Strategic Planning Research Project: Improving Strategic Planning for Nature Conservation

The PLanning Advisory Service have commissioned and published  three research papers to look at the linkages, challenges and opportunities of the integration of strategic planning and key agendas of transport, the natural environment and health. The papers, through academic and policy reviews and workshop and research projects, highlight the present realities and challenges to integrated delivery and tries to give recommendations to planning authorities that wish to produce integrated strategic plans. Embedding these agendas with strategic plans will allow a coordinated approached to place making across a strategic area. Recognising the role that strategic plans and coordinated planning can have in adding value when delivering places that is more than just the costumery housing provisions. This report produced by the Alister Scott from Northumbria University looks at the improving strategic planning and nature conservation. Strategic Planning Research Paper: Improving Strategic Planning for Nature Conservation

Drawing from this report a new paper Scott AJ and Kirby M.G (2024) Improving strategic planning for nature: panacea or pandoras box for the built and natural environment?  Ambio https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-024-01995-9 has been published

This paper assesses how strategic planning for nature can be improved for England’s built and natural environment using mainstreaming and landscape-scale concepts. Whilst both concepts feature in academic literature, there has been limited attention on their role as catalytic agents for strategic planning. Addressing this gap, evidence is used from two stakeholder workshops involving 62 senior policy experts managing a range of operational and hypothetical strategic spatial planning challenges. The results reveal a significantly weakened strategic planning arena characterised by policy disintegration, short termism and uncertainty. Key findings highlight the fallacy of pursuing strategic planning for nature in isolation from wider policy integration fusing environmental, economic and social components from the outset. Current barriers to progress include institutional inertia, technocratic vocabularies and neoliberalist priorities exacerbated by a weak underlying theory. Conversely opportunities for mainstreaming processes may help knowledge generation and exchange within transdisciplinary partnerships, whilst landscape scale thinking can improve understanding of issues using natures inherent geometry transforming processes and outcomes. The paper recommends the adoption of strategic planning pathways using mainstreaming and landscape-scale approaches working in tandem. Whilst focused on the English context, our findings are transferable to other planning systems in the Global North, especially those championing neoliberal market led policies.