First of all, we are very pleased to share that the 2014 impact factor recorded for the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning has been its highest so far, with 1.51 for the 2-year impact.
Despite such excellent news, the editors of this journal are also concerned about a troubling contradiction within the globalizing academic sector which we have experienced in different national and university settings over recent months. On the one hand, academics are increasingly evaluated against key performance indicators (KPIs) among which publication in high-ranking peer-reviewed journals holds a key position. On the other hand, many academics find themselves increasingly pressed not to spend time on activities that do not directly contribute to the delivery of such KPIs. Since in most places neither the editing of an academic journal nor peer review is part of the KPIs, they are implicitly framed as a luxury, a pastime, as a distraction that is not related to a university's success. The contradiction is blatant and systemic: the KPI-driven university relies on a system of peer-reviewed journal publication to demonstrate its value to politicians, taxpayers and other donors, but is reluctant to invest paid staff time into this system or to acknowledge the contribution by those academics who invest considerable time and energy to make this system work. There is no easy solution to this problem. It would be consequential to include the editorship of a journal as well as peer reviewing in KPIs; these activities could be bibliometrically verified in the same way as publications. Otherwise journal editors who are embedded in KPI-driven systems and institutions will see themselves increasingly pressed to justify the time they spend on their alleged hobby horse, and some will retreat from these activities. Such a development could not only undermine the publication-related foundations of academic ‘performance management’ in the spirit of New Public Management. An increasing inability or unwillingness of academics to spend time on unacknowledged, unpaid activities could hollow out the invaluable infrastructure and culture of thorough, constructive peer review on which good scientific publishing depends.
As editors of this journal we are very pleased that contrary to our more general, systemic concerns we currently have no shortage of authors and of devoted peer reviewers. This issue of the Journal of Environmental Planning presents eight papers which develop novel and challenging perspectives on policy and planning in a range of environmental issue domains.
Polluted soils on planned development sites are a pressing issue in many municipalities. Comparing three examples from Helsinki, Paula Saikkonen analyses how the acknowledgement and distribution of the related risks co-evolve over three decades with the available and legitimate knowledge of the time. Based on document analysis and interviews, the paper demonstrates the interaction and interdependence between changes in problem classification, knowledge production and approaches to risk management. The paper finds that risk management approaches tend to background environmental risks behind the assessment of financial risks.
The role of knowledge in planning is also at the centre of the paper by Mick Lennon and Mark Scott who focus on the processes of contestation of expertise. The authors analyse the rhetorical strategies in wind farm debates in Ireland, in particular attempts at ‘rescaling’ of the ‘planning problem’ at hand to influence the planning application assessment. They find that the conflicting parties ‘deployed nuanced discursive strategies that constituted their character (ethos) by skilfully interlacing implicit and explicit portrayals of scientific objectivity (logos) with emotive subjectivity (pathos)’. The paper provides novel perspectives on how contested ‘planning problems’ in wind power and beyond should be reconceived.
An important issue in many planning controversies is the visual impacts. Neil Powe and Kyungjin An start with the observation that development outcomes often disappoint visual expectations. They conceptualize the issue as a problem of ‘boundary work’ between (landscape) experts and other actors in the policy arena and suggest that the use of virtual reality can facilitate interaction and improve communication and negotiation among the various actors. The authors conclude that virtual reality can be useful during formal processes of landscape and visual impact assessment, and that unlocking further potential requires better understanding of its function for boundary work.
Resonating with last year's special issue on sustainable mobility, two papers in this issue address the challenges and contradictions of current planning practices that attempt to support transitions to a more sustainable system of transportation. Julio A Soria-Lara, Valenzuela Montes, Luis Miguel and Paulo Pinho introduce the concept of ‘mobility environments’ for transport planning. Using the example of Granada, Spain, they assess how this approach helps to understand relationships between transport and land use and to translate this knowledge into planning practice. Robert Hrelja, Mattias Hjerpe and Sofie Storbjork analyse the effectiveness of spatial planning to support transitions towards sustainable transportation. Contrary to expectations, their case studies in two Swedish municipalities did not find a strategic reorientation of transport planning. The authors point out that a reframing of transportation in terms of climate change was lacking in their cases. The dominant frames of city attractiveness and economic growth legitimize the lack of legally binding tools and agency, and the selective application of planning tools. In contrast to any transformative ambitions, the paper suggests an incremental approach that mobilizes agency within the given local implementation structure.
Amal Ali's paper addresses a planning context where growth is not challenged but qualified. US Eastern States provide incentives to municipalities to adopt planning strategies that reduce sprawl. However, based on a survey among almost 500 cities/towns, the author finds that elected officials in particular in smaller places lack familiarity with the details of the smart growth policies. Based on his findings, he calls for outreach and educational programmes to improve the uptake of the programme.
The gap between top-down and bottom-up perspectives on policy is also at the heart of Suvi Huttunen's analysis of agri-environmental policies in Finland. She finds that policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from land clearing through voluntary agri-environmental measures were less effective than expected. Adopting a practice theory approach, Huttunen explains that farmers were reluctant to enrol because they felt that the measures did not fit their practices and goals and were also seen as incoherent with other policies. The authors therefore suggest that coherent policy design needs to engage with the experiences of those whose behaviours are to be addressed to achieve environmental policy goals.
Attempts to reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture are also the topic of the paper by Nina Hagemann, Katrin Prager and Stephan Bartke, who analyse the effectiveness of soil protection policies in Germany. In contrast to Huttunen's paper, Hagemann et al. attempt to capture the friction in implementation by using the concept of transaction costs. Building on key informant interviews in two case study areas, the paper finds that due to ecological and institutional complexity, transaction costs are manifold, potentially high and need to be considered along the entire policy cycle.
Last but not least, Christian Hunold, Franco Montalto and Katharine Travaline contribute to the discussion about the role of citizen participation in complex planning processes, building on the example of Philadelphia's attempt to implement a ‘green stormwater infrastructure’. Adopting a deliberative policy analysis perspective, the authors find that including the experiences of participants and the people affected by a policy is necessary to understand the complexity and uncertainty inherent in environmental planning issues. In particular under circumstances of extreme inequality and distrust, policies that require the cooperation of variegated actors, such as green infrastructure development in urban neighbourhoods, need to engage with the multiple normative perspectives of participants when trying to assess the social meaning of the empirical facts.
Overall, the papers in this issue provide exciting insights into the complexities of environmental policy and planning and will certainly find attention in the wider fields of planning studies and policy analysis.