A fundamental purpose of intergovernmental growth management has been to infuse regional concerns—especially regional environmental and economic development concerns—into local land use planning. This paper presents results from a study of state-mandated local planning in coastal North Carolina during the mid-1990s, addressing in particular local efforts to ‘strike a balance’ between environment and economy as required by the state's planning mandate. While acknowledging the need for coastal resource protection, coastal localities were not striking a balance between environment and economy through their planning efforts beyond stating support for the State's minimum resource protection rules. Within this context, key factors yielding less environmentally focused local planning included both local elected officials' concerns about the need for economic development for jobs and their belief that environmental protection was not a local problem. Factors that tended to shift local planning back toward environmental protection included local officials' perception that the local economy was in good shape and heightened citizen engagement.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Scenario-based planning offers the promise of enhancing local coastal management given uncertainties from shoreline dynamics and climate change. Deploying it can require substantial capacity, however, or can obscure the key policy choices a community faces. We set out to develop and test a simple, decision-centered approach to scenario-based planning as a way to improve local management of coastal shorelands through master plans, focusing on coastal hazard mitigation. We also looked for ways to use basic spatial analysis techniques and off-the-shelf data sources that could be manipulated to generate meaningful and reasonably accurate analyses. We find the simplified and decision-centered methods we have developed can provide useful information for local decision makers. We also find the quality of the master plans adopted by two partner localities that used our scenario-based planning methods substantially exceeds the quality of comparison plans with regard to coastal management. Takeaway for practice: Using simplified, decision-centered, scenario-based planning methods can facilitate enhanced hazard mitigation analysis and policy adoption in local master plans. Those methods necessarily will and should be tailored to the unique political and physical conditions of the community, as demonstrated by the leadership provided in the localities studied here.

Today’s students need to become specialists in their profession while also recognizing the blinders that specialization brings—they need both disciplinary and meta-disciplinary learning. Today’s universities need to innovate by providing an education responsive to contemporary demands. They also need to show their relevance to the broader publics they serve. This article critically assesses a teaching initiative that brings together existing courses from multiple disciplines working for public-oriented clients to collaborate on closely related problems. The Michigan Engaging Community through the Classroom initiative was designed to enhance students’ learning by making them smarter, more pragmatic, and wiser while simultaneously enhancing the university’s public service. This article assesses the promise and the challenges of such a complex initiative and summarizes preliminary findings from student and community partner evaluations. The initiative has been challenging to implement because of the faculty dedication it requires. Developing robust evaluations of student learning has proven difficult as well. We have found that when student, faculty, and partner expectations are raised but not fulfilled, frustrations run high. When coordination and collaboration align, however, student learning can be enriched and public service enhanced. The article concludes by discussing lessons learned and presenting models of collaboration developed in turn.