Elsevier

Cities

Volume 63, March 2017, Pages 58-69
Cities

Preparing for disruptions: A diagnostic strategic planning intervention for sustainable development

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2016.12.016Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The impediments to sustainable infrastructure delivery are complex and varied.

  • Strategic planning processes need to anticipate and prepare for those impediments.

  • We propose a diagnostic approach as an intervention in the planning process.

  • The intervention was tested in water system planning in an urban renewal area.

Abstract

Despite the emphasis on sustainable development in some of the contemporary planning and policy rhetoric, we face an implementation deficit in practice. The impediments to the widespread adoption and successful implementation of sustainable infrastructure in cities' critical sectors—such as water, energy or transport—are varied and complex. Although the scholarship has made some attempts to understand and categorize those impediments, not much has been said about how to identify them in a specific practical context. This study proposes a model for a diagnostic intervention in the ongoing process of strategic infrastructure planning, as a way of revealing context-specific impediments. The diagnostic intervention incorporates an explicit and reflexive consideration of short-term barriers and long-term disruptors into the strategic planning process, and assists with drafting the required coping strategies. The intervention has been tested in water infrastructure planning for one of the world's largest urban renewal areas in Melbourne, Australia. This trial application provided promising outcomes for addressing the implementation deficit of sustainable development: it created a platform for various stakeholder groups to engage in explicit discussions on their confronted problems, which often have trans-organizational causes and impacts; it enabled reflexivity within the ongoing planning process; and, it helped to consider a large portfolio of future uncertainties to provide an enabling condition for more robust decisions to be made. Moreover, the trialed intervention provided empirical evidence in support of the scholarly discourse which contends that sustainable infrastructure delivery is not only about the development of technical solutions, but is also about the development of processes and tools that support the widespread adoption and successful implementation of those solutions in the face of wide-ranging impediments.

Introduction

Almost three decades after the rise of sustainable development as a grand vision, we are facing an implementation deficit in practice (Holden et al., 2014, Newton, 2012).Worldwide, in critical sectors such as water, energy and transport, investments in conventional infrastructure predominate, and the adoption of sustainable alternatives often remains too slow (Negro et al., 2012, Rijke et al., 2013, Walsh et al., 2015).

Scholars agree that the shift in infrastructure delivery in today's cities toward sustainable solutions would be a radical change (Pickett et al., 2013, Truffer et al., 2010), requiring cumulative capacities built into strategic planning processes. Currently, a range of impediments across different sectoral and geographic contexts tend to delay, divert or stop the desired transformation (Brown and Farrelly, 2009, Negro et al., 2012). Strategic planning literature often refer to those impediments as barriers (e.g. Ferguson et al., 2013a, Hunt and Rogers, 2005). Innovation literature refer to them as systemic problems (e.g. Wieczorek & Hekkert, 2012) or systemic failures (e.g. Klein Woolthuis, Lankhuizen, & Gilsing, 2005). They include a range of political, economic, social, institutional and technological issues, such as: lack of political will, insufficient capital resources, limited community engagement, fragmented institutional frameworks and technological failures (Brown and Farrelly, 2009, Klein Woolthuis et al., 2005).

While there have been some academic attempts to categorize the impediments to the adoption and successful implementation of sustainable infrastructure solutions, not much has been said about how to identify them systematically in a practical context (Wieczorek & Hekkert, 2012). More importantly, it is not well understood how strategic planning methodologies can incorporate an explicit consideration of those impediments, and assist planners and decision makers in designing the required resolution strategies.

To address the implementation deficit of sustainable development, however, such an understanding is crucial. As Voß and his colleagues argue, in steering for sustainable development universal solutions may not work; instead, we need to be able to identify and deal with particular problems within their concrete empirical contexts (Voß, Newig, Kastens, Monstadt, & Nölting, 2007). Similarly, other scholars warn against generalized solutions or blueprint approaches and emphasize the need for diagnostic analyses in dealing with complex problems (Edquist, 2011, Moser and Ekstrom, 2010, Ostrom, 2007). Malekpour and colleagues highlight this with specific reference to planning, and call for the development of diagnostic approaches that help with the systemic and empirical identification of problems and barriers as part of the strategic planning process (Malekpour, Brown, & de Haan, 2015).

