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The thesis examines the contemporary conception of the socio-environmental issue of flooding in England and Wales. The focus is on the policy and expert spheres and the current understanding of the issue as it is represented in these discursive domains. This qualitative research involved three distinct methods semi-structured interviews, document analysis and observation. The interviews were carried out with key figures that worked in differing roles in organisations and institutions involved in tackling flooding. At one level the assertions in the thesis concern the connections being made between flooding and climate change and the implications of this for approaches to tackling floods. At another level they relate to the emergence of a pervasive risk discourse in relation to flooding. Theoretical ideas from time (Adam 1997 1998 2004) and risk theory (Beck 1992a 1994 1996 2000 Luhmann 1993) are utilised to provide a conceptual analysis of the nascent discourses of climate change and risk, through which flooding is understood as a contemporary problem. In this thesis the conceptual and empirical analyses are bought together in establishing questions relating to the emergence of a prevalent risk discourse and what this means for approaches to flooding in contemporary England and Wales. The analysis has produced a picture of a complex and paradoxical context in which efforts are made to address flooding. The thesis offers insights into the difficulties in finding ways of establishing practices appropriate to the knowledge(s) through which flooding is understood as a contemporary problem. The research creates deeper understanding of the issues associated with tackling flooding in contemporary England and Wales and opens up spaces for the kind of reflection that is important for pursuing and enabling change.

This research explores how China has been developing urban design as public policy in the context of rapid urbanization and radical Socialist market reform. This is not a well developed area in urban research in China, however Western literature provides a good comparative basis through which to develop a more sophisticated system of design control. In pursuing the research objective, a Chinese city - Shenzhen has been chosen as a case study. It is the national exemplar and represents the best Chinese practices. Inspired by international aspirations for good practice in design control, the Shenzhen case study allows exploration of the political and economic influences on design outcomes, reveals the instruments used by planners to promote good design, uncovers the shifting concept of urban design, and assesses the impacts of the permitting process on project design. Some 11 commercial office projects have been selected to provide empirical evidence. They range from masterplanned projects in central locations to individual developments in off-centre locations, from conventional developments to projects involving appeals and illegal constructions, from recently completed projects to the ones still in the planning process. The event-sequence and structure-agency models derived from real-estate research have been used to analyse design processes. To collect the data, a 'snowball approach' mixed with participant-observation, documentary review, interview and design evaluation are utilised. This research reveals that Shenzhen has achieved progressive improvements in developing urban design as public policy. However urban design's public values are only partially embedded in Shenzhen's urban planning system, due to rapid urbanization processes, the significant change of development scale, top-down hierarchy of political control, lack of discrimination among tenants and the partial application of the generic urban design principles in the planning and design process. Shenzhen is facing many challenges when compared with the best international practice in design review. In detail, the city has a strong design vision for its future, but this is not developed with the local communities, and only reflects an elite vision that is both short-term and oriented towards business. The political support, the use of land powers, and discretionary zoning control have provided a solid basis for Shenzhen to pursue higher quality urban design, but a more regulated system is needed to limit political intervention and provide a better research base for planning decision making. Planners are slowly developing urban design principles to address the quality of the public realm, but they need a deeper understanding of the generic design principles and sustainable design. Shenzhen's established planning permission process has been a successful mechanism for design intervention, but it needs to address weaknesses in public participation and in dealing with monitoring, enforcement and appeal. It is argued that Shenzhen is representative of most large Chinese cities, but small or medium size cities and the cities with conservation issues may have slightly different experiences. Future challenges are discussed and practical suggestions are made to better develop urban design as public policy in Shenzhen and more generally in China.

Although there are a growing number of studies in the environmental field of Europeanisation, more academic inquiry is needed to assess the success of environmental policy adoption, especially within certain accession countries where EU policy implications seem particularly challenging. This study aims to investigate the adoption of an EU environmental policy instrument, the EU Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) Directive, within one such accession country, Turkey. For this purpose, a theoretical framework based on Europeanisation and policy transfer is applied to Turkey's adoption of the EU SEA Directive and the consequences are assessed through empirical research. The EU SEA Directive places great emphasis on the governance modes such as transparent decision-making and public participation with domestic policy-makers in its concern and drive to promote sustainable development. Adoption of the SEA Directive implies new governance modes for Turkey's institutional settings, especially the country's political and administrative institutions. The research shows that the discourse of 'Europeanization' helped empower actors seeking to drive through the SEA Directive, until the accession process started to falter; and that there remain questions about whether SEA, on its own, proved able to influence Turkey's approach to democracy or governance in the environmental sphere.

