Speaker
Description
The balancing of economic, environmental and social goals is widely discussed in planning theory and practice. It could have been expected thus that sustainability, which also seeks to balance these goals, would be at the center of planning practice and theory, and that planners will play a central role in advancing sustainability world-wide. Yet this is not the case. Planners’ role in the sustainability discourse and policy, as reflected in the UNSDC deliberations or the various international forums advancing sustainability notions has been minor at best. While SDGs are noted in planning discourse most of them have little relevance for most planning endeavors, which are only marginally embedded in sustainability deliberations. This discrepancy partially reflects our inability to define sustainability in a positive manner, resulting in a slew of definitions, and a large number of goals and targets, which often do not coincide. As a result, new notions of sustainability have arisen seeking to identify safe and just spaces by utilizing a double-negative approach (whereby sustainability is the set of situations which are not unsustainable). This approach opens new options for incorporating the emerging double negative approach to sustainability in planning. To this end a red lines methodology is advanced, whereby the red lines serve to delineate safe and just spaces seen as sustainable from the double negative perspective. In essence a four step procedure is advanced in which the issues to which red lines should be applied are identified, the concrete red lines are advanced as well as the relevant indicators, the current state is assessed vis-à-vis the red lines thereby identifying and prioritizing the issues where action needs to be taken. From a planning theory perspective this approach upends much of planning practice. Rather than seeking to comprehensively plan it disentangles the issues addressing them each on its own vis-à-vis the red lines determined as pertinent for that specific issue. It also allows to identify policy externalities and thereby advances a muddling through process for the identification of safe and just spaces and the actions needed to move into and remain within these safe and just spaces. By doing so it leaves much flexibility for adaptations within the safe and just spaces as well as normative plurality. This approach is flexible, allowing applications at different levels and for a wide variety of endeavors. Moreover, it facilitates stakeholder involvement at the outset of the planning process, not least by identifying concrete easily explainable issues to be deliberated. The need to agree what is undesirable rather than on positive goals arguably allows stakeholders with very different world views to agree on what needs to be avoided, while disagreeing on what is desirable. Thereby in enhances decentralization, democratization of planning processes and the resilience of planning outcomes. In the presentation the red lines approach to identifying safe and just spaces and its implications for planning practice and theory will be explicated, and several examples of early utilization of this approach provided.
| Keywords | Sustainabillity; red lines; stakeholder invovlement |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
