Of Barriers to Entry for Medium and Large n Multiple Streams Applications: Methodological and Conceptual Considerations

Recent literature reviews on contributions applying the multiple streams framework (MSF) concluded that although the framework is prolific, there is a lack of contributions testing it in a larger sample size. By addressing which barriers to entry medium and large n MSF applications face and by suggesting ways to handle them, we aim at providing researchers with a benchmark contribution for developing MSF‐guided research designs based on a medium to a high number of cases. Building on an overview of the few existing medium and large n MSF studies, we address three challenges researchers must deal with: (1) choice of dependent variables and case selection; (2) operationalization and measurement of the framework's (predominantly figurative) key concepts; and (3) choice of a method that corresponds with the framework's research questions. In the latter regard, we focus on the pros and cons of employing regression analysis and qualitative comparative analysis. We conclude that although the barriers to entry are high for testing the MSF in a larger sample size, they are not insurmountable.     

Endangerment-driven heritage volunteering: democratisation or ‘Changeless Change’

This article is the product of prolonged wrestling with the question of how heritage professionals and researchers can facilitate and sustain public agency in caring for heritage in the UK during austerity without exploiting volunteers or devaluing professionals. It offers critical perspectives on efforts made to democratise heritage in the UK by increasing public participation through a critique of neoliberalism and the rise of neoliberal approaches in the heritage sector. It argues that the adoption of neoliberal approaches, such as crowdsourcing, that profess to democratise yet reinforce existing power structures, is the inevitable result of insisting on protecting material culture from harm, despite the continuing accumulation of more ‘heritage’. Drawing on critical perspectives on participation from a number of disciplines, it is suggested that efforts to increase public participation in heritage cannot hope to avoid exploiting volunteers, devaluing professionals and marginalising traditionally underrepresented demographics unless they also let go of the perceived need to protect the materiality of the past. Drawing on Sarah May’s archaeology of contemporary tigers, this article argues that the application of endangerment narratives to heritage reinforces uncritical understandings of both heritage and volunteering that preclude heritage from fulfilling its potential function as a contemporary social process.     

Spatial planning in transition in Greece: a critical overview

Greece is a country undergoing major changes in its course towards recovering from the recession and meeting the desirable economic standards. Over the past years, a series of legislative acts have reformed not only the sectoral policies and guidelines for the development of the main economic sectors of the country, but also the spatial planning policy and system, which in the period of just two years (between 2014 and 2016) underwent a double reform (Laws 4269 and 4447). Planning procedures became more ‘favourable’ to investments and the market’s needs. However, despite this early shift towards a more flexible and neoliberal approach, competitiveness and economic growth have not yet been achieved, whilst spatial planning is still ‘on hold’, leading to further entrepreneurial hesitancy and to a further delay in meeting the State’s requisite economic goals. The paper aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding the future of spatial planning in Greece, in view of achieving economic stability and prosperity. The paper concludes that a suitable spatial planning model for Greece should prioritize public interest and territorial justice, in a way that it will not asphyxiate or discourage private sector initiatives that are so needed for the economic recovery.     

Investigating the partnership approach in the EU Urban Agenda from the perspective of soft planning

At the European level, several strategic documents concerned with spatial and urban development have been published during the last decades. While these documents are essential to communicate European ideas and objectives, they are often regarded least influential in practice due to their abstract nature, legally non-binding status and lack of allocated resources. Though these limitations apply to the EU Urban Agenda, this recently published policy paper introduces partnerships as a new implementation tool. The partnerships can be regarded as innovative in two respects: On the one hand, they involve new actors, most importantly cities, in European policy debates. On the other hand, they ensure the anchorage of the Urban Agenda with a broad range of actors at various spatial scales without challenging its legally non-binding status. The Urban Agenda can thus be understood as another example of the move towards soft European spatial planning and urban development. This article investigates the notion of partnership as a soft planning and governance tool within the Urban Agenda. Moreover, based on expert interviews, it presents early opinions and expectations of actors involved in the development of the Urban Agenda and the partnerships on affordable housing.     

Competing discourses of built heritage: lay values in Irish conservation planning

Built heritage conservation has traditionally been shaped by professionals through an ‘authorised heritage discourse’, emphasising expert knowledge and skills, universal value, a hierarchy of significance, and protecting the authenticity of tangible assets. However, while the purpose of built heritage conservation is widely recognised to be broad, encompassing cultural, social and economic benefits, it takes place in the presence, and on behalf, of a wider public whose values and priorities may differ starkly from those of heritage power-players. Drawing on the perspectives of a range of built heritage actors in three small towns in Ireland, this paper contributes to these debates, exploring the competing values and priorities embedded within lay discourses of heritage. Based on critical discourse analysis of interviews with local actors, the paper identifies that collected memory and local place distinctiveness, contributing to a sense of local identity, are of central importance in how non-experts construct their understanding of built heritage. In the Irish context, this is particularly important in understanding social and cultural statutory categories of heritage interest. The paper concludes on the implications for policy and practice and, in particular, the need to more effectively take account of non-expert values and priorities in heritage and conservation decision-making.     