The objective of this research is to evaluate the role of government in collaborative government-community coastal management initiatives. The research aimed specifically to: demonstrate that governments are willing to share selected management responsibilities with non-statutory community-based organizations and that the community-based organizations are willing and able to assume specific responsibilities to describe the conditions under which such power sharing occurs and to identify the specific management functions that can and are willing to be shared. This research was informed by a detailed review of a diverse literature and a specific case study of a well-developed community-based coastal management program in Atlantic Canada - the Atlantic Coastal Action Program (ACAP). This thesis hypothesized that the effective functioning and sustainability of government-community partnerships will be strengthened by a clearer definition, mutual understanding and acceptance of the shared and respective roles, responsibilities and accountabilities among the government and community partners in these initiatives. The research was informed by an on-line survey and semi-structured telephone interviews with a cross-section of both community and government actors in the case study. The thesis identifies the need for a 'shifting' role for governments that enter into and support these partnership arrangements. The data show that most of the identified management functions in the case study have already shifted to a community lead, but with a clear desire for government to be involved as the collaboration continues. The significant challenges that such a shifting view and perspective require in these hybrid coastal governance partnerships are explored in depth and supported by the findings that these approaches are indeed good for government, respond to community expectations for greater and more meaningful involvement and can be strong and effective means of capitalizing on the strengths and capacities of both community and government actors in advancing Integrated Coastal Management.

Coastal hazards and their associated risks are not new to coastal managers, engineers and planners. As an island nation the coast of the United Kingdom (UK) has been an attractive area for settlement for centuries. Consequently, a substantial proportion of urban development in the UK is at risk of flooding or coastal erosion. Traditional responses to coastal hazards across Europe have been based upon reactive, parochial hard engineering structural solutions in order to protect assets at risk. These practices have been predominantly sectoral due to fragmented institutional arrangements, with limited integration between the sectors of shoreline management and the land-use planning system. Additionally, historic coastal risk decision making has shown little understanding of the complexities of coastal systems. Whilst within contemporary coastal risk decision making, there is limited transparency as to the role of natural coastal change. Levels of uncertainty exacerbate the complex task of managing coastal risk, in particular in relation to the natural coastal change evidence base. Using a multiple-case study approach, decision making practices in relation to coastal risk in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were evaluated. Concomitantly, the role of the natural coastal change evidence base within these decision making processes was scrutinised. Research investigations were facilitated via the development of two distinct and innovative methodological approaches that framed and guided two semi-structured interview schedules and a number of documentary reviews. This deductive process included a case study selection hypothesis and a Research Strategy Model (with Empirical Indicators). Case study results established the complexities associated with coastal risk decision making, including historic, contemporary and likely future decision making practices. In particular, the range of decision makers involved and the hierarchical and framed nature of decision making were identified. Importantly, traceable coastal risk decision making relationships that exist temporally, spatially and sectorally were ascertained. Forcing factors or 'context issues' that influence these decision making practices were highlighted. It was further determined that the role of natural coastal change science, as part of the coastal risk decision making evidence is constrained. This was found to be due to a number of issues, including the perpetuation of the science-practice disconnect, aggravated by natural coastal change scientific uncertainty. Through analysis of empirical findings and consideration of the underlying case study hypothesis and previous construction of decision making, a conceptualisation of coastal risk decision making was developed. This seeks to convey hypothetical stages of coastal risk decision making pathways and convey the wider complex decision context, including intricate pathway connections. A revised suite of supporting Empirical Indicators allows for a structured and comprehensive assessment of decision making, and importantly, a mechanism by which to explore the role of science within coastal risk decision making.

Along with the transition of major Western cities from production bases to consumption places over recent decades, urban public spaces have been increasingly manipulated by urban governments and developers as an effective 'tool' to promote commercial activities and events, and to attract more consumers, investment and developments. In the face of this trend, on the one hand the positive contributions of consumerist culture to the revitalisation of city life have been recognised and credited; while on the other hand, critics have discussed the negative effects of consumption powers in the shaping of public space, arguing that the 'publicness' of many contemporary public spaces is likely to diminish in the interest of mass consumerist culture (i.e., 'the critique of loss'). Chinese cities have experienced great transformations since the late 1970s. The central areas of many large cities have been developed into Central Pedestrian Districts (CPDs) which are public spaces of the city but with strong consumption and development pursuits. Similar to their Western counterparts, these CPDs receive 'the critique of loss' which discusses the predominant role of commercial and managerial considerations in the shaping of these places, largely discovering the 'negative effects' of mass consumerist culture on public space and public life. On the other hand, however, many of the Western critics seem to ignore the 'positive contributions' of consumerist culture to urban life, imposing a generalised and over-pessimistic verdict on contemporary Chinese public space, while without fully examining the complexities and varieties in the history and reality of China's central urban spaces (e.g., their extent of publicness in earlier periods, their current detailed physical forms and social uses, etc.). This thus creates the doubt about the applicability of the Western critiques in Chinese urban contexts, particularly on China's CPDs. With this inquiry, this thesis presents a comprehensive survey of China's four leading CPDs (Wang Fujing in Beijing, Nanjing Road in Shanghai, Central Street in Harbin, and Xin Jiekou in Nanjing) and a detailed case study on the largest CPD of China (Jie Fangbei in Chongqing). By so doing, the thesis tests both the consistency and discrepancy between Western theoretical critiques and the actual conditions of these CPDs. In particular, the thesis explores how these five CPDs have historically developed, and how they are physically constituted and socially used today. Attention focuses upon the political-economic aspects in their development, and also upon users' daily behaviours in public spaces. The main theoretical bases underpinning these examinations and discussions come from urban-design domain, but embrace political-economic and environmental and behavioural design perspectives. In the final analysis, the thesis tries to establish a more comprehensive and socially and culturally specific evaluation on the public nature of these CPDs, and it provides a series of recommendations regarding the design and management of CPDs, in order to enhance their future performance in sustaining better public uses.

The issue of policy coordination is inevitably viewed in discourses surrounding fragmented planning and the integration of the plan making process. This even more so in Taiwan since the 1990s. a period that has seen the significant institutional change, while economic globalisation has impacted on the developmental state strategy adopted over previous decades, and the movement towards democratisation has led to the collapse of political authoritarianism. This thesis attempts to explore the dynamic relationship between different sectors through an understanding of policy coordination between economic planning and the land use planning system. It adopts a neo-institutionalist perspective as an approach to explore how coordination works and to explain how the roles in planning have altered during a period of institutional change. The emphasis of this study is on the practices in the plan making processes, and the relationships between actors/agencies during this process, at the regional level, through which cross-sectoral policy are supposed to be coordinated. Based on the findings of three case studies, the thesis argues that the policy making process has been affected by the institutional changes and suggests this has led to a weakening role of the central planning authority and the rise of local authority powers. In spite of the change, it also finds that primary planning policy has remained on track owing to the solid personal network behind the formal planning system. The significant role of personal factors which are embedded in the cultural context is noticeable and can be viewed as a part of the informal institutional factors in policy coordination process. Accordingly, the thesis finally emphasises the importance of informal institutional elements and suggests the personal factor, including the relationship and the network must be taken into account in any research on planning process in Taiwan.

Further work should focus on the advances made in CFD modelling and low energy lighting since this study was undertaken.

This research explores the views, beliefs and knowledges of experts responsible for flood management in Bangladesh. As one of the most disaster-prone nations on Earth, and in response to the neglect of power-holding experts within the existing literature, this project analyses the differences between academic accounts of flooding, labelled the ‘prevailing understanding’, and the local expertise of those responsible for management. Relative to the entrenched narrative, local experts are surveyed and an alternate interpretation is constructed using their knowledge. This combination of textual and perception-based analyses accounts for the complex interrelations between competing forms of knowing. It is on this juxtaposition that the research contributes to new knowledge. The thesis is based on research conducted in Bangladesh between November 2007 and March 2008. To accomplish its objectives, using prominent debates as entry points, academic and government sources are used to account for the lineage of the prevailing understanding. On the basis of this narrative, qualitative interviews with 54 experts explore the construction of flood management knowledge and its relationship with decision making. The experts describe and justify understandings of flood management that are contextual, adaptive and indefinite, challenging many of the assumptions associated with the prevailing understanding. The findings inform several findings: that individuals close to the poverty line are uniquely vulnerable; that disasters merge with management to produce second-generation events; and that a hybrid socio-physical context is both a product and a producer of flood management knowledge. Overall, despite the already complex issue of flooding, managers in Bangladesh consider increasingly issues as diverse as poverty, environmental sustainability and economic and human development. Given the scope of the controversy surrounding flood management, the findings show how analyses of competing knowledges, assumptions and framings can aid the interrogation of prevailing knowledge to generate original findings