Themes under fluid processes of reform

In this book, we have discussed how we can conceptualise and understand the role of frontline planners, and how those same planners experience the ongoing reforms of planning and the public sectors. As Schofield and Sausman write:

The accounts of frontline planners constitute the reality of planning practice, and rigorous data is essential if we are to properly understand it. Drawing on a large-scale, carefully administered postal survey and a detailed collection of semi-structured interviews, this book provides a significant empirical contribution. This is important because context matters. Although planning shares similarities with other public services, there are differences too. Thus, broad agendas such as the move to promote the ideal of customers lead to confused narratives and contested ideals when they are imported with little context-specific understanding into the planning arena.

Chapters Four to Seven looked, successively, at: the reaction of local authority planners to implementing spatial planning through revised local planning policy frameworks, the emphasis on targets to speed up planning, moves to make planning more participatory and the broad impulse for increasing customer sovereignty. In each case, the response has been mixed, involving apparent embrace of some elements of the reforms and rejection – in terms of conceptual rejection, at least – of others. A number of themes seemed to emerge through these chapters, which we now consider in turn.

Imagining modernisation

A first emergent theme is the question of how planners are imagining modernisation, how they appear to conceptualise the broad programme of planning and public sector reforms to which they have been subject over recent years. This reform agenda appears to be seen overwhelmingly in terms of threats and opportunities, in contrast to some texts that suggest public sector professionals reject all new public management reforms (Berg, 2006). There is a clear feeling evident in the data that planners supported the idea of some reform being necessary; in Chapter Four we saw that almost twice as many survey respondents agreed rather than disagreed with the statement ‘I support the reform agenda’.