Diminishing borders and conflating spaces: a storyline to promote soft planning scales

At the latest since the argumentative turn, the crucial importance of language, narratives and discourses in the field of planning and policy-making is widely acknowledged. This can be particularly important for European spatial planning, for which the European Union (EU) does not have any formal competence. Thus, instead of enacting directives or regulations, the EU and its member states release legally non-binding documents, which contain ideas and objectives relevant to planning. In these documents, certain storylines can be identified, for example, regarding sustainability, balanced development and competitiveness. This article argues that there is another storyline, advocating the reduction of borders and the creation of new, soft spaces across Europe, such as city regions, cross-border regions or macro-regions. If picked up by national or sub-national actors, this storyline can play a crucial role in contributing to establish the legitimacy that soft spaces often lack. Based on empirical findings from the city region of Graz in Austria, the article aims to identify the elements of a discourse coalition, i.e. what the EU does to support soft spaces, who the actors reproducing the storyline are and how the storyline supports soft planning in practice.     

From bricks and mortar to social heritage: planning space for diversities in the AHD

This article investigates the authorised heritage discourse (AHD) through the lens of conservation planning practice. The AHD is characterised as an exclusionary discourse that privileges the physical nature of ‘heritage’, defined scientifically by ‘experts’. Set within the context of wider international trends towards more inclusive heritage practices, the article advances understanding of the contemporary AHD. Using local heritage designation as an investigatory platform, a thesis is developed to explain professional representations of heritage operating in this setting. In doing so, a pervasive, yet nuanced AHD is exposed. At the same time, a complex variety of contextual factors that constrain radical readjustment of the AHD are also uncovered. These include struggles over the subjectivity and operationalisation of social and cultural heritage values in rational planning environments. The conclusions drawn from this research challenge and subtly refine the AHD, and crucially, propose that wider trends in the heritage discourse cannot be adequately implemented within the current legal apparatus and mind-set of traditional rational planning. The article suggests that further research is required to understand how the multiple and diverse layers of heritage meanings can be emplaced and legitimised within planning settings.     

Communicative and participatory paradigm in the European territorial policies. A discourse analysis

Communicative planning has been widely criticized for having little to do with the official legal procedures and for low-quality spatial solutions. It has also been blamed to be an empty concept, referring to an action that in itself has no content. This critique gives ground to the question: what is actually the role of the communicative and participatory paradigm in contemporary territorial policies? In this paper, we adopt discourse analysis methods to study the European documents on spatial planning in their three characteristic strands: smart city, integrated planning and multilevel governance. By extracting eight core principles (governance, sustainability, communication, participation, resilience, innovation, cooperation and coordination), we measure the importance of the communicative and participatory paradigm in the current planning discourse in Europe. We find that despite critique it remains one of the fundamental building-blocks of the European territorial policy. Communicative planning principles are visibly present in all the analysed strands of spatial planning in Europe.     

Borders,planning and policy transfer: historical transformation of development discourses in the Finnish Torne Valley

European Union spatial policies have become a key institutional context in which to study policy transfer processes in European border areas. These policies are, however, only the most recent part of these transformation processes which raises a need for more historically sensitive approaches. An historical perspective is important, since border regions are historical processes with particular path-dependent development trajectories and power structures. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion concerning the transformation of European border regions by looking at the policy transfer of regional development discourses in the Finnish Torne Valley. The study material consists of strategic development documents produced by the Finnish border municipalities and the municipal-based co-operation organizations from the 1930s to 2013. The examination, based on critical discourse analysis, shows that the transformation process is driven by national trends and the dominant planning discourse. Nevertheless, the particular border setting and local discourse on ‘united Torne Valley’ have also intertwined with political and economic processes during different time periods.     

Unpacking the discursive Irish woman immigrant in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newfoundland

From the late 1600s to the early 1800s, Irish migrants journeyed to Newfoundland to take advantage of opportunities in the lucrative Newfoundland cod fishery. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this essay explores constructions of Irish-Newfoundland womanhood as articulated by local British officials, the Catholic Church, and male-centred family history narratives. These discourses located women at the margins of early settlement experiences or rendered them invisible altogether. Yet Irish-Newfoundland women were able to negotiate their own subjectivities within this discursive terrain, finding spaces for identity construction in the disjuncture between rhetoric and lived experiences. Some resided more immediately under the hegemonic gaze and struggled to break free from dominant narratives. But most became essential workers in household fishing production outside the capital of St John's, and their vital contribution as shore crews gave them considerable power and authority both in their households and in the broader community. Performing demanding physical work on stages and flakes (elevated wooden structures) or in gardens and fields, carrying out various economic activities in their own right, they were hardly the unproductive, unruly bodies of British official discourse or the passive flowers of civilisation narrated from Catholic pulpits. And far from being absent from the migration story, they were central players in community formation and the economic life of the island. In this historical context, proximity to/distance from hegemonic knowledge production created variations in identity construction within a group often represented in the literature as homogeneous and powerless.     

