Pierre Magontier (p), Albert Solé-Ollé, Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal

All along the Spanish democratic era, the country´s coast experienced massive urbanization. On average, 2.2 hectares of lands have been converted every day between 1987 and 2011 within its first 500-meter fringe. Rather moderated rates of conversion would be expected from a social planner in the presence of such a public good. Nonetheless, in Spain, most of the responsibility for urban development falls on politically fragmented local governments who plan for future land use. That is, urban development responsibilities within a given coastal segment are shared among many municipalities and also between them and the regional government.

In this paper, we want to study the impact of this political fragmentation on coastal development. It is our contention that local governments surrounded by other local governments controlled by the same party will be better able to overcome fragmentation through cooperation between co-partisans. Similarly, we also expect that local governments controlled by the party ruling at the regional level will have more incentives to cater to the general interest (instead than to parochial interests) when developing its coastline.

In order to test these hypotheses, we define dummies for horizontal political alignment (i.e., one if the municipality is ruled by the same party or coalition that is ruling a majority of the municipalities in the same coastal segment) and for vertical political alignment (i.e., one if the same party or coalition is ruling the municipality and the regional government at the same time). We run panel regressions using as a depended variable the amount of land located close to the coastline that has been converted to developable during a given period, and the two above mentioned dummies as explanatory variables. Additionally, we also conduct a dynamic close-elections regression discontinuity design.

We carry out our analysis on an extensive dataset of 463 Spanish coastal municipalities (including the Canary and Balearic Islands), during three housing cycles between 1975 and 2012. Our dependent variable is built based on the combined Landstat IV imagery and census data from the Global Human Settlement Project of the European Commission. Our covariates include partisan, economic, residential, climate, and topographic data, as well as accessibility measures.

With this paper, we wish to contribute to the literature on land use development policies, as well as the one on coastal urbanization.

Sophie Masson (p)

In a context of globalization of flows and production systems, logistics infrastructure and activities play a major role in the economy and confront the territories to new challenges of economic and social development, environmental protection and development of territory. Logistics platforms are highly space-consuming and, on the other hand, they concentrate large freight flows, which have a high demand on the transport system, particularly on roads, and generate carbon emissions.
Logistics infrastructure, based on their geography and their characteristics, in particular their ability to handle multimodal flows and encourage modal shift, are essential territorial tools for sustainable transport policies. The territorial development of logistics platforms not only involves the stakeholders in their own territories but requires a coordinated and comprehensive management. Thus, logistic territorial development concerns cross-border cooperation.
Crossed by a considerable number of road goods vehicles, the eastern and western parts of the Pyrenean border face the challenges of modal and logistics platforms thus become major tools. On both sides of the Pyrenees deployed alternative transport equipment to the road accompanied by the will to implement railway freight corridors. Nevertheless, if Aquitaine has approached its neighbor Euskadi to create a cross-border logistics platform on the other side of the Pyrenees, it seems that the projects are developing without real cross-border coordination.
The article aims to highlight the challenges of cross-border cooperation in territorial logistics development. First, it is necessary to specify the socio-economic, environmental and territorial organization issues associated with the territorial logistic development that justifies the need to implement a governability of logistic development.
Then, the research mobilizes the literature on the concept of territorial governance and that of cross-border cooperation. The research is based on a comparative analysis of the practices of territorial logistics governance and transfrontier co-operation carried out on the Basque and Catalan cross-border territories. It shows a wide variety of actions and their modality of implementation.

Erzsi De Haan (p), Tialda Haartsen, Sabine Meier, Dirk Strijker

As a result of the shift towards big society and depopulation, active contribution to service delivery in rural areas is expected from citizens’ initiatives. So far, research on these initiatives has mainly focused on the success stories, leaving the stopped or failed initiatives underexposed. However, the experiences of stopped citizens’ initiatives especially contribute to the understanding of these initiatives in general. This research will discuss the processes taking place that lead up to the untimely end of citizens’ initiatives in the North of the Netherlands in the period 2015-2016.

Our previous work has focused on the factors that influence the success and continuity of initiatives in a quantitative manner, including stopped initiatives as well. This research aims at shedding light on the processes that take place when initiatives stop with their activities, the reasons behind these processes and the consequences of stopping. Attention will also be given as to what extent the notions of stopping and failure are perceived to be the same thing or whether they are evaluated as different concepts.

To get to more in-depth information the case-study method is used. Examples of stopped citizens’ initiatives will be examined in the depopulating rural areas of the northern provinces of the Netherlands. Citizens’ initiatives relating to real estate (e.g. housing cooperatives, building re-use initiatives or initiatives against building impoverishment) are topic of this case-study. The following research question will be answered: how can the processes of stopping citizens’ initiatives be explained and what are the consequences of stopping?

Jan Wolf, Fernando Nogueira (p), Eduardo Castro

In the last decades, the praxis of policy-making has witnessed a major shift from top-down, bureaucratic policy delivery, to more open, equitable and inclusive processes. Although this shift has been broadly discussed in planning, policy or regional science fields, and produced many scientific insights and methodological guidelines, the implementation of collaborative practices in real world scenarios still poses significant challenges. These challenges concern the need to deal with collective and individual knowledge, interests and values, in such a way that stakeholders and citizens are involved and have a real say on the matters at stake, thus warranting not only that their voice is heard, but also that their participation has practical consequences. In this work, we discuss these issues in the light of the findings from four case-studies – concerning the development of local and regional strategic plans in Portugal – that deal with implementing a workable methodology of collaborative decision-making, based on multi-criteria analysis. In our opinion, this methodology had several advantages. First, it combined more open and discursive modes of participation with other, structured and closed ones, where participants were able to vote the plans’ priorities. This way, we set clear rules on how to aggregate the participants’ preferences, while not leaving them to choose among predetermined alternatives. Second, there was a constant opening-up and closing-down of the planning process, where the loose contributions of participants were synthesized and structured and then returned to them for validation. This ensured a broad participation in different phases of the process, but guaranteed that the contributions were given an operational purpose. Finally, the methodology tried to cope with a multilevel governance context in two ways. On the one hand, the policy proposals that were voted by the participants took into account the regulatory, institutional and financial framework of the supra local and regional scale. On the other hand, the voting exercise also increased the negotiating power of local/regional stakeholders, since reaching priorities through voting confers greater legitimacy to decisions than when they merely express the preferences of elected officials.