Impact of planning mandates on local plans: a multi-method assessment

ABSTRACT

An increasing number of subnational government bodies mandate municipalities to establish a vision for their future development with a local plan. Outside the U.S., few studies have assessed whether these mandates succeed at increasing formal quality, policy focus and implementation of local plans. In addition, the reasons that prompt governments to impose mandates remain unclear. To tackle these issues, we used a multi-method approach combining interviews, plan content analysis and questionnaires to compare mandated and voluntary planning in Switzerland. Our analysis reveals that mandates only have limited impact on local plans. In particular, they do not produce higher quality plans than voluntary planning and do not improve implementation of policies. Our results may imply that (a) planning mandates from subnational governments are ineffective in general or (b) Swiss mandates in particular entail too few requirements and enforcement mechanisms to show a clear effect. Further studies could explore this issue empirically by comparing the characteristics of different planning mandates and assessing their effect on the quality and implementation of local plans. Alternatively, future research efforts could also examine how to find a compromise between mandated and voluntary planning in order to increase local commitment towards plan making.

KEYWORDS:

• Planning evaluation
• policy focus
• plan quality
• comprehensive plan
• intergovernmental coordination

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Matthias Müller, who assisted with the content analysis of the local plans, and to Curtis Gautschi for improving our English. We also thank Felix Kienast for his helpful comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sophie C. Rudolf http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7443-423X

Simona R. Grădinaru http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7532-5083

Anna M. Hersperger http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5407-533X

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL and by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung), as part of the project ‘Controlling urban sprawl to limit soil consumption’ (SPROIL, grant number 406840_142996) conducted within the National Research Programme ‘Sustainable Use of Soil as a Resource’ (NRP68), and the project ‘From plans to land change’ (CONCUR, ER C TBS Consolidator Grant number BSCGIO 157789).