There is a growing understanding of the potential of spatial planning to constitute a co-ordinating arena for sustainable development, and planning processes are expected to merge all dimensions of sustainability. Since the concrete manifestation of spatial planning takes place at a micro level, it all boils down to the need for bringing together stakeholders at municipal level in a well functioning planning processes. Alongside this viewpoint, there is also an increasing awareness of the need for a decentralization of such processes, bringing them closer to the grassroots. Communicative planning is a planning ideal and a theoretical stream that has developed from this new 'paradigm'. It is based on citizen participation as a win-win situation, where the planning process builds a social sustainability, in turn enhancing the likelihood of the process to be successful. However, global and national visions of sustainability and local implementation are in many ways separate from one another. Bringing it further, to the individual level, the gaps are even wider. These gaps make the daily job for the planner increasingly complex and difficult. This article aims to contribute to understanding the characters of these gaps by describing them as four threats. The discussion is purely theoretical and based on the eight proposals of Goodin and Dryzek (2006) on possible pathways from micro-level deliberation towards the macro political system. However, the seed of the discussion is based on the authors' joint experiences from a number of evaluations of planning processes carried out in a Swedish context. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.