The Collaborating Planner?

Practitioners in the Neoliberal Age

Clifford, Ben, Tewdwr-Jones, Mark, Ben Clifford, Mark Tewdwr-Jones

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781447305118
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447320418
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Stadtentwicklung

Since the turn of the 21st century, there has been a greater pace of reform to planning in Britain than at any other time. As a public sector activity, planning has also been impacted heavily by the wider changes in the way we are governed. Yet whilst such reform has been extensively commented upon within academia, few have empirically explored how these changes are manifesting themselves in planning practice.

This new book aims to understand how both specific planning and broader public sector reforms have been experienced and understood by chartered town planners working in local authorities across Great Britain. 

After setting out the reform context, successive chapters then map responses across the profession to the implementation of spatial planning, to targets, to public participation and to the idea of a 'customer-focused' planning, and to attempts to change the culture of the planning. Each chapter outlines the reaction by the profession to reforms promoted by successive central and devolved governments over the last decade, before considering the broader issues of what this tells us about how modernisation is rolled-out by frontline public servants.

This accessible book fills a gap in the market and makes ideal reading for students and researchers interested in the UK planning system.

SIX

Participation: planners and
their ‘customers’

Participation and active citizens

During the research on New Labour and planning reform, the topic of public participation cropped up in conversation.¹ “Ah”, said the planner, “when I was doing my planning course we had a Canadian planner come to chat to us, as they were ahead of us in terms of public participation in those days. He told us how terrible it was, that the only thing they could get done was plant trees, because nobody objected to that, and that seems to me a danger of where we are headed in this country.” The planner then smiled wryly before adding, “well actually in the last couple of weeks I have had several letters from local residents complaining that decomposing leaves from trees along the streets are falling onto their cars and damaging the paintwork. So we can’t even plant trees any more.”

The image of almost a ‘tyranny of participation’ from the eyes of a planner is fascinating given how efforts at making British planning more participatory have formed a central part of the planning reform agenda promoted by central and devolved government in Britain under both Labour and the Coalition since 1997 (Kitchen and Whitney, 2004; Gallent and Robinson, 2012). As reviewed in Chapter One, this seemingly pro-participation