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This paper introduces market mechanisms for sustainable community development, an interdependent planning and implementation framework encompassing strategic directions, strategies, actors and instruments for municipal policy making. It examines how the economy influences the unsustainable development of local jurisdictions and how a coherent typology of strategies, actors and policy levers can move communities toward complementary environmental, social and economic outcomes. The paper illustrates a dichotomy between municipal decision making and embraces economic, social and environmental criteria for development of the built environment. It defines sustainable community development and analyzes research findings from senior decision makers in government, academic institutions, industry and non-profits. After critiquing ‘the market mechanism’ and identifying preferred approaches, the authors propose a typology that systematically aligns market signals with implementing sustainable community development policies.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge research support for this project from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) as part of a three-year SSHRC research project examining the relationship between market mechanisms and sustainable community development.
Notes
1. Communities are defined in a variety of ways; in this context they refer to geographic communities of place, represented by municipal, local, regional or aboriginal jurisdictions.
2. Citizens are penalized twice when governments subsidize unhealthy or ecologically destructive behaviour: first, when taxes support fossil fuel subsidies through direct financial payments and tax credits, and second, from natural resource degradation, resulting in indirect health care costs. Perverse subsidies benefit polluting, extractive industries, since taxpayers pay for regulating, monitoring and mitigating costs; often under-funded or under-staffed protect to adequately the public commons. See Myers and Kent 2001.
3. For substitution possibilities refer to a discussion between Gale Johnson (2001) and Dasgupta (2001).
4. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) started as a voluntary certification standard, whose rating systems were first designed in the late 1990s for commercial and institutional buildings. Canadian and US Green Building Councils administer LEED.
5. The Dudley Street Neighbourhood Initiative, for example, created a non-profit urban community land trust to implement expropriation (eminent domain) activities with vacant land in Boston, MA.
6. While PPP proponents claim projects come in on time and within budget, some literature provides cautionary tales tracking cost overruns, legal disputes, bankruptcies, environmental degradation and construction discrepancies. See Mehra (2005), O’Dowd (2006).