land use plans can direct the land market sectoral plans in transport housing utilities and other sectors can be tied to the goals and milestones of comprehensive or strategic spatial plans metropolitan planning is vital to coordinated natural resource and infrastructure decisionmaking but often run into power games political resistance is strong in many countries municipal officials resist ceding authority to regional counterparts whilst national officials resist creating strong contenders so as to maintain political bases line service delivery agencies are not likely to follow national or urban plans that conflict with their own agency plans or that are the product of decision p which they had no involvement