Metropolitan Governance and Cooperation in Ottawa-Gatineau : Land use planning in an interprovincial context.

This paper focuses on the renewal of land use planning practices in the interprovincial metropolitan area of Ottawa-Gatineau, where sustainable urban development and metropolitan cooperation recently became official targets of public action. The authors formulate the hypothesis that the lack of cooperation between stakeholders responsible for land use planning in the region is due primarily to the complexity of interprovincial governance and to significant divergences in the political, economic and social interests of those stakeholders. Taken together, these factors constitute the main impediment to sustainable, integrated transportation and land use planning at the metropolitan level. The authors find that municipal collaboration is in fact increasing, but is marred by serious procedural flaws and that the interprovincial cooperation process, though initiated long ago, is still not a top priority for public organizations.