1 New politics for planning – introducing climate policy in Dutch and Danish planning cultures Severine van Bommel 1 , Anne Jensen 2 , Wiebren Kuindersma 3 and Anders Branth Pedersen 4 Conference paper accepted by the 2009 Amsterdam Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, held in Amsterdam, 2-4 December 2009. Presented in panel 11: “Urban Planners as Agents of Earth System Governance”. Abstract There is a growing appreciation that global climate change is basically not a problem of environment, but one of politics and policies. Therefore, it is argued that the policy context in which climate change decisions are made must be considered. Using theories of strategic power in planning and of planning imaginaries, in this paper, we ask how the challenges of climate policy issues become integrated in the framing and mundane practices of specific local and regional planning initiatives. We build the analysis on two case studies of climate policy implementation in The Netherlands and Denmark, respectively. Our study shows how climate policy issues are introduced with a general push to realize climate sensitivity in particular [proof] regions and cities. This, however, faces obstacles in regional and local planning’s traditional sector divided institutions and existing cultures around sustainable development. The complexity of climate policy issues pushes for interactions across policy sectors and gradually adds to a reframing of strategic planning in our two cases. In the present context, we argue that planning practices taking on the challenges of climate change accentuate current movements towards a more politicised planning which acknowledges and is enabled by the power ridden nature of planning. Introduction There is a growing appreciation that global climate change is basically not a problem of environment, but one of politics and policies. Therefore, it is argued that the political context in which climate change decisions are made must be considered. As it is inevitable that any policy aimed at climate change mitigation or adaptation will interact with other sector interests, the importance of negotiation and interaction is increasingly recognized as part of the climate change policy making process. In addition to this, the actual effects of climate change policies will depend on concrete actions taken. These actions are always local and have regional impacts. Hence, local and regional scales of planning emerge as targeted areas for climate change mitigation and adaptation. These scales of 1 Communication Science and Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group, Wageningen University and Research Center, Wageningen, the Netherlands. 2 National Environmental Research Institute, Aarhus University, Roskilde, Denmark 3 Alterra and Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group, Wageningen University and Research Center, Wageningen, the Netherlands 4 National Environmental Research Institute, Aarhus University, Roskilde, Denmark