Community-Based Environmental Planning

Community-based environmental planning (CBEP) emerged in the 1990s as a result of concerns over the state-directed or top-down character of environmental planning. CBEP can be defined as decentralized environmental planning conducted by place-based communities at the local scale. It has a number of perceived advantages of interest to geographical inquiry, including promoting deliberation about environmental concerns and potentially higher local acceptance of the legitimacy of a given planning process, leading to effective implementation of planning outcomes. However, these prospective advantages are not always realized, suggesting that the application of CBEP is limited to particular settings.