Comparing Planning Policy Instruments

Spatial planning is a comprehensive field of public policy and characterised by a considerable diversity of policy tools. The lack of clarity over what constitutes a policy instrument in planning and how it is used in specific contexts can present challenges for the comparison of policy approaches across different jurisdictions. Unlike other policy areas, for urban and regional planning there have been few attempts to date at developing typologies of policy tools that could support the comparison of instruments in use across different planning contexts. In this chapter, a taxonomy of planning policy tools according to different stages of the policy cycle is proposed. With a view to demonstrating its usefulness for a structured analysis of policy changes, this taxonomy is applied to a case study of the changes to planning policy instruments as effected by a major policy reform in South Australia.