The New IN-PLAN Checklist: A Practical Tool for Integrated Planning

The new IN-PLAN Online Checklist is designed to help municipalities apply integrated planning approaches across four sectors: Spatial Planning, Climate Adaptation & Biodiversity, Sustainable Mobility, and Renewable Energy.

Explore the planning principles
Each sector contains a set of planning principles. A principle is a guiding idea for integrated planning – it defines what should be achieved or considered, not the specific measure itself. Because integrated planning is cross-sectoral, each principle contributes to several sectors. Colored tags show where a principle “pays into” other sectors.

Decide what is relevant for your municipality
For each principle, you can choose whether it is relevant to your local context. If you mark a principle as relevant, the checklist displays a set of supporting measures that show possible ways to put the principle into practice. You can tick the relevant measures for your municipality.

Get an overview and identify gaps
By going through the checklist, you can quickly screen existing plans and projects, identify blind spots, and gather inspiration for improvement. The tool is not exhaustive or prescriptive – it is meant to help you reflect, compare, and discover new options.

Export your results
Once you have made your selections, you can create a PDF summary. This includes all relevant principles and the associated measures you selected.

Use the Checklist-Tool in your planning process:

• to set goals for upcoming projects,
• to document the current status of your planning process, or
• as a monitoring template to track progress over time.

The Online Checklist and the Excel-based tool (.xlsx) follow the same structure, so you can easily switch between them depending on your working style.