Towards best practice coastal planning: challenges of negotiating regional understandings with local priorities in New South Wales

摘要

Recent years have seen some leading examples of local coastal planning/management while regional-level efforts have also been considerable. This paper examines the usefulness of local and New South Wales (NSW) state planning mechanisms in light of contemporary land-use conflicts and coastal zone management. Coastal Planning tools from coastal local governments in NSW are reviewed to grasp what is occurring at a local government scale and to consider where regional information is assisting (or not) local planning, policy development and implementation. In the context of regionally dominating planning paradigms, regional understandings can be quite different from local realities. While regional efforts are made to understand impact of climate change on our coasts, 32% of councils examined in this study were not considered to have climate change planning provisions. Different capacities and planning approaches seen at local scales raises significant challenges under current planning practices. This paper aims to highlight some of these difficulties in implementation.