Displacing Conflicting Goals in Planning for Sustainability? Insights from Three Norwegian Cities

Abstract

Sustainable transformation is hampered by conflicting goals. Here we examine how goal conflicts are handled in planning practice, focusing on processes around municipal climate and sustainability governance. We investigate local manifestations of goal conflicts between transport and land use planning and emissions reductions in three Norwegian cities, using document analysis, interviews and observation. We find that governance actors handle goal conflicts through what we term strategies of displacement. We identify three such strategies: temporal, sectorial and scalar. The research contributes to explaining how and why goal conflicts persist in planning practice.