Coherence in environmental policies among Iskandar Malaysia’s selected blueprints

Abstract

A significant increase in number of International, national, regional and local policies on one hand, and emergence of different policy domains, committees and sections on the other hand, has made the concept of “policy coherence” extremely important. Nations on the way to achieve their long term economic, social and environmental goals try to set the best policy scenarios. Iskandar Malaysia in this context has been defined as the second significant economic project of the country which is looking for an international standing sustainable development. For ensuring the sound development, IRDA, the related authority, has published 32 blueprints. Given the large number of blueprints and consequently policy sets on one hand and importance of environmental concerns in both international and national level, this study is going to evaluate two selected blueprints, Livable Neighborhood Design and Integrated Land use blueprints, in terms of their coherence with environmental guidelines and policies. To achieve so, the Environmental Planning Blueprint, which is a blueprint released by IRDA itself, has been considered as the basis of comparison. Taking texts as the basis of evaluation, content analysis has been applied as a main method of the study. Results coming from the analysis show that two selected blueprints are by and large consistent with the principles of EPB, although their environmental focus has been on distinct environmental features. No contradiction found between EPB and Livable Neighborhood design while some critical contradictions revealed in Integrated Land use Blueprint.