Environmental Policy Integration; policy documents; landscape fragmentation; internal consistency; SMART policies; green.

Uncoordinated land development results in landscape fragmentation, which is a complex and serious environmental threat to the Czech landscape. It poses a challenge especially for (post)industrial urban agglomerations with an extremely low connectivity of green-blue infrastructure. Environmental and spatial planning strategic policy documents are considered to represent long-term communicative instruments for effective environmental protection. Current experience shows that policy documents are commonly poorly integrated, and burdened by formulation inconsistencies. In this study, we (i) specify the driving factors as main causes of landscape fragmentation, describing how is the issue understood by environmental and spatial planning strategic policy documents and (ii) identify criteria for the formulation of these documents at the national and regional governance level. A content analysis of 12 strategic policy documents enabled the calculation of internal consistency and an assessment of their inter- and cross-sectoral integration. The results revealed formulation flaws in documents, leading to serious misunderstandings of the meaning of the landscape fragmentation between environmental (biocentric) and planning (anthropocentric) policy domains. This aspect makes the horizontal and further vertical cooperation between policy domains difficult. The guidelines for the formulation of strategic policy documents may improve their intelligibility and support smoother environmental policy integration.