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A consistent finding from recent work on the evaluation of planning outcomes has been that local commitment to planning plays a vital role in explaining those outcomes, especially when planning is promoted as a way to address regional development management concerns. While the importance of local commitment is not surprising, many questions remain, such as what “local commitment” means, what motivates it, and how it operates to affect local planning efforts and outcomes. This article presents results from a study of state-mandated local planning in coastal North Carolina during the mid-1990s, focusing on the factors that appear to motivate local elected officials’ commitment to planning and the influence of their commitment on planning outcomes. Taken altogether, coastal localities generally failed to address coastal resource protection through their local planning beyond complying with minimum state resource protection rules. This was largely because of resistance to the imposition of state-level policies through local planning requirements. State mandates appeared to foster local commitment to planning but not the state’s development management goals. Within that context, local elected officials’ commitment to planning played an important role in enhancing both plan quality and plan implementation.

A fundamental purpose of intergovernmental growth management has been to infuse regional concerns—especially regional environmental and economic development concerns—into local land use planning. This paper presents results from a study of state-mandated local planning in coastal North Carolina during the mid-1990s, addressing in particular local efforts to 'strike a balance' between environment and economy as required by the state's planning mandate. While acknowledging the need for coastal resource protection, coastal localities were not striking a balance between environment and economy through their planning efforts beyond stating support for the State's minimum resource protection rules. Within this context, key factors yielding less environmentally focused local planning included both local elected officials' concerns about the need for economic development for jobs and their belief that environmental protection was not a local problem. Factors that tended to shift local planning back toward environmental protection included local officials' perception that the local economy was in good shape and heightened citizen engagement.

Many planners work at private consulting firms, and many local governments use their services, but we have little idea of how consultant involvement affects plans. Analyzing data from a survey of local officials who engage planning consultants, we find that while engaging consultants does not appear to nudge local officials in a policy direction different from their preferences, it does appear to yield plans with a policy focus more oriented toward smart growth. This raises questions about the kind and degree of consultants' impact on the legitimacy of the planning process.