Introduction

This chapter situates international debates on participation and the widening of democratic engagement in the context of initiatives in the English planning system. It discusses the devolution of neighbourhood planning powers to local communities from 2011 and draws parallels with traditions of citizens’ control and direct action in land-use planning. It asks whether neighbourhood planning can be said to devolve some kind of ‘power to the people’. In doing so, the chapter argues for an understanding of participation not as a process of inclusion, but as a political practice founded on the inevitability of antagonism and conflict. It begins by exploring the theory and practice of participation in planning and its relation to community action. It then introduces neighbourhood planning within the context of community opposition to development and considers the emergence at the local scale of new collective identities structured around participation as a democratic political practice

Participation, citizens and communities

The spectre of hierarchical power continues to haunt all attempts to deepen democratic participation in land-use planning. In the community engagement practices of Australasian, European and US states, and in the development programmes of the global South, participation still eludes its anticipated empowerment. Debates over the theory and practice of participation have centred on tensions between representative and participatory democracy and the conflicting rationales of consumer voice and citizenship in the context of liberalised development markets (Brownill and Carpenter, 2007; Brownill, 2009; Bailey, 2010). The stubborn knot at the heart of these debates has been the extent to which participation recognises and challenges the inequalities embedded in market societies and hierarchical structures of government (Flyvbjerg, 2002). Theoretical distinctions between consumerist and citizenship models of participation were first advanced four decades ago to distinguish a collective approach to democratic engagement from the individualised consultation of market research (Croft and Beresford, 1996; Cairncross et al, 1997). These distinctions are now difficult to discern in practices of public participation, where the consumerist model has long since acquired ubiquitous orthodoxy. In the rise of the global liberal project, political engagement is equated with the acquisition of capital while citizenship has been distilled down to the civil rights of ownership and exchange (Barron and Scott, 1992).