ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on municipal planning and the demands on local governments to contribute to the sustainable development of the local territory. The purpose is to elucidate and discuss the capacity at the local level to tackle these problems in planning and strategic considerations. Up to now, a great deal of attention has been given to the fact that sustainable development is an unclear and even ambiguous concept. In order to overcome the problem of unclear ends, the main interest in areas like planning research has been on operationalizing ends, which have been adapted to current ideas of planning practice. Moreover new methods and tools have been developed in order to encourage the integration of sustainability issues in planning.
