for rural land-use practices – all contexts where outlier regional authorities stand
to benefit from centrally provided regionally focused advice. By avoiding a legal
prescription for such bulletins (which also ensures that they remain operationally
innovative and challenging) they can be presented as best-practice indicators,
serving regional, national and local sustainable intent backed up by the planning
court system.
Well-staffed urban-rural agencies work on data, linkage and rural-urban analy-
ses, and project generation and project evaluation as outlined earlier in this
chapter. What is worrying is that the central governments of Anglo settler society
nations still largely do not appreciate the potential of conservation withdevelop-
ment. The modern-into-neomodern situation for a structural integration of
central-local-regional administration, and the fashioning of sustainable urban
planning needs to be better understood and practised.
What is at stake is improvement in the ‘delivery’ capabilities of political and
planning agencies. The facts of the matter, simply put, are that:
- Rural-urban (regional) representatives are able to integratea mix of actions
with certainty of effect in those parts of a nation where central government is
remote and misunderstood. - Rural-urban (regional) agencies can engagedevelopment and conservancy
stakeholders and go where central government cannot venture. - Rural-urban (regional) organization is able to controlfrom the middle out in
development contexts where central government is obliged only to intervene
from the top down. - Rural-urban (regional) agencies inducethe ‘with a carrot approach’ in contexts
where central government can only indicate and berate. - Rural-urban (regional) agencies directusing a ‘with a stick approach’ in both
development and conservancy contexts, where central government can only
be seen as a big-brother bully.
Macro pattern agencies – state, provincial, regional – appropriately empowered,
can actually attainoutcomes to which central government can only aspire, namely
material progress, protection of the human living space and the natural habitat,
and human security and wellbeing. Urban-rural administrations at a regional level
of intermediacy are positioned to deliver nationally favoured outcomes and
promote locally sustainable planning practices: those operations which achieve a
triple harmony between patterned growth for the regional economy, a palpable
sense of social wellbeing for the regional population, and the attainment ‘indefi-
nitely’ of a healthy regional environment.
Growth Pattern Management 187