The ELC intends to overcome the separation that still exists between landscape, nature conservation policies, territorial development, spatial planning policies, and other approaches. The difficulty is to connect aesthetic qualities, daily uses and economic valuation. A segregated organization of the policy domain can be held in part responsible for a lack of knowledge considered for decision-making. How do these observations relate to relevant social and political theories? We hereby think of theories that try to explain the lack of efficiency of public policies, or theories aiming at increased rationality of government action: an operational science for decision-making and implementation of decisions. However, human action is rarely rational, which, among others, Pareto (1916) explains by pointing to instincts, passions (residues according to Pareto). Logical actions are means to ends, but a lot of actions are illogical because they are driven by customs, superstition, reflexes or they conduct to effects unthought. In front of these illogical actions, humans give justifications. With the neo-liberal turning point, the sociology of organizations (Crozier and Friedberg, 1977) also highlighted the dysfunctions of state action, the lack of rationality of the public decisions and the difficulties of the administration to implement the decisions taken. State becomes a more or less wobbly assembly of public policies more or less well adjusted to the complex real world challenges and whose rationality is more than problematic. Public policies aren’t given, but an analytical definition constructed by the different actors. They are the product of social actors and their interactions, and a category applied and told by actors. Hence, they can be subjected to transformative attempts to change the current regimes of landscape planning.

When considering the ongoing conflict between proponents of a top-down and bottom-up approach in policy-making, Hajer (2011) seeks a compromise with his concept of the ‘energetic society’. The main question in the essay is how to mobilize the modern ‘energetic society’, featured by a mass of autonomous and articulatef citizens, in favor of sustainability. Hajer suggests a “lighter form of development that offers greater scope to citizen initiatives” and a “different type of project development, that will work.”(Hajer 2011) However, government will remain in charge of setting the broader goals and values. In the end, the question remains what is new in the 21st planning model for the energetic society? First, there is no mentioning of the value of practical, tacit knowledge of citizens and the fact that they are in a disadvantaged position in front of the still dominant knowledge for example of urban planners. Second, and related to this, there is the idea that state planning will remain necessary, because of the specific task of government to protect the more vulnerable in society. When it comes to sustainability, it is the government who knows what needs to satisfy and the energetic society needs to be persuaded to do so. There is a wide recognition that local knowledge is critical in addressing issues of urban landscape quality. Since they are often unaware of specific local conditions, planners need to benefit from practical knowledge at local level (Schön, 1983; Sanchez, 2012; Bettencourt, 2015). Local citizens are often the ones who know the real rather than the administrative boundaries of a territory. However, collaboration between planners and locals is easily undermined because of lack of trust.

For the third challenge, namely the structural power differences in landscape governance, we refer to the power relationship and processes as the political economy of landscape governance. Basically, landscape governance is considered a multi-actor process, where diverse types of parties, or stakeholder groups, participate. Among the most prominent ones are government agencies and elected officials operating at various administrative scales, but, in the cases considered in the Smart-U-Green project context, mostly local authorities. The second stakeholder group includes market parties, who are driven by economic profit maximization such as real estate development companies. As a third group, we point to citizen initiatives defending particular (small) group interests. In contrast to lobbies influencing policies, government is supposed to act in the public interest and, therefore, weighs and finds a trade-off between specific demands. In reality, government agencies have also particular interests. Creating opportunities for project development is a vital asset for municipalities. It creates economic activity, it increases their number of inhabitants and provides them with income.
Since bureaucracies tend to avoid risks and aim at reaching their goals against lowest cost, we can imagine that they will normally rely on a network of companies they know and trust, as they have worked with them before. This leads to the hypothesis that there is a natural alliance between municipalities and (local) developers in achieving economic prosperity. In fact, their collaboration is all supposed to be done for the public good, as it creates jobs, houses and -indirectly- public spaces that increase the attractiveness of a territory. For similar reasons, bottom-up initiatives confront municipalities with a dilemma. On the one hand, citizens are voters and bottom-up initiatives have a good image, so they cannot easily be denied. On the other hand, the initiatives do not increase municipality’s income, and many initiatives ask for support.
Our suggestion is that transition governance needs be featured by growing alliances between the urban and regional authorities (e.g. municipalities) and their citizenry and less intense interactions between the authorities and the development and construction sector. In a sense, the perspective described here dovetails with a pessimist Marxist conception of growing connectivity between the State and (factions of) the private sector, as has been suggested by theories on state-monopolist-capitalism. However, what follows from the economic theories of bureaucracy is that bureaucracies act in conformity with their public responsibility, whereas the Marxist approach would stress the nontransparent and undemocratic decision-making caused by the interwovenness of public and private interests.