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Local Commitment to State-Mandated Planning in Coastal North Carolina

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.