Against this backdrop, this paper puts forward a model for a planning intervention to assist the systemic diagnosis of impediments to sustainable infrastructure delivery within their practical contexts. Broadly speaking, strategic infrastructure planning in the context of sustainable development starts with developing a vision, followed by designing strategic pathways/options to achieve the vision (Ferguson, Frantzeskaki, & Brown, 2013). Our diagnostic intervention targets those strategic planning and decision-making processes that have already envisioned and intended sustainability, to be achieved through innovative infrastructure options. The intervention would then assist planners and decision makers to explicitly and reflexively identify a range of challenges and barriers to realizing the vision and strategic options as part of the strategic planning process. It also helps with drafting coping strategies, in order to remove, circumvent or ameliorate the identified impediments.

The diagnostic intervention we propose may be considered as a member of a broader family of approaches that deal with high uncertainties in long-term planning and aim at increasing the robustness of planning decisions in the face of future challenges. Examples include Assumption-Based Planning (Dewar, Builder, Hix, & Levin, 1993), Robust Decision Making (Lempert, Popper, & Bankes, 2003) and Adaptive Policymaking (Walker, Rahman, & Cave, 2001). However, what we propose is not a grand planning framework or methodology. It is indeed an intervention that aims at capacity building within the ongoing processes of strategic planning for more robust outcomes toward realizing sustainable development.

The paper also reports on the trial application of the proposed intervention in water infrastructure planning for one of the world's largest urban renewal areas (approx. 500 ha) located in Melbourne, Australia. This empirical application provides insights into the details of the implementation challenge, as well as a potential roadmap, for delivering a Water Sensitive City—a vision that encapsulates sustainable, liveable and resilient urban water systems. The methodological approach and the insights derived from the trial application are relevant and potentially useful for both academic scholars and practitioners who aim to achieve sustainable development in infrastructure sectors.

Section snippets

Conceptual underpinnings of the planning intervention

Infrastructure planning in industrialized countries is often undertaken at multiple scales and levels across national, state and local governments; bureaucratic planning bodies; and water, energy, transport or communication utilities (Furlong, De Silva, Guthrie, & Considine, 2016). Infrastructure planning frameworks are often used to guide the process and provide the required steps for identifying infrastructure solutions. Most existing frameworks vary both within and across nations. However,

A diagnostic planning intervention model

In this section, we present a model for a diagnostic planning intervention which provides a process methodology for planners and decision makers to systematically reveal and prepare for short-term barriers and long-term disruptors to sustainable infrastructure strategies. The planning intervention, as its name suggests, does not aim to comprehensively transform or replace the ongoing strategic planning process. Rather, it is meant to be used as an add-on to the ongoing planning process, in

Trial application of the diagnostic planning intervention

A fundamental challenge faced by the planning research is the evaluation of new planning concepts, approaches or methods (Haasnoot, Kwakkel, Walker, & ter Maat, 2013). The suitability and effectiveness of a planning approach can neither be determined in the short term, nor from a single instance of a plan generated by that approach, unless there is a competing parallel plan (Dewar et al., 1993). In this regard, planning research often tends to provide controlled real-world applications of new

Impediments to the practical realization of a water sensitive Fishermans Bend

The impediments to the practical realization of a water sensitive development, as consolidated from the diagnostic planning intervention for Fishermans Bend, are presented in Table 1, Table 2, Table 3.

Table 1 includes a range of disruptors to the water sensitive vision, as made explicit by workshop participants. The disruptors did not refer to any specific water sensitive technology or solution, but were rather about the vision as a whole. The overarching disruptors across political, economic,

Discussion

In this section, we discuss the implications of the trialed diagnostic process, as well as the produced results/contents, for sustainable infrastructure delivery. We then conclude by discussing broader implications of this research for policy and planning research in the context of sustainable development.

Conclusions

A great deal of sustainability scholars has warned against blueprint approaches or panaceas in dealing with systemic problems, and has instead called for diagnostic approaches (e.g. Edquist, 2011, Malekpour et al., 2015, Moser and Ekstrom, 2010). In this paper we put forward a diagnostic intervention, to be used as part of the evaluation of infrastructure options—or candidate strategies—in strategic planning processes. The proposed intervention assists planners, engineers, architects,

Acknowledgement

The workshops carried out in this study have been hosted by the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities in Australia. The authors would like to thank Jamie Ewert and Chris Chesterfield for their support and facilitation during the workshops. Special thanks to Wikke Novalia for her generous assistance in running the workshops.

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