Collaborative policy making has become increasingly significant in environmental management, but it is often evaluated by whether or not agreement is reached and implemented. The most important outcomes of such policy dialogues are often invisible or undervalued when seen through the lens of a...

This is a study of the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s (MTC) transportation decision making process after the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act in 1991. This innovative federal legislation promised to make transportation policy at...

After a 5-year study of transportation planning in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have concluded that the contentiousness we observed in the process was due in great part to differences in participants’ styles of planning and not solely to disagreements over desired outcomes. Each style...

This article presents an alternative way of thinking about how regional sustainability might be accomplished. It starts from the premise that metropolitan regions can be understood as self-organizing complex systems if they have certain characteristics. When observed through this framework,...

A major national debate is under way about the effects of the regulation of development and land use patterns on metropolitan economies. Because this is often framed around whether sprawling development patterns are harmful or beneficial to the economy and environment, we are seemingly presented...