Transitions in planning: transformative policy visions of the circular economy and blue bioeconomy meet planning practice

ABSTRACT

Ongoing sustainability challenges create pressure on planning practices and institutional arrangements. Transformative policy visions, such as the circular economy and bioeconomy, create promises for designing and planning sustainable pathways in society. Moreover, research agendas on sustainability transitions, such as transition management, are developing toolkits and attempting to shift planning practice by applying evidence-based policy-making processes. In this paper, we ask what happens when sustainability visions are exposed to planning practices, and vice versa, by developing an analytical framework to discuss processes of territorialization and mobilization. We draw lessons from two contextually differing case studies in Finland; on the evaluation of spatial planning processes for the circular economy and a strategic planning intervention for the blue bioeconomy. The disparate cases show that the planning process act as a bidirectional intermediary space, refining both the general transition visions and established planning practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability transitions
• transformative planning
• circular economy
• blue bioeconomy
• planning practice

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge participants in the 2020 YHYS fall colloquium session “The spatial and regional dimensions of sustainability transitions” and researcher Aino Rekola for constructive comments on the initial paper idea as well as the anonymous reviewer for critical remarks that significantly improved our argumentation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Finnish Strategic Research Council project ‘BlueAdapt – Enhancing adaptive capacity for sustainable blue growth’ [grant number 312650] and part of the material was collected in the project ‘Land-use planning as an enabler of circular economy solutions’.