Since the mid 1980s performance-based planning has been actively promoted as a way of achieving more sustainable land-use planning outcomes in Australian cities and regions. The benefits of a more integrated, flexible approach to land-use planning appear to offer a compelling alternative to the rigid and blunt silo style of land-use planning that has shaped and defined the (increasingly unsustainable) morphology of Australian settlements since federation. In theory at least performance-based planning offers the possibility of achieving more sustainable planning outcomes by engendering innovation, creativity and a customized approach to urban and regional areas. In practice however, the ‘performance-based turn’ to planning emerges as an ill-understood concept that struggles to live up to professional and community aspirations. Yet, despite these concerns performance-based planning has held only a ‘shadowy presence’ in urban planning that warrants more critical research and public policy attention. This thesis develops and applies an institutional framework to better understand and learn from the mobilisation and practice of performance-based planning as a strategy for sustainability in Queensland under the Integrated Planning Act 1997 (IPA). Within Australia this case is significant as the first statutory attempt to embed both ecological sustainability and performance-based planning at the heart of state-wide land-use planning amidst a pervasive political agenda of micro-economic reform. The methodological framework utilized for this study draws on a combination of two key institutional learning approaches:

1. The spatial strategy-making approach outlined by Healey (2007); and
2. The key principles around institutional change for sustainability put forward by Connor and Dovers (2004).