Explaining barriers to environmental policy integration in planning sustainable urban development

Urban environmental quality is an essential feature of sustainable urban development. In planning such development, environmental quality issues must therefore be considered or, in other words, integrated into the planning process. There is a considerable body of literature about environmental policy integration (EPI), which has, inter alia, revealed several types of barriers to the actual implementation of integration ‘on the ground’, notwithstanding genuine commitment at higher levels of government. This paper aims to seek the origins of such barriers. It does so by deriving three different perspectives from the EPI literature and aggregating those into a more holistic view. First, from a substantive perspective, urban environmental quality – as well as EPI itself – is found to be fragmented. There is fragmentation in terms of policies, in terms of spatial scale and administrative levels, and there in terms of actors. Second, taking a process perspective points at two more factors explaining barriers to EPI in urban planning: the bounded-rational character of decision-making and the way in which expert knowledge about environmental impacts is used within the urban planning process. Third, the institutional perspective reveals that restriction of local authorities by policies of higher government tiers can hamper EPI, as well as the way in which devolution upon lower government tiers is shaped in order to allow them sufficient room for manoeuvre, while still maintaining environmental quality standards. The multi-dimensional character of urban environmental quality causes the other explanatory factors to intertwine. This complex of factors, then, can only be analysed taking a holistic perspective. In practice, rigid environmental quality standards are sometimes found to be all too restrictive for urban planning. Devolution of the authority to set urban environmental quality objectives can then be a useful approach. Our analysis suggest that at least three conditions must be met in order to take advantage of such an approach locally, without risking loss of urban environmental quality from a wider perspective. A first prerequisite is adequate governance capacity to initiate and manage the multi-actor participatory process and to include in it all relevant stakeholders and interests, helping actors to connect and reframe policy issues. It also implies the ability to raise political support. Second, clear guidance is needed for local-level decision-makers with respect to handling qualitative multiplicity. The third condition is that a knowledge infrastructure is in place that makes all relevant information for the management of urban environmental quality available to decision-makers and their advisers.