Evaluating strategies for plan coordination: a survey of Canadian planners

ABSTRACTIn the contemporary context, many Canadian cities have large numbers of plans that present major challenges for coordination and implementation. The paper reports the results of a survey of Canadian planning practitioners who were asked about the strategies they use to coordinate plans and policies. The most highly-rated strategy, collaborating and sharing data for consensus-based decision-making, reflects the dominance of the collaborative planning paradigm in motivating the discipline. Data analysis discovered strong correlations between perceptions of the efficacy of a strategy and practitioners saying they used the strategy: in other words, planners value not only what they have been taught in theory, but what they do in practice.