Planning in land-change studies and models

Anna M. Herspergera ^a

Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Switzerland

Keywords: Governance; External conditions; Planning intentions; Plan implementation; Strategic spatial planning; Land-change modelling

In land-change science, spatial planning is often classified as a politicaldriver (Geist and Lambin, 2006), whereas in political science,planning is considered a public policy (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith

et al., 1999). For illustration purposes, Fig. 1 shows on the left-handside a simple model of explaining land change: Five groups of driving forces determine the actor’s autonomy and motivations in taking decisions and subsequently actors cause change (Hersperger et al., 2010).Political and socio-economic drivers are strongly interlinked and mediated by technological forces. These drivers act within a backgroundset by cultural and natural drivers and feedbacks are omnipresent (e.g. Brandt et al., 1999; Bürgi et al., 2004; Rounsevell et al.,2012). When the policy cycle is applied to spatial planning as shown in Fig. 1, the following steps are commonly identified: problem definition, goal formulation, regional and local analysis of past, current and future socio-economic trends and environmental conditions, plan design, implementation,and evaluation (Steiner, 2008; Steinitz, 2012;Hersperger et al., 2015). Planning thus entails the processes of plan making (designing the

plan) as well as plan implementation and is affected by local socioeconomic factors and external processes. However, plans are rarely implemented as they are. For example, urban development can occur as informal development in areas that were not foreseen for development or development can be partially lacking in areas that were intended for development (e.g. due to a lagging economy) (Loh, 2011). This incomplete implementation is an issue of governance and poses a mayor challenge for conceptualizing the role of spatial planning in urban development.

Much research on political drivers so far has been in the form of qualitative assessments of policy and planning effects on land change in case studies around the world (Plieninger et al. 2016). A number of

studies focus holistically on landscapes and aim to distil a historical description and explanation of land change (e.g. Seabrook et al., 2006; Thapa and Rasul, 2006; Bieling et al. 2013). Such studies highlight how policy and planning shape the changing landscape in interplay with the other driving forces (Fig. 1). For example, Santana-Cordero and colleagues (2017) studied land change, driving forces, as well as actors and institutions in three costal landscapes of the Canary Islands and identified case-specific development models. They found that socioeconomic, political and natural driving forces were especially important to explain the very different developments in terms of land

cover and land-change processes (e.g. resource extraction and urbanization) in these three landscapes. Other qualitative studies take a slightly different approach and focus on the contribution of planning and policy to land-change (e.g. Bicík et al., 2001; Hersperger and Bürgi, 2010; Zhu, 2013; Hersperger et al., 2014; Pagliarin, 2017). Such studies address the influence of policy and planning, as interplay of drivers and actors, relative to other influences. For example Mu and colleagues

(2016) studied the contribution of planning to urbanization. They conclude that national policies favoured urbanization in the hinterlands and that the effect of these policies, reinforced by regional and local planning policy, caused the observed transformation of the study area Zhenghzhou (China) from an agricultural to an urban centre. Quantitative assessments often use regression models (e.g. Hu and Lo, 2007; Liu et al., 2011; Kasraian et al., 2017), but also other methods such as AHP (Osman et al., 2016) or ANOVA (Warren et al., 2011) to investigate the relative contribution of planning and policies to land change. Typically, planning is represented in a rather simplified approach by a binary variable for conservation (e.g. Hu and Lo 2017) and/or designated growth areas (e.g. Kasraian et al., 2017). Such quantitative assessments have confirmed the role of conservation policies in keeping areas open (e.g. Kasraian et al., 2017 for the Randstadt in The Netherlands) and for guiding growth (e.g. Liu et al., 2011), but also pinpointed the limited effects of plans in certain contexts (e.g. Osman et al. 2016 for Cairo, Egypt). Overall, there are rather few quantitative assessments which might be due to the fact that they build upon a rather simplistic conceptualization of planning, unsuitable to do justice to complex land-change situations.

Qualitative and quantitative assessments, as outlined above, show for locations across the world to what degree political drivers, together with other relevant drivers have affected land change.However, generalizations regarding the role of planning remain difficult because of the diverse and complex socio-economic and natural contexts. Indeed, meta-studies that synthesize case studies and provide more comprehensive results are scarce for urbanization (van Vliet et al., 2016). This leads to the current situation where there is a serious lack of theories on the mechanisms through which policies and planning affect land change.