Power, scale and Ikea: analysing urban sprawl and land use planning in the metropolitan region of Munich, Germany

The paper deals with urban sprawl and land use planning to examine the role of scale and power for regional environmental governance processes. Urban sprawl is chosen as a field of study because it represents an environmental problem; and land use planning is regarded as the political intervention to solve the problem. Moreover, land use planning is a well suited policy field for environmental governance research because a variety of (state and non-state) actors is involved and various mechanisms of coordination (hierarchy, cooperation, competition) are effective. In order to analyse scale and power relations in detail, the example of a land use conflict in the metropolitan region of Munich, Germany is used.