ABSTRACT
Climate change poses many significant technical challenges for spatial planning, including, for example, how to plan adaptation responses with uncertain knowledge of potential impacts or how to include alternative forms of energy supply within local developments. Although significant, such technical issues are only part of a broader set of issues related to how spatial planning is framed, practised and implemented. In short, climate change has the potential not only to reshape what it is that spatial planning does, but how it is done. In this chapter, the governance challenge of addressing climate change in the spatial planning system is considered. Governance is a slippery term with almost as many definitions as advocates but in essence it relates to the institutionalized processes through which collective action is defined and determined. It is argued that through the spatial planning system multiple modes of governing climate change are taking shape, creating a fragmented governance landscape, which provides both opportunities and barriers for progress in addressing this critical issue. This challenges the notion that spatial planning can necessarily provide a way of integrating climate change into other policy domains, or offer a straightforward means of delivering climate policy goals.
