Evaluating strategies for plan coordination: a survey of Canadian planners

ABSTRACT In 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.