ABSTRACT
Why should sustainability assessment be applied to planning – especially when we consider that many planning schemes strive for sustainability anyhow? And why should sustainability assessment be integrated into planning? In this chapter we investigate how these questions can be answered in the light of the effectiveness criteria laid out by Bond, Morrison-Saunders and Howitt in Chapter 8. As sustainability assessment is a relatively young domain with evolving, but still little, practice, this chapter presents a vision for how the effectiveness criteria can be addressed in integrated planning and sustainability assessment processes. To create the vision we build upon experiences gained with strategic environmental assessment (SEA) where, analogously to sustainability assessment, an assessment scheme was introduced into planning processes. The framework for this paper is derived from Stoeglehner (2010a), where the aspect of SEA-integration into planning is discussed, and Stoeglehner (2010b) where a concept for strategic planning and assessment methods is drafted that we propose should be applied in sustainability assessment to achieve substantive effectiveness.
