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Governments serve the public interest by regulating land use in favour of democratically determined objectives. While people can become involved in allocation processes through pre-structured participation, uninvited entry into planning processes may occur too. This article studies the latter, seeking to highlight the mechanisms of interaction between local governments and local opposition groups (LOGs) when conflict occurs about housing projects and industrial sites. We argue that because formal decisional power has a predefined territory, the effectiveness of self-organized LOGs is highly influenced by the decisional configuration. We analyse two cases of contestation in recent Dutch planning practice and attempt to link the spatiality of power with the concepts of 'spaces of engagement' and a 'political opportunity structure'. In the case of strong municipal autonomy, administrative borders appear to be important for local opposition strategies and for the way in which they shape urban and regional geography.

In the Central-European countries, a transformation from command-economy to market-economy is taking place. Redistribution of rights over land is one aspect of transformation, and a key process particularly in rural areas. Changing property and use rights means changing patterns of land use. In theory, ecological structures and conservation areas that existed before 1990 in cases may be converted into other types of land use. Cadastral maps and aerial photographs are analysed for two case-study areas in Hungary, providing a long-term assessment on land use changes and their implications for ecological values. For these cases, the loss of natural landscape elements has been small, whereas a considerable length of dirt roads and parcel boundaries was added. Moreover, the negative ecological impact of socialist agriculture was far greater than the recent privatisation. The typical nature of the Hungarian privatisation system and the national nature conservation policy have played an important role in preventing large-scale conversion of nature into farmland.

After the collapse of socialism and the consequent land privatisation process, Central Europe was left with an unfavourable agricultural production structure. In this light, the exchange of Western European knowledge on land consolidation seemed logical and effective. Looking back, a match that seemed at the time to be straightforward now appears much more complex. This paper aims to provide insight into the complexity of transplanting planning instruments by analysing both the inherent problems of this approach and the alternative solutions. In this type of situation, the need to start from a transparent terminological base is vital to cross-national exchange, and, as such, the strategic issue of a given problem and alternative solutions to it should be dealt with before attempting to address the operational details of any given solution., The paper is published by the European Journal of Spatial Development (EJSD). The previous version of the journal was host by Nordregio.