- The Impacts of Poor Governance on Land Development Approval Processes. A case of City of Nairobi    89 kb by    Mwangi, Winnie & Nyika, David | wnyika@hotmail.com    Short Outline Governance in land planning agencies is key to sustainable development.This paper investigates how governance plays a critical role in approval processes and proposes institutional reforms as key to governance issues. Abstract Land planning is an important component of land management which is key to sustainable development. It is the discipline that deals with allocation of space amongst competing users to ensure beauty, convenience and returns to real estate investment. On a larger scale land planning plays the roles of, ensuring effective physical development hence propagating sustainable development, catering for the failures of the free markets economy, helps in settling land use conflicts. The tools of land planning include land use plans, development plans, zoning regulations and development applications amongst others. These tools have different roles in meeting the goals of planning Government agencies and local authorities, as custodians of the land resources are mandated by law to effect land planning. In the recent past, there has been explicit recognition of the importance of governance in land management. Governance has a way to do with how the society is managed and the reconciliation of competing priorities and interests amongst different groups. This paper uses one component of development applications, namely subdivisions to examine how the processes are governed for the wider benefits of the society. The key objectives of the study are to assess the role and impacts of governance in the development approval processes and to identify measures to mitigate against poor governance. Preliminary findings indicate that there is poor governance in the way these processes are managed resulting to time and cost overruns, low approval rates and hindering the levels of investments. This compromises the tenets of development. The paper recommends adoption of performance measurement approaches and institutional reforms as key to addressing governance issues. . Keywords Governance, Planning approval processes Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2010: Sustainable City - Developing World   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper