In contrast to conventional conference programs, the workshops will be designed as hands-on interactive sessions that will ground Smart Growth techniques in actual cases involving projects, neighborhoods and communities in North Carolina. Attendees will leave the workshops prepared to return to their communities and professions and implement the Smart Growth strategies and techniques used. The project is sponsored by the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology. New Zealand initated a major sustainable development effort with an extensive series of reforms undertaken during the late 1980s in restructing central, regional and local government, and in revising resource management law through passage of the 1991 Resource Management Act. A key requirement of this law is that regional and local governments are to create plans to achieve the overarching goal of sustainable resource management as stipulated in the Act.
Key findings suggest that plan quality is uneven across the country.
Empirical modeling shows that clear legislative provisions, central government information dissemination strategies, and subnational organisational capability had an important impact on the quality of regional and local plans. Alternatively, regional government organisational capacity and plans have little influence on local capacity and plans. These findings suggest that while clear mandates are effective, more attention needs to be given to building sub-national organisational capacity and central government information provision efforts. More attention also needs to be directed to facilitating collaboration between regional and district councils. The 2000 census shows that North Carolina has grown rapidly since 1990, with the bulk of the growth occurring in the Triangle, Triad and Charlotte-Mecklenburg regions.