Tim Richardson

• PhD
• Professor at Norwegian University of Life Sciences

This paper engages with recent debates in the environmental assessment (EA) literature about the lessons that can be learned from planning theory. It argues that the current communicative turn in EA, echoing a similar shift in planning thought in the 1990s, has failed to benefit from this earlier experience. Instead of following this trend, the pap...

Political power has received curiously limited attention within the vast literature on environmental governance. This article addresses this research lacuna by employing a particular perspective on power – governmentality – to examine the environment as a site for the contestation of power and authority. Our empirical focus is the ‘making up’ (afte...

This article contributes to understanding of how change occurs in the field of environmental assessment (EA). It argues that the integration of new issues in EA, such as human health, is significantly influenced by how practitioners' understandings shape their actions, and by what happens when those, possibly different, interpretations of appropria...

This paper seeks to contribute to debates on the potential for conservation planning to engage actively with conflict. Current research in conservation planning generally approaches conflict by concentrating on the challenges of securing agreement and consensus. Recent planning literature advocates approaches that are more open to conflict. In the...

Urban densification has for some decades been considered as the most relevant strategy for ecological modernization within the field of urban spatial development. Compared to outward urban expansion, densification has important environmental merits, but is not without negative environmental impacts. This paper critically examines how urban densific...

In conservation planning, maps do important work in producing territories of stronger and weaker protection, and spatially fixing special handling of development. Because of this, mapping and maps are contested, yet there have been few studies of their roles in planning conflicts. The performance of maps in planning processes affecting a wild reind...

What role does visualisation—such as images and maps—play in environmental and landscape governance? As pointed out by our late colleague Eirin Hongslo, surprisingly little research has been conducted on what ‘work’ images and maps do in these fields. This special issue draws on her insights, and the wider scholarship on critical cartography and po...

In addition to a primary dwelling, having access to a non-primary dwelling for leisure activities is a mass phenomenon with a long tradition in Norway. This paper questions the Norwegian multi-dwelling lifestyle by critically discussing its climate implications. Based on a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews with persons having access to n...

Denne rapporten oppsummerer en studie av hvordan norske kommuner og fylkeskommuner arbeider med å implementere bærekraftsmålene i planlegging. Rapporten er skrevet av Nordlandsforskning, med deltakelse fra Norges miljø- og biovitenskaplig universitet, på oppdrag fra Kommunal- og moderniseringsdepartementet våren 2020.

Based on a mixed-methods study of Norwegian second home users, this paper addresses travel distances, modes and carbon dioxide emissions from second home mobility, with a particular focus on reasons for choosing relevant modes of transportation to second home areas and while staying there. The questionnaire data show that the climate impacts are pa...

The article scrutinizes planners’ stories of innovation in contemporary public transport planning in three Scandinavian contexts (Denmark, Sweden and Norway). This analysis is accomplished by adapting Judith Butler’s post-structural feminist critical theory on performativity to the planning context. This theoretical framework is used to illuminate...

The European Landscape Convention has introduced a Europe-wide concept of protection, management and planning of all landscapes – not just the outstanding ones. This book reflects on the background to the establishment of the convention, takes a critical look at examples and experiences of its implementation, and discusses future developments for t...

The aim of this paper is to sharpen the ways in which power dynamics can be analytically ‘seen’ in complex governance contexts where particular ways of governing, and their associated horizons of thought, shape and are in turn shaped by intricate interactions between actors. A theoretical approach is proposed, combining a governmentality perspectiv...

The central concern of this paper is the relationship between research-driven “state-of-the-art” knowledge, and knowledge claims made in practice, in planning for sustainability. The paper approaches this topic from a critical realist perspective, which is used to provide criteria for positing “state-of-the-art” knowledge validity, and assessing th...

The aim of the project has been to analyse institutional and planning conditions for public transport in the Scandinavian countries from a comparative perspective, looking at the county of Skåne (Sweden) and the municipalities of Aarhus (Denmark) and Trondheim (Norway). The report considers qualitative casestudies of public transport in Skåne, Aarh...

Previous studies have identified implementation problems connected to sustainable mobility. These difficulties raise the question of which strategies can be successfully pursued to break path dependencies in urban policy making. This article is focused on corporate mobility management as one specific example of sustainable mobility initiatives, and...

The significance of politics and power dynamics has long been recognised in environmental assessment (EA) research, but there has not been sustained attention to power, either theoretically or empirically. The aim of this special issue is to encourage the EA community to engage more consistently with the issue of power. The introduction represents...

The aim of this special issue is to stimulate conceptual development in the fields of borders and mobilities studies through theoretical and empirical contributions of scholars working at the interface between them. The introduction argues that there is both a need to strengthen the conceptual vocabulary through which the mobilities field engages w...

In this article, we analyse how contested transitions in planning rationalities and spatial logics have shaped the processes and outputs of recent episodes of Danish “strategic spatial planning”. The practice of “strategic spatial planning” in Denmark has undergone a concerted reorientation in the recent years as a consequence of an emerging neolib...

