Europe exposed: mapping the impacts of EU policies on spatial planning in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

National laws, local traditions and practices largely define which spatial planning policies are pursued and how they are carried out. Still, like many other policy areas, an unmistakeable process of Europeanization is underway in planning. On the one hand, informal bottom-up Europeanization is occurring through the increasing interaction between scholars and practitioners and by the growing body of spatial information and analyses available at the European Union (EU) level. On the other hand, formal top-down Europeanization occurs when EU policies – competition, economic development, agriculture, nature protection, air quality, etc. – impact domestic spatial planning systems, policy and practice. In this study, we investigate this second kind of Europeanization, using the case of the Netherlands as an example. Specifically, we construct a map revealing the location of EU sectoral policy using six distinct impact types. We observed that many policies overlap and various inter-sectoral tensions (horizontal coordination) are present. The empirical analysis moreover revealed, in line with recent theoretical literature on multilevel governance, that domestic policies and practices, particularly at the national level, determine the way European policies affect planning. This finding has implications for all member states, but particularly those whose national planning is undergoing fundamental reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilevel governance
• planning policy
• horizontal coordination
• territorial impact
• better regulation
• spatial planning
• territorial cohesion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This categorisation diverges from the five uses of Europeanisation identified in the widely cited article by Olsen (2002). For reasons of relevance to planning, it excludes uses focussing on change in external boundaries and those focussing on the project of political unification. It also reinterprets the ‘use’ of ‘exporting forms … beyond the European territory’ to exporting EU influence beyond the legal mandate of the EU Treaty (e.g. into policy areas like planning). In this sense, it is more akin to the distinction made in Böhme and Waterhout (2008, p. 246) between Europeanisation through (1) sectoral policies, (2) spatial policies and (3) informal cooperation.

2. Here policy is taken by its dictionary definition as the course of action of an organisation, which in the case of governments generally entails exerting power in one form or another.

3. Policies such as product labelling or copyright protection are clearly not immediately relevant to planning, whereas nature protection and infrastructure construction obviously are. There were many grey areas, however: should Horizon 2020 be included in the analysis? In general, this policy has very limited impact on land use, but some research financed in this manner is clearly relevant to planning (e.g. on sustainable mobility). The same applies to Life+ and regional policy as some funded projects have clear physical impacts, while others are exclusively directed at innovation and knowledge.

4. For example, for regional policy the period 2007–2013 was used, and TEN-T projects indicated throughout the history of the policy (as many are still under construction and therefore impacting the territory). Geodata for CAP investments were available for 2012 only and fisheries for 1996–2006 (excluding 1998).