Strategizing Towards Agreements That Create And Capture Added Value

Abstract

The urban challenges of today are plentiful. A million houses need to be built in the next decade, urban development needs to allow for climate adaptation and contribute to the energy transition. It needs to ensure sustainable economic growth potential in a circular and social economic fashion. The active forms of land policy that where standard to the Dutch government prior to the economic crisis of 2008 however are no longer applied in the same level of frequency. Neo-liberal influences have over time shifted the top-down government-led planning approach, to one where private parties need to be incited if there are particular planning questions to be solved. Yet, even when confronted with fragmented land ownership, or the necessity of integrating non-economic-efficient development functions, through facilitative forms of land policy, the government still has a task to shape the environment. Achieving the urban ambitions above is very costly, especially when integrative development is necessary; and without active forms of land policy or heavy forms of public private partnerships, the government can no longer mobilize the incomes gained from land management. According to former studies, it is possible to achieve integrative added value in urban development where private law agreements embody the value capturing arrangements. Little to no study has yet been conducted into how such agreements can do so in the Dutch institutional context, for which reason this thesis has addressed this apparent literature gap through the following research question: How can public parties increase the potential of their value capturing strategies within facilitative land policy using private law agreements in projects of area redevelopment? Through an explorative case study approach, initial lessons -rooted in empirical data- are drawn and abductively translated to formulate more tangible insights. The end product therein is the proposition of an initial theoretical understanding, and to present what Glaser and Strauss would call a ‘running discussion’.

Value capturing within facilitative land policy in a technical sense takes places through agreed-to contributions in the anterior agreement, be they monetary or in-kind. From both literature as well as the case studies conducted it becomes apparent that it is the process preluding the actual agreement that makes possible more integrative forms of value capturing, through for example negotiation or a market-oriented redesign of the anterior process. These more integrative forms however are not necessarily to be understood in a solely financial sense. This thesis proposes to couple the concept of value capturing with the policy mode in the new actionable definition ‘facilitative value capturing*’, and to therethrough see value capturing within a facilitative context as an active exercise of attaining public spatial policy objectives. In conclusion this study proposes to use the definition of facilitative value capturing as a starting point, from the contention that even when public parties cannot or will not take a more risk-bearing role to the development, they still ought to take a proactive role towards achieving their spatial objectives, as they have an inherent responsibility to shape the environment, and facilitative therein needn’t equal laissez faire.

*Facilitative value capturing: "Maximising the way in which the area development contributes to public spatial policy objectives through (synergetic) negotiations, transfer of operational risks or anterior process design."