Failure to implement plans has long been considered a significant barrier to effective planning. We examine two conceptions of success in plan implementation (conformance and performance), the effects of the implementation practices of planning agencies, and the capacity of agencies and permit applicants to bring about success. A key lesson from our New-Zealand-based evaluation is that implementation is somewhat weak. Another key point is that, if implementation is defined and measured in terms of conformance, plans and planners have an important influence on implementation success. Alternatively, if implementation is defined and measured in terms of performance, plans and planners are less influential in implementation. These lessons have broad implications for the theory and practice of plan implementation.

Despite calls for performance-oriented and evidence-based planning, the outcomes of land use and environmental plans are rarely monitored or assessed ex post facto (that is, post implementation). As a result, planners cannot know whether or why plans achieve their goals, or learn from the results of past interventions to improve planning practice. This evaluation gap is caused by a lack of methodology to evaluate the outcomes of plans and the difficulty of attributing changes to planning activities. We address this gap by proposing and testing a plan-outcome evaluation (POE) methodology. We demonstrate its broad applicability and usefulness in the context of local plans in New Zealand. The POE methodology will be useful to practitioners and academics seeking to assess the outcomes of plans in countries with western planning traditions.

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Trust is a central element of planning practice because the profession is positioned at the nexus of public and private interests, has a crucial role in the contested management of space, and seeks to promote democratic governance and public participation in local decision making. While trust (social and interpersonal) is often cited as a central factor contributing to the success or failure of participatory planning processes and of plan implementation, its role in planning has not been fully conceptualized. Building on the literature on trust in governance, this paper highlights key characteristics and paradoxes of trust, discusses the importance of trust for cooperation and planning, and presents the factors that hinder and promote trust. This discussion provides the bases for planning practice and research aimed at effective trust building.

This article investigates the determinants of plan implementation by applying a recently-developed Plan Implementation Evaluation methodology. The lack of methodology to assess the implementation of plans has so far precluded any systematic analysis of the determinants of the implementation of local environmental plans. The article focuses on the implementation of plans in New Zealand. The key factors of implementation are: the quality of the plan; the capacity and commitment of land developers to implement plans; the capacity and commitment of the staff and leadership of planning agencies to implement plans; and the interactions between developers and the agency. The analysis is based on 353 permits implementing six local environmental plans in New Zealand, and on surveys of the developers who obtained the permits and of the planning agencies that granted the permits. The analysis finds that plan implementation is mainly driven by the resources of the planning agencies and by the quality of the plans, rather than by the characteristics of developers. Investments in plan writing and agency and staff capacity building thus improve the implementation of plans in the long-run.

Public participation has become a central element of planning activity over the last decades. The planning literature has given considerable attention to participation in theory and practice, discussing its benefits for democratic governance, its multiple goals and criteria for assessing success. Although planning academics and practitioners understand the importance of participation and know that participatory processes often fail, the field of participation evaluation lags behind. This paper explores how often, why and how planners evaluate participation in practice. It builds on data collected through a nationally representative survey of 761 AICP-certified planners. We find that they rarely evaluate participation formally. Informal evaluations rely on a wide range of criteria about participation processes and outcomes consistent with the criteria identified by planning theory. The paper presents these evaluation criteria and the practices and recommendation of the planners with most experience in participation evaluation.

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This paper presents the first national study on environmental inequalities in France. It applies the Anglo-American concept of environmental justice, focusing on the distribution of environmental burdens, to the French setting and tests the hypothesis that poor and immigrant communities are disproportionately exposed to environmental risks. The location of eight types of hazardous sites (industrial and nuclear sites, incinerators, waste management facilities) and the socio-economic characteristics of populations are associated at the commune, or town, level for all 36�600 French towns. The analysis, descriptive and multivariate, uses simple and spatial regression techniques. It shows that towns with high proportions of immigrants tend to host more hazardous sites, even controlling for population size, income, degree of industrialization of the town and region. The study establishes the presence of environmental inequities in France and raises new public policy questions. However, it does not investigate the mechanisms that may explain inequities, which could include procedural injustices, land market dynamics and historical patterns of industrial and urban development.