This article analyses how urban authorities manage goals of sustainable development in decentralized planning contexts when faced with economic growth opportunities offered by a powerful development actor. This challenge is described and analysed in a comparative case study of how two Swedish cities handled the issue of new IKEA stores in decision-...

Planning for sustainable mobility is a complex and demanding task and the knowledge of how to trade off multiple, often conflicting, goals is not entirely clear. One of the most contentious and confounding issues in the context of urban planning has been, and continues to be, the place of the automobile within the evolving sustainable mobility para...

This paper explores the interplay between the spatial politics of new governance landscapes and innovations in the use of spatial representations in planning. The central premise is that planning experiments with new relational approaches become enmeshed in spatial politics. The case of strategic spatial planning in Denmark reveals how fuzzy spatia...

[please note – the spatial images have been removed from this version of the paper to reduce the file size for electronic distribution] Paper to be presented at the ESRC/UACES Study Group on the Europeanisation of This paper explores the representation of European space in images, and the significance of these images in building and reproducing pol...

While traces and techniques of power and contestation around the understanding and production of spaces are clearly recognized in the sociological and planning research literature, there has been little rigorous attention to how socio-spatial inequality is put at stake in strategic mobilization around particular spatial imaginaries. In an analysis...

The outcomes of frameworks and practices for stakeholder involvement in environmental impact assessment (EIA) for road planning, under the umbrella of a common EU legal framework, are investigated here in specific national contexts. Data for the two empirical cases examined - Poland and Sweden - are related to the recent ongoing discussion on conte...

This article sheds light on the dynamics of power in a contested field of action – environmental assessment (EA) – within which theorisation and analysis of power has been limited, and there has been little engagement with productive approaches to power. We use of a typology for analysing the production of social order to create a rich and complex...

The central role of impact assessment instruments globally in policy integration initiatives has been cemented in recent years. Associated with this trend, but also reflecting political emphasis on greater accountability in certain policy sectors and a renewed focus on economic competitiveness in Western countries, demand has increased for evidence...

The introduction of a congestion tax was a significant moment in the management of mobility in Stockholm. This paper critically examines this apparent consensus on confronting car based mobility, by analysing how mobility was framed at key stages in policy making, from the 1970s through to the trial in 2006 and subsequent implementation. Changing t...

This paper presents the results of an analysis of deliberative norms in the framework for Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) in roads planning in Sweden. The more specific question is how this framework has responded to the shift towards more deliberative approaches to planning and decision making, advocated in planning theory and policy literat...

The controversial nature of urban congestion charging policies makes them politically risky. Urban planners, policy makers and politicians are forced to consider how they can legitimately introduce a policy that the public may not want. Implementation in London, and failure in Edinburgh, raise questions about whether they should seek full citizen s...

This paper reports upon the development of a policy assessment tool designed to evaluate the outcomes of policies promoting increased accessibility to services in rural areas. Much public policy is now concerned with addressing issues (such as accessibility) that span traditional organisational responsibilities and boundaries and thus require ‘join...

This paper explores a crucial aspect of sustainable mobility: the production of social inequality in mobility systems. The approach taken is to focus on how, as new transit infrastructures create alternative ways of travelling into and accessing the city, they create changed conditions for the formation of subject identities. New types of traveller...

This paper investigates the changing relations between citizens and Europe's internal borders by seeing these relations as objects of governmentality of mobilities. It focuses on the particular discursive space of one transnational ‘corridor in the making’, studying how, through practices of visioning and strategy-making, governmental actors make n...

Rural governance in the UK and elsewhere has undergone far-reaching changes, as partnerships and other collaborative approaches have emerged to address the challenges of rural sustainable development. The legitimacy of this ‘new rural governance’ is purportedly grounded in deliberation between stakeholders, but this is problematic—it is not clear h...

This paper investigates how the governmental project of creating a single EU space creates new conditions for respacing, rebordering and rescaling, within and across that space, and beyond it. The focus is on the micropolitics of policy-making upon which the fate of such big ideas rely. The specific aim is to scrutinize the calculative practices th...

This paper contributes to the current spatial turn in planning research by analysing the Europeanization of strategic planning practices in a specific territory, and the consequent implications for spatial justice. The narratives of policy making presented suggest that the normative construct of polycentric urban development, underpinned by the fun...

It is widely accepted that new governance structures are needed to support sustainable development, because of both the nature of the challenges faced, and the incapacity of existing modes of government to address them in a context of eroded legitimacy. A burgeoning range of participatory practices rests on an established orthodoxy that sustainable...

This paper argues that we cannot debate SEA procedures in isolation from questions of value, and that these debates should foreground qualities of outcomes rather than become preoccupied with qualities of process. Value differences should not be left as a question of mediation between conflicting positions. As a means of introducing this normative...

