ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the importance, nature and conditions of policymaking for urban environmental management. Policy, management and organisation are, or should be, inseparable aspects of urban environmental research. Urban environmental researchers seem to agree that the proper understanding of the complex phenomenon of urbanisation requires an interdisciplinary approach, which can lead to the constitution of a common language. The incipient political analysis underlying urban environmental studies have largely concentrated on traditional relations between state and society, when substantial changes have taken place in the nature and role of the state, in the state’s relations with the market and society, as well as in societal organisation. The creation of new and flexible legal instruments to enable state action has been constrained by both conservative legal ideologies and the lack of understanding of the new realities – social, economic, political and legal – brought about by the process of intensive urbanisation.
