Spatial Governance and Planning Policy Transfer in the Global South: The Role of International Agency and the Recirculation of Policies

Spatial Governance and Planning Policy Transfer in the Global South examines how spatial governance and planning concepts and ideas circulate within and beyond the Global South, highlighting the actors, power relations and institutional contexts that shape how these ideas are adopted, adapted, or resisted.

As regions and cities are being faced with an increasing number of challenges – from climate change to housing shortage, social inequality to energy security, they increasingly look for ready-made solutions, often with the support of international organisations and city networks. Yet policies do not simply move from one place to another. They are reshaped, adapted – and sometimes distorted – by local political interests and institutional traditions. Bringing together leading scholars in the field, the book explores how concepts and practices travel across the globe, and what happens when they land. The collected contributions bridge an important research gap by examining how spatial policies circulate within and beyond the Global South, challenging the long-held assumption that planning knowledge flows mainly North-South. Through case studies from Ecuador, Brazil, the Andean region, Chile, South Africa and Taiwan, the authors show how planning ideas are translated on the ground, how international agendas interact with local priorities and how “quick-fix” solutions can prevent deeper structural challenges.

Offering a fresh perspective on how cities and regions learn from one another in a rapidly changing world, this collection represents an essential reading for urban and regional planning scholars, policymakers and practitioners seeking to understand not only how spatial policies travel, but how they transform – and are transformed by – the places they touch.

The chapters in this book were first published as a special issue of Planning Practice & Research, and are accompanied by a new Introduction and Conclusion.

Francesca Blanc is a Senior Researcher at the LINKS Foundation, coordinating international projects focused on just urban mobility, public space redesign, and citizen engagement. She has previously worked for the Ecuadorian Ministry of Urban Development and Housing and as a consultant for different international organizations in Latin America, Africa, and Europe.

Giancarlo Cotella is Full Professor of urban and regional planning at Politecnico di Torino, with over 20 years of comparative spatial planning research experience developed through the active participation to numerous international projects. Since 2023, he serves as Secretary General of AESOP, the Association of European Schools of Planning.

Marcin Dąbrowski is an interdisciplinary urbanist integrating insights from political science and spatial planning to critically engage in scholarly and policy debates on sustainable and inclusive urban and regional futures. His work transcends disciplinary, methodological and organisational boundaries to examine the governance dynamics that shape spatial development, thereby informing both spatial design and decision-making processes in the ‘real-world’.