David Evers

The Rise (and fall?) of National Retail Planning

One of the most important factors driving urbanisation processes is the location of shops. The Netherlands has taken a particularly hard line against what it calls ‘peripheral’ developments by establishing rules at the national level to curb the growth of out‐of‐town hypermarkets and shopping malls. With the arrival of the Fifth Report on Spatial Planning draft, this resolve seems to have weakened, and deregulation and decentralisation have become the new catchwords. Paradoxically, this is occurring as Belgium, Germany, France and the UK – all of whom have had experience with a more liberal policy – are tightening restrictions. This paper explores this curious shift in terms of political interests, asking who was served by the old planning regime, and who would rather see it go. In this debate, planning ideology and rhetoric was pitted against that of free‐market competition. In the end, it seems as if the latter has gained the upper hand.

The Steady Advance of Wal-Mart across Europe and Changing Government Attitudes towards Planning and Competition

Aggressive internationalisation activities by global retailers frequently encounter, in addition to responses from indigenous rivals, the regulatory mechanisms of the governments of host or target nations. However, these public regulatory mechanisms are themselves in a state of flux, often as a function of internal conflict between government policy sectors. Internationalisation itself is also an agent of change and we illustrate this using the example of retail regulatory systems in Britain and the Netherlands at the time of Wal-Marts entry into the EU. In both countries, an ambivalent stance by the central government was evidenced by the publication of reports by planning authorities and investigations by competition authorities.

Explaining governance in five mega-city regions: rethinking the role of hierarchy and government

With the fundamental rescaling of socio-economic relationships, the mega-city region (MCR) has emerged as an important geographical space for governance. At the same time it is highly fragmented institutionally, making it difficult to overcome collective action problems such as providing regional public transport and protecting open spaces. In practice, different arrangements are employed to address these problems, including hierarchical approaches, competitive self-coordination and joint decision-making. Drawing on experiences in five MCRs in Europe and the US, the relative use and success of these approaches was investigated. The analysis suggests that the composition of the actor constellation (e.g. the number and kind of parties involved) and local political support proved to be important factors in explaining the performance of a particular governance approach. In addition, the findings provide a new appreciation for the role of the state, particularly the national government, in governing MCRs.

Europe exposed: mapping the impacts of EU policies on spatial planning in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT National laws, local traditions and practices largely define which spatial planning policies are pursued and how they are carried out. Still, like many other policy areas, an unmistakeable process of Europeanization is underway in planning. On the one hand, informal bottom-up Europeanization is occurring through the increasing interaction between scholars and practitioners and by the growing body of spatial information and analyses available at the European Union (EU) level. On the other hand, formal top-down Europeanization occurs when EU policies – competition, economic development, agriculture, nature protection, air quality, etc. – impact domestic spatial planning systems, policy and practice. In this study, we investigate this second kind of Europeanization, using the case of the Netherlands as an example. Specifically, we construct a map revealing the location of EU sectoral policy using six distinct impact types. We observed that many policies overlap and various inter-sectoral tensions (horizontal coordination) are present. The empirical analysis moreover revealed, in line with recent theoretical literature on multilevel governance, that domestic policies and practices, particularly at the national level, determine the way European policies affect planning. This finding has implications for all member states, but particularly those whose national planning is undergoing fundamental reform.

Formal Institutional Change and Informal Institutional Persistence: The Case of Dutch Provinces Implementing the Spatial Planning Act

Conscious attempts to affect planning practice by reforming the statutory planning system are a common form of institutional design. Despite this, the effectiveness of institutional design as a strategy has not been sufficiently addressed in the planning literature. The Dutch case has been monitored thoroughly and provides a good opportunity to assess the extent to which the instruments introduced under the new legislation were used according to the stated intent of lawmakers. As the national level has largely devolved responsibility to provinces, these comprised the objects of study. The empirical evidence covering the 2008–11 period reveals remarkable variation between provinces in applying the law, including applications that run directly counter to the laws objectives. These findings point to the difficulty of institutional design in planning practice, and suggest that lawmakers should rethink their approach to influencing behaviour of planning agents.