A framework for evaluating and designing collaborative planning

• Knowledge integration is the key aspect of successful collaborative planning.
• The framework can help setting goals for collaborative planning of land use and nature areas.
• The framework can help organizations to shift their practices towards the organizations’ own ideal.

Collaborative planning processes have been criticized for inefficiency, but attempts to improve them in planning of urban nature have been limited by lack of usable evaluation methodologies. This paper presents a framework for evaluating and designing collaborative processes in strategic planning of land use and nature areas. A framework with four key perspectives and their success criteria was developed with the help of literature and data from interviews and focus groups in two case areas in the Helsinki metropolitan area, Finland. Planning organizations can use the framework as a tool and source of inspiration in designing collaborative processes and their evaluation, and in shifting their practices towards the organizations’ own specified goals. A conscious design of more efficient and holistic collaborative planning can be achieved with case-specific operationalizing of this framework.

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