ABSTRACT
Climate change is a challenging issue for spatial planning in part because it raises particular problems of understanding ‘the public interest’. Most planning systems, as explained in Chapter 1, have developed as an intervention in the free operation of land markets and development rights, with conceptions of the public interest lying both in the national interest and in local or community interests. In many countries, national governments have retained their powers of central-or national-level decision-making through legislating for the right to set policy for the use of land and space, and for powers to determine applications for consent for certain types of development (especially energy, minerals, transport and defence), in the national interest. At the same time, countries within the EU espouse the principle of subsidiarity, that is, the taking of decisions as closely as possible to the community directly affected. There has therefore always been potential for conflict between these scales for defining the public interest.
