Theoretical orientations in environmental planning: An inquiry into alternative approaches

In the process of devising courses of action to resolve problems arising at the society-environment interface, a variety of planning approaches are followed, whose adoption is influenced by—among other things—the characteristics of environmental problems, the nature of the decision-making context, and the intellectual traditions of the disciplines contributing to the study of these problems. This article provides a systematic analysis of six alternative environmental planning approaches—comprehensive/rational, incremental, adaptive, contingency, advocacy, and participatory/consensual. The relative influence of the abovementioned factors is examined, the occurrence of these approaches in real-world situations is noted, and their environmental soundness and political realism is evaluated. Because of the disparity between plan formulation and implementation and between theoretical form and empirical reality, a synthetic view of environmental planning approaches is taken and approachesin action are identified, which characterize the totality of the planning process from problem definition to plan implementation, as well as approachesin the becoming, which may be on the horizon of environmental planning of tomorrow. The suggested future research directions include case studies to verify and detail the presence of the approaches discussed, developing measures of success of a given approach in a given decision setting, and an intertemporal analysis of environmental planning approaches.