Jansen.  Beyond Sprawl: Principles for Achieving More Qualitative Spatial Development , 2005 .

[22]  H. Bulkeley.  Cities and the Governing of Climate Change , 2010 .

[23]  L. Hooghe,et al.  Unraveling the Central State, but How? Types of Multi-level Governance , 2003, American Political Science Review.

[24]  B. Bradshaw.  Questioning the credibility and capacity of community‐based resource management , 2003 .

[25]  Scott D. Campbell,et al.  Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities? Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable , 1996 .

[26]  T. Graedel,et al.  Urban Environmental Sustainability Metrics: A Provisional Set , 2000 .

[27]  M. Nilsson.  Learning, Frames, and Environmental Policy Integration: The Case of Swedish Energy Policy , 2005 .

[28]  G. D. Roo.  Environmental planning and the compact city. A Dutch perspective , 1998 .

[29]  P. Driessen,et al.  Drivers of and Barriers to Shifts in Governance: Analysing Noise Policy in the Netherlands , 2011 .

[30]  A. Boekhold.  Ecological risk assessment in legislation on contaminated soil in The Netherlands. , 2008, The Science of the total environment.

[31]  P. Glasbergen.  Decentralized reflexive environmental regulation: Opportunities and risks based on an evaluation of Dutch experiments , 2005 .

[32]  M. Betsill,et al.  Rethinking Sustainable Cities: Multilevel Governance and the 'Urban' Politics of Climate Change , 2005 .

[33]  Steven R. Henderson,et al.  Sustainable urban planning and the brownfield development process in the United Kingdom: Lessons from the Thames Gateway , 2006 .

[35]  V. Simeonova,et al.  The Role of an Area-oriented Approach in Achieving Environmental Policy Integration in the Netherlands, and its Applicability in Bulgaria , 2010 .

[36]  M. Neuman.  The Compact City Fallacy , 2005 .

[37]  R. Cervero,et al.  Green TODs: marrying transit-oriented development and green urbanism , 2011 .