Governing Towards Sustainable Land Use: Evidence from Planning Regions in 12 European Countries

Unsustainable land use presents significant environmental and societal challenges, particularly due to its contributions to climate change and biodiversity loss. Historically, governance interventions and policy instruments have played a crucial role in shaping land use, yielding both successful and failed outcomes across regions. However, cross-country empirical studies on the impact of governance interventions on land-use changes remain limited. As a result, our understanding of the governance-related factors and mechanisms driving these changes is incomplete. This study investigates the key enablers for sustainable land-use change governance, focusing on the role of governance interventions and policy instruments in shaping land use across 12 European planning regions since 1950. Conducted as part of the EU-funded Horizon project “PLUS-Change – Planning Land Use Strategies: Meeting Biodiversity, Climate, and Social Objectives in a Changing World,” the research employed a transdisciplinary approach in collaboration with local planning authorities. A total of 26 instances of significant land-use or land-cover changes were collaboratively identified within the 12 planning areas, covering diverse geographical contexts, types of land-use changes, and their varying impacts on sustainability. A theory-informed analytical template was used to guide data collection, supported by interviews with key actors – primarily local planning authorities – and an in-depth analysis of relevant planning documents. This approach provided detailed insights into the processes behind the land-use changes, their driving forces, and long-term impacts. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) was employed to identify governance and non-governance factors contributing to sustainable and unsustainable land-use outcomes. Four clusters of outcomes, together with their corresponding decisive factors, reveal that differences in land-use outcomes are explained by distinct configurations of conditions—particularly zoning flexibility, economic incentives, and the strength of environmental constraints. These clusters are as follows: (1) the dominance of economic pressure and permissive or weakly enforced zoning, alongside the secondary prioritization of environmental considerations, leads to growth-oriented land-use changes, such as dispersed urbanization, the establishment of transport corridors and the fragmentation of agricultural or natural land; (2) strong national or regional strategic policy priorities, coupled with targeted economic incentives and strong private actors influence, results in infrastructure development in the industrial and energy sectors; (3) in case of agricultural restructuring, the recurring combination of decisive factors is economic incentives and changes in, or consolidation of land ownership; (4) conservation-, restoration- and amenity-oriented landscape outcomes tend to emerge under conditions of strong environmental designation, societal value shift, and institutional coordination across levels. The study shows that 26 instances of land-use change across the EU are shaped not by individual governance instruments, but by specific combinations of decisive conditions operating within a shared policy and planning baseline. The findings highlight the limits of instrument-based governance and underscore the importance of understanding how governance arrangements interact with economic forces and societal values. This research provides a nuanced understanding of the dynamics underlying sustainable and unsustainable land-use governance, offering a context-sensitive empirical dataset that elucidates the mechanisms linking policy instruments, their implementation, and the capacity of stakeholders to achieve sustainability objectives.