Beyond the divide: evaluation in co-evolutionary spatial planning

Spatial developments are becoming increasingly a-linear and dynamic with a wide range of possible actors. The awareness of uncertainty is growing and, therefore, projects need to integrate a high level of flexibility. But simultaneously, there is a growing demand for more informed and well-argued decisions. Predictions from the ‘best estimated model’ are no longer credible nor accepted, being too fragile and uncertain. How can we keep long-lasting, multi-actor projects in permanent transition on track? This expresses an important demand for more integrated evaluation in spatial planning. In this respect, this paper analyses existing theoretical evaluation strategies and how these strategies deal with spatial developments. They are still usually structured along static, generic and circular approaches; in fact, many neglect the dynamic, plural and a-linear realities. Therefore, this paper develops a post-structural evaluation approach for various planning issues and different playing fields of actors, followed by an illustration of the various settings for this approach in a Flemish case. Finally, we discuss how spatial planning and future plans might be evaluated with a dissipative role for evaluation.     

Participation in Policy Streams: Testing the Separation of Problems and Solutions in Subnational Policy Systems

The multiple streams theory of national policymaking has been influential in the study of public administration and public policy—if not without a fair bit of controversy. While some laud the model for its openness to the important role of policy entrepreneurs and the irrationalities of the decision‐making processes, others criticize the model for its lack of readily testable propositions. This article identifies a series of testable propositions in the multiple streams model (particularly that discussed by Kingdon). We assess whether participation in local policymaking (focusing on school district policymaking related to violence prevention) is characterized by “separate streams” of participants or is dominated by organized participants like interest groups or policy specialists. We found evidence of unity (rather than separation) in the policymaking process and scant evidence of elite, organized interests dominating the policymaking process. The results call into question a key assumption of the multiple streams model.     

Measuring the performance of planning: the conformance of Italian landscape planning practices with the European Landscape Convention

The assessment of the performance of planning is debated. The evaluation of the conformance of a given national planning system with a set of principles is similarly received with critical and favourable remarks. A relevant case study consists of the conformance of European landscape planning practice with the principles of the European Landscape Convention (ELC). Italy incorporated in 2004 the principles of the ELC with the Code on Cultural Assets and Landscape (CL), which opened the way for new laws, tools, observatories and atlases. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of an assessment exercise concerning the conformance with the ELC of planning practice in Italy. We scrutinize planning systems and tools established by peripheral administrations, according to a qualitative and comparative framework. We refine our analysis by focusing on 10 most recent cases and identifying critical issues in current landscape planning practice. The results are promising and show that landscape planning in Italy is increasingly in line with the ELC.     

Institutional contradictions and attempts at innovation. Evidence from the Italian urban facility planning

Spatial planning affects the way in which cities are created and developed, as well as their economics and welfare. It does so by constructing institutional frameworks that frequently undergo states of contradiction and demands for adjustment and revision. This situation is particularly evident by looking at the way in which urban facilities have been planned during the twentieth century. The article explores the issue of urban facility planning in Italy by taking into account the adaptations of the institutional framework governing and regulating their supply. In particular, it explores the central contradictions which guided reforms and revisions of urban facility planning in Italy, starting from the post-war period until now, and the main problems left unsolved after years of attempts at innovation aiming at a more flexible and quality-oriented approach. In order to contribute to this debate, specific policy implications and devices are presented.     

Generating Confusion,Concern, and Precarity through the Right to Rent Scheme in Scotland

The Immigration Act 2016 has heralded an era of amplified Government intervention into day‐to‐day life, placing increased responsibility for border protection on UK citizens. Using interviews with representatives from the field of housing in Scotland, this paper examines one specific aspect of the Immigration Act 2016, the Right to Rent scheme. We investigate how the Right to Rent creates a precarious environment for all those who may appear to be non‐UK citizens. We argue that it may endorse senses of fantasy citizenship to inculcate people into acting on behalf of the state and is a driver for further division in society. Scotland provides a particularly interesting case study, as housing is a devolved power, but immigration is not. This creates an additional layer of tension in our interview data, as housing organisations are faced with a set of conditions imposed from Westminster, infringing on a field that Scotland has self‐determined for some time. Our interviews illustrate the level of confusion around the scheme, the fact that it is increasing criminalisation in the housing sector, and stresses that the scheme is offloading state responsibility for border protection.     

Spatial imaginaries and institutional change in planning: the case of the Mersey Belt in north-west England

One outcome of the increasing spatial sophistication in research on regions is a growing interest in how spatial imaginaries are institutionalized in processes of region-building. This article proceeds from the observation that the Mersey Belt spatial imaginary, in north-west England, exhibits an outstanding degree of durability as compared to other spatial imaginaries in the region. It is hypothesized that the Mersey Belt has come to function as an informal planning institution with which subsequent spatial imaginaries are compelled to engage. In order to test this hypothesis, Neuman's lifecycle theory of institutional change is adapted to examine a spatial imaginary as a planning institution, analyzing the relationship between the Mersey Belt and subsequent spatial imaginaries produced in the region. The article in this way adds to existing theories on the institutionalization of spatial imaginaries. Based on the findings, it is suggested that the Mersey Belt has become embedded within the region's planning culture, such that shifts in the spatial conception of the region based on new economic imaginaries have been expressed through the spatial imaginary of the Mersey Belt.     

GIS技术在萨拉乌苏考古遗址公园规划设计中的应用

传统规划设计工作的技术平台多以计算机辅助设计(CAD)为主,本工作以内蒙古自治区鄂尔多斯萨拉乌苏考古遗址公园规划为例,将Arc GIS Desktop作为技术平台应用到公园的规划设计工作中。首先,通过对规划区的实地踏勘,采集相关数据和资料,进行规划区数据库建设;其次,在数据库建设的基础上,通过GIS技术构建与现实环境对应的虚拟地理信息空间,实现规划区景观的三维可视化;最后,利用三维景观模型对现实地理环境进行模拟、分析及虚拟场景飞行。不同于传统CAD的二维工作平台,本工作借助GIS对空间数据和属性数据的强大处理功能及其三维景观可视化模块,为实现内蒙古鄂尔多斯萨拉乌苏考古遗址公园的科学规划提供辅助。     

Performing postcolonial identities at the United Nations’ climate negotiations

This study aims to understand how postcolonial identities were performed in the negotiations that led to the new climate agreement signed in Paris in December 2015. Based on interviews, the analysis of documents and participant observation of the negotiations it was possible to identify the legal, economic and scientific discourses mobilised by both global North and South countries. In all three discourses, it was possible to identify a systematic effort of the Northern parties to unmake the identity of Southern parties as ‘developing countries’ as a way to erase the ontological difference between emerging and established industrialised economies. At the same time, in the context of the convention Southern parties reaffirmed their identities as ‘developing countries’ and demanded from the North a strong commitment to tackle climate change and the transfer of more financial resources to the South. In this process, it was also possible to identify an inversion of the position usually taken by mainstream and critical postcolonial scholars that see the deconstruction of categories such as ‘developing countries’ as key for the emancipation of the global South. Finally, this invites postocolonial scholars to look more closely at how postcolonial identities are being instrumentalised, discursively and politically.     

Victories from Insurgency: Re‐Negotiating Housing,Community Control,and Citizenship at the Margins

This article considers how insurgent campaigns for housing the poor in New York City and Chicago succeeded in engaging the local state, non‐profits and financial institutions in the creation of community land trusts. These campaigns had long arcs in which victories and losses built from each other, neither as permanent as they initially seemed. The campaigns moved iteratively between spaces of “invited citizenship” (courtrooms, planning committees) and “invented” spaces of collective action (property takeovers). They found their greatest success when, exploiting state incapacity to defend abandoned property, they elicited a degree of complicity from local governments in their takeovers of housing and land. The article thus contests dichotomised accounts of social movements that oppose losses to victories, cooptation to resistance, and movements to institutions. Instead, we call for situated and dynamic accounts of insurgent practice, capable of theorising the long, messy, co‐constituted evolution of political contexts and popular struggle.     

Framing,agency and multiple streams– a case study of parks policy in the Northern Territory

ABSTRACT

There is increasing interest in the role of agency in policy processes for creating effective change. In this paper I explore the critical role of policy entrepreneurs in both creating and capitalising on windows of opportunity through creative framing of issues. I combine Kingdon’s multiple streams framework of the policy, problem and politics streams with the three types of social movement framing – diagnostic, prognostic and motivational – to analyse a case study of pragmatic and innovative policymaking in Australian Indigenous policy. I find that pragmatic policy entrepreneurs used framing to actively refine available policy solutions, particularly in response to structural barriers, and played an active role in brokering the problem in ways to make it politically acceptable. This confirms the importance of ideational processes, and the critical role of framing, in creating windows of opportunity for significant reform.