Evaluation of planning and territorial management processes: a methodological contribution from a review of approaches

The ‘new strategic territorial planning’, reappeared in Europe at the end of the 20th century, intrinsically incorporates the need for evaluation of land use plans. This evaluation cannot focus so­lely on evaluating the impact of the plans but must also be carried out with a focus on the technical processes in which material goods are produced and knowledge generation. The present work intends to provide the methodological framework to be able to develop an evaluation instrument for planning processes and management of land use plans. Using an analysis matrix, different evaluation approaches are compared in order to select the most convenient category for the evaluation of territorial planning processes. Thereby, the most interesting approaches are selected, and are subsequently characterized by identifying the most representative au­thors, the methods applied, the phases that compose them, the criteria used to evaluate the processes, their strengths and weaknesses, and the evaluation questions. Results reflect that the process evaluation approaches that belong to the eclectic approaches ca­tegory seem to be the most interesting for territorial planning, since by their nature they combine the advantages of the approaches they use, and adapt methodologies and philosophies to the needs of each specific evaluation, optimizing the evaluation results and actively involving the main stakeholders.