This article calls for a new analytical approach to address how the emergence of a new European spatial policy field conditions policy-making and implementation across Europe. This is now urgent because as the new policy field takes shape, its core ideas and values are being contested across different scales, sectors and territories of governance,...

The introduction of national parks in areas where existing authorities have traditionally been responsible for developing policies, preparing plans and making decisions on development proposals, can be a threat to longstanding interests. This paper explores this problem by examining the struggle for control of planning in one of Scotland's first na...

Consensus building has become an everyday activity in environmental planning and management, and its use is often held to be a symbol of a fair, transparent and fully participative process. However, this paper argues that in any real situation practical constraints and tensions between different goals lead almost inevitably to compromises in the id...

The Development of Policies to Promote Accessibility in Rural Areas in Great Britain

This paper explores a classic challenge in implementing sustainable development: how to build an integrated policy discourse across a complex and contested policy field. Renewable energy development in Wales has become a controversial issue over the past 10 years, and dramatically illustrates the institutional challenges of implementing sustainable...

This paper explores the representation of European space in images, and the significance of these images in building and reproducing policy discourses of European space. Landmark and less well-known images of European spatial relations are discussed, from representations of trans-European infrastructure networks to the iconic 'bananas' and 'grapes'...

The aim of this paper is to explore how spatialities are 'constructed' in spatial policy discourses and to explore how these construction processes might be conceptualised and analysed. To do this, we discuss a theoretical and analytical framework for the discourse analysis of socio-spatial relations. Our approach follows the path emerging within p...

Making European Space explores how future visions of Europe's physical space are being decisively shaped by transnational politics and power struggles, which are being played out in new multi-level arenas of governance across the European Union. At stake are big ideas about mobility and friction, about relations between core and peripheral regions,...

The publication in 1999 of the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) is a significant step towards European spatial planning. It follows a period of intergovernmental and inter-institutional development of a framework and policies, which raises many issues about the normative and discoursive positions and constructions which are integrate...

In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what shou...

Discourse analysis is becoming an increasingly common approach in planning and environmental policy research. This paper asserts that the generic treatment of discourse analysis obscures distinct approaches in which ‘discourses’ can combine different elements of text, systems of thought and action. Textually oriented approaches have been more preva...

The paper argues the need for a more nuanced debate over the place of public involvement in transport planning in Britain, in the context of the current democratic turn in governance. The recent policy shift towards integrated transport has been accompanied by significant institutional changes, which have created a new framework for transport plann...

The emergence of European spatial planning is characterized by new processes at different spatial scales that reach across national boundaries, and encompass new mega-regions, the EU as a spatial entity and a wider pan-European spatial vision. In this paper we explore how a dialectical relation between a Europe of flows, and a Europe of places, is...

In this paper, the theoretical work of Michel Foucault is used to construct an approach to the analysis of transport policy which focuses on the inherently political and contested nature of policy making, played out in the competition between discourses. This approach is used to analyse critically British transport policy in the 1990s, when, in a c...

This article carries out an analysis of the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), a policy document which represents a critical moment in the emergence of a new discourse of European spatial development. The analytical approach probes at the power relations which have shaped the ESDP framework and its contents, focusing on the twin core...

This article presents a discussion about an emerging area of evaluation discourse, the ‘European spatial approach’. It examines the current policy framework at the European-wide level by exploring the alternative planning and public policy paradigms that underpin the case for rationality within this framework. By using such a theoretical review, th...

The adoption of the European Spatial Development Perspective by the informal meeting of ministers responsible for spatial planning in the EU in Potsdam on 10-11 May 1999 (European Spatial Development Perspective - Towards Balanced and Sustainable Development of the Territory of the EU - to be referred to here as CSD 1999) represents a critical mome...

In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe public participation is a relatively new phenomenon that is being introduced to traditionally closed planning processes. In the face of inertia against the democratization of decision-making, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are beginning to play a critical, double role both in advocating the need...

This article critically examines the integration of environmental policy in the European Union (EU), focusing on the development of Policy Guidelines for the trans-European transport network. Key events are charted by which the integration of environmental concerns came to hinge on a single contested issue-the adoption of Strategic Environmental As...

This paper explores the implications of Michael Foucault's work on discourse, knowledge and power for our understanding of the policy process, and for planning theory. A recurrent weakness in planning theory is its failure to address issues of power. In particular, the recent turn to argument in planning theory, grounded in Habermasian Communicativ...

The paper explores the strategic transport planning process which took place in the English Pennines in the early 1990s. The key road and rail transport studies which informed the process are evaluated from a normative perspective, to reveal the assumptions, practices and positions which influenced the development of policy. It is concluded that st...

Yes Discourse analysis is becoming an increasingly common approach in planning and environmental policy research. This paper asserts that the generic treatment of discourse analysis obscures distinct approaches where ‘discourses’ can combine different elements of text, systems of thought, and action. Textually-oriented approaches have been more pre...