Sustainability and Short-term Policies

There has been a profound change within the sphere of government and societal regulation in recent years. Traditional hierarchical government has been challenged by new governance instruments relying on negotiations instead of command and control. Alongside this development there has been a change in the time-framing of politics and steering. Traditional politics has been implicitly based on stability and permanence while new forms of governance are explicitly based on just-in-time actions such as projects and issue-based collaborations in networks and programs. This book analyses the implications of this shortening of time frames, focusing particularly on spatial policy interventions and examines the characteristics of temporary policy measures across a range of rural, urban and regional contexts, in four continents: Europe, North America, Oceania and Africa.