Comprehensive Planning

This article discusses plan quality evaluation, an emerging methodology for assessing the quality of plans. It reviews the evolution of the concept, the dimensions covered, and the principles and criteria used. It then provides a comparative meta-analytic analysis of the findings from published plan quality evaluations, ranging from research studies in the United States to national planning policy applications in Holland and New Zealand, and offers recommendations about future directions in improving content analysis of plan documents and research design in plan quality evaluation.