Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, tables and boxes
- Abbreviations and acronyms
- Notes on the authors
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- one Introduction: planning at the coalface in a time of constant change
- two Conceptualising governance and planning reform
- three The planner within a professional and institutional context
- four Process: implementing spatial planning
- five Management: the efficiency agenda, audit and targets
- six Participation: planners and their ‘customers’
- seven Culture: the planning ‘ethos’
- eight Conclusion: the importance of planning's front line
- Notes
- References
- Index
two - Conceptualising governance and planning reform
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, tables and boxes
- Abbreviations and acronyms
- Notes on the authors
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- one Introduction: planning at the coalface in a time of constant change
- two Conceptualising governance and planning reform
- three The planner within a professional and institutional context
- four Process: implementing spatial planning
- five Management: the efficiency agenda, audit and targets
- six Participation: planners and their ‘customers’
- seven Culture: the planning ‘ethos’
- eight Conclusion: the importance of planning's front line
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
The age of continual reform
We saw in Chapter One that both the planning system and the wider public sector context in which British planning is situated have been the objects of concerted reform over the last 15 years in central and devolved government in Great Britain. Hull sums up the reforms thus:
Public service provision has been slowly re-configured since the early 1980s by the introduction of ‘market’ measures of efficiency. So far, the ‘hard’ infrastructure of the planning system has remained relatively unscathed from the privatisation of services and State assets…. The main changes have been to the ‘soft’ infrastructure of the planning system; the values, norms and standards. There have been ministerial statements and calls from business interests for a more transparent and efficient planning system, to help create policy certainty and to more effectively support the development industry. (2000, p 772)
This largely summarises the situation up to the present day, and there has been no slowdown in reform to planning with changes in power in devolved administrations and the election of the UK Coalition government in May 2010.
In this chapter, we provide, briefly, the contextual frame for understanding what is driving these planning reforms, before turning in Chapter Three to consider the lenses we can use to consider the role of planners.
Understanding reform
The reform processes which have been affecting planning over recent years can be understood through a number of connected theoretical approaches, including neoliberalism and managerialism generally, the so-called ‘third way’ associated with New Labour and the emerging ‘localism’ associated with the Coalition government. These approaches vary between the normative and the more analytical in terms of both stated aim and common usage. In this section we briefly explore each of these approaches in turn before considering, in the following section, the broad frame of governance.
Neoliberalism
An increasingly common approach to understanding the modernisation of the state within human geography and cognate disciplines has been through the lens of ‘neoliberalism’. Neoliberalism grew out of a critique of the welfare state, which began to be understood ‘as a uniform provision that is bureaucratic, hierarchical, sometimes coercive and oppressive, and often unresponsive to the needs and differences of individuals and communities’ (Dean, 1999, p 153).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Collaborating Planner?Practitioners in the Neoliberal Age, pp. 39 - 60Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2013