A marriage of inconvenience: the coupling of spatial planning to European environmental policy

ABSTRACT

For decades, the European Union has affected spatial planning in the member states through its environmental policies. To investigate the mechanism by which EU policy becomes joined up to spatial planning, we invoke the concept of ‘coupling’ from systems and organizational science. We show that coupling is established not only at the EU policymaking level (e.g. within a directive’s text), but also during implementation and enforcement. Consequently, it is possible to actively ‘manage’ coupling either by enhancing its flexibility on paper or by limiting its activation in practice. Drawing on three case studies in the Netherlands, we show that various (de)coupling strategies can be applied, but none are completely satisfactory or risk-free.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatial planning
• European policy impact
• systems theory
• implementation
• planning and environmental policy
• territorial cohesion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Apart from the top-down flow of influence depicted in figure 1, the implementation process gives rise to bottom-up flows as stakeholders interact in order to influence EU policy development, through a variety of mechanisms that are mostly outside the scope of this paper.

2 Because these norms have usually been translated into national law, the project is assessed against national norms, but of European origin.

3 Wiering et al. (2018) explored possibilities to ‘regionalize’ this procedure, which would make it more territorial, and thereby potentially create a tighter coupling to planning decisions.