Green infrastructure programmes and strategies are regarded as planning opportunities to promote sustainable and resilient urban development. However, the discourse about green infrastructure policy and its effectiveness has pointed to the limited success in practical implementation. Since the green infrastructure has no planning status in its own right, it depends on being embedded in comprehensive urban and regional planning approaches if it is to have an impact on sustainable and resilient urban development. At the same time spatial planning may contribute to providing a platform for its institutionalisation. Against this backdrop, the article first looks at the contents of urban resilience. Secondly, we discuss principles for planning resilient cities. Thirdly, we analyse how green infrastructure initiatives can foster these principles contributing to building urban and regional resilience. Fourthly, we discuss the challenges facing the institutionalisation of green infrastructure initiatives. Finally, we draw conclusions about the future role of spatial planning in the process of institutionalising green infrastructure strategies.

Responsible mining is a new catchword of our times. However, in practice, there seem to be many barriers that hinder the successful implementation of the concept. This is especially true for countries with high urbanization speed, and it is even true for one-party states where its implementation could, in general, be taken for granted as soon as the central government has taken respective decisions and put appropriate stipulations and mechanisms formally in place. On this background, the article deals with barriers and possible solutions regarding responsible mining taking the case of Vietnam, and more especially the Province of Hoa Binh, neighboring Hanoi. Based on a literature review on responsible mining, a set of principles promoting this approach is developed. This is taken as a criteria set for the assessment of respective policies and their implementation on the different levels of authority in Vietnam. Finally, proposals are developed how to advance responsible mining in this case and in other comparable countries.

Resilience ranks high on the environmentally oriented research agenda on sustainable urban and regional development. The annual “Global Forum on Urban Resilience and Adaptation” has become a meeting point for academia and practice. The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development uses the term in two of their 17 Sustainable Development Goals, i.e., in Goal No. 9 on infrastructure as a basis for economic development and No. 11 on cities and human settlements. Moreover, resilience has become a prominent topic in the New Urban Agenda. Against this background, the article provides an overview of recent discussion on resilience. It scrutinizes how the concept has been used by different researchers from diverse disciplines with special reference to urban, regional and environmental studies. A systematic literature review on resilience was carried out in order to shed light on recent developments of thought and practice. All in all, 650 articles were reviewed. Following an introduction into the topic and description of the applied methodological approach, different facets of the debate on resilience are presented, and conclusions are drawn. It can be seen that the discussion of resilience needs more specificity, transdisciplinary approaches, and regional contextualization, especially in urban and regional development studies in the countries of the global south.

No abstract

In fast growing economies, rapid urbanization generates high demand for construction aggregates in the rural hinterland of cities. Their extraction often causes negative repercussions on the environment. In Vietnam, the central government has made strong efforts to incorporate environmental objectives in the aggregate mining sector, and, in a one-party state, it has powerful means to implement its policies. Nevertheless, adverse environmental effects of aggregate mining are visible throughout the country. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to identify barriers for environmental policy integration in a one-party state. The aggregates industry in Hoa Binh Province, located in the hinterland of the fast growing capital Hanoi, is taken as a case. Methods of the study, which was conducted between 2015 and 2019, include literature review, document and data analysis, interviews, group discussions for information collection and validation of results, and site visits. Six environmental policy integration barriers are derived from the literature. They form the conceptual basis for explaining difficulties of environmental policy implementation and integration in the concrete case. The study demonstrates that the following factors provide a viable concept for analyzing deficits of environmental policy integration in a fast modernizing one-party state: (a) the prevalence of top-down approaches with insufficient trigger-down effects, (b) the predominance of socioeconomic over environmental objectives, (c) weak incentives to improve environmental performance, (d) fragmented environmental planning and implementation, (e) weak institutional control mechanisms on lower levels of government, and (f) compliance oriented public participation and deficient compensation mechanisms. These are potential entry points for coping with environmental challenges of growth oriented sector policies.