Relationship between spatial and development planning at the local level in the Republic of Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The mutual relationship between spatial and development planning at the local level is a very current topic that has concrete consequences for development processes in local government units in the territory of Republika Srpska (RS). Although it is still unregulated from the legislative point of view, local development planning is much more present in practice, which is primarily manifested in the almost complete coverage of the territory of the RS by local development strategies. The connection of these documents to spatial and urban plans has not been treated in an appropriate way, which leads to a certain degree of their mutual inconsistency. The basic hypothesis of this paper arises from this statement, and that is that the lack of a clearly defined connection with spatial planning in the methodology of drafting local development documents leads to the inconsistency of these documents as the final result. As an auxiliary hypothesis, the assumption will be investigated that a large discrepancy in the coverage of the territory of the Republika Srpska between local development strategies and spatial plans of local government units also contributed to this inconsistency.