What’s in it for me?
For Government

Governments, both large and small, stand to gain from Green Plans in many important ways. Essentially green plans are long-term environmental management strategies—governance structures and tools—that have the ultimate goal of achieving environmental and economic sustainability and a high quality of life, whether for a city, state, region or nation.

By replacing traditional single-issue policies with a comprehensive, integrated, strategic plan of action, governments are able to integrate environmental efforts across institutional and jurisdictional boundaries. Green planning nations achieve this through systems analysis, a discipline that dissects complex problems into basic elements and subsystems. In this way the underlying interrelationships and patterns of change can be properly evaluated for the development of an effective response.

Examples of this systems-based thinking include New Zealand’s shift to managing resources by ecological watershed systems rather than arbitrary political boundaries. Likewise, the Netherlands developed a systems approach based on eight overarching environmental themes, five levels of geographic scale, and nine primary target groups responsible for environmental problems (and their solutions).

Inherent in these interrelationships is the inextricable link between managing resources and government budgets. Finding efficient means of using and maintaining resources is important for the long-term wellbeing of a community, state, and country. If mismanaged, resources deplete, prices go up, budgets get reallocated and the environment (and ultimately the people) suffer. With an operational green plan a government can predict upcoming issues, plan accordingly and avoid costly regulations and pitfalls down the road. Greater certainty, one outcome from green planning, helps governments avoid situations like California’s energy crisis in 2002. With a clear strategic plan, a government knows where it is, where it wants to go, and can devise cost-effective methods for getting there.

Efficient planning not only leads to economic gain from better resource management, but also less time and money spent regulating use and cleaning up the effects of pollution. Ongoing monitoring and reporting, essential elements of results based management, require a significant economic investment, but the long-term benefits of being able to track environmental and economic progress have big payoffs.

Governments that implement a green plan gain from enhanced public input and attitudes. The green plan process ensures the development of consistent, long-term environmental policies that can survive political change. Green plans are not political or ideological documents; they are formulated by multi-party, multi-interest coalitions. Because no single political interest owns the green plan, non will be especially motivated to dismantle it. Since all sectors of society are involved in developing the plan, there are countless and diverse advocates to support the government in fulfilling its green plan obligations.

Ultimately, the role of the government in environmental protection and management is to minimize the effect of activities on the environment. At the same time, governments have the objective of enhancing economic growth and securing financial stability. Countries implementing green plans are demonstrating their ability to decouple economic growth and environmental degradation.