ABSTRACT
Understanding and acknowledging the meaning of diverse interests for contemporary societies is now the starting point for planning evaluation across all public sector agencies. This has set a challenge for practitioners and researchers of how to structure and arrange large amounts of otherwise complex information in a form relevant to decision-making. One of the classic themes for planning evaluation has been the ability of evaluation tools such as cost-benefit analysis and environmental impact assessment to rank competing project proposals according to some economic or “value for money” criteria or assess the degree of impact on scarce environmental resources (Lichfield et al., 1998). Nathaniel Lichfield’s contribution to setting out the craft of “pre-development evaluation” was essential to the development of the theory and practice of evaluation in planning (Alexander, 2006). His work has provided the essential guidelines to the increasing number on practical manuals of how to undertake ex ante evaluation of project proposals (Crabbé and Leroy, 2008; Geertman and Stillwell, 2009; Holden and Zimmerman, 2008). While these tools helped to create clarity in terms of decision options, and
their pros and cons, there was no clear attention, however, to the societal and political context in which these techniques were supposed to work. The new emphasis on sustainable development and the new institutional and governance realities in the twenty-first century, including the fragmentation of the public sector and the decentralisation of decision-making, have led to a demand from practitioners for extending the scope of planning evaluation. These challenges both to the methods and the theory and to the practice of planning evaluation have been addressed by researchers in many books on
planning evaluation. Borri et al. (1997) focused on evaluating the relationships between theory and practice and the urban-rural interplay in planning, while Lichfield et al. (1998) sought to understand the challenge of complexity in evaluating the performance of planning. Henk Voogd (2001) edited a collection of planning evaluation papers emphasising the change from elected government to governance by public and private stakeholders, and Miller and Patassini (2005) assessed the evolving approaches to incorporating non-market values in planning evaluation. The focus on place-making, the competitiveness of our cities, and the resource
efficiency of public and private investment in an era of far-reaching ecological change means that planning evaluation is becoming more central to assessing the impacts of both public and private sector actions. This book is, therefore, situated in the new practice context of attempting to integrate economic efficiency with environmental sustainability and social equity. Clearly, issues such as biodiversity, climate change, and dilemmas between economic growth and nature conservation now lead to further demands for extending the scope of planning evaluation. The challenge of integrating these concerns has given new meaning to the paradigm of sustainable development and the principles of sustainability that underpin the paradigm. This is a critical stage in the conceptual development and practice of sustainability with the consideration of alternative proposals essential for informed debate and decision. These changes to the substantive concerns of planning evaluation are,
however, situated in the new institutional realities including multi-scalar governance and the fragmentation of governmental interventions. The current practice context raises further questions of where the evaluation of planning starts and ends, and who should be involved. Different levels of governance and diverse policy sectors are involved in the evaluation of alternative long-term strategic options for spatial and infrastructure development, the more detailed policies in public sector documents and the measures to implement policies for land use, transport, health, ecological assets, energy and infrastructure. How these different tiers of governance, and policy sectors, should involve civil society in ex ante and ex post evaluation is now the subject of debate among a much wider clientele or set of stakeholders than before. The challenge for planning evaluation spans, on the one hand, the theory and methods of evaluation and, on the other, the practical considerations of the institutional design of evaluation across the vertical scales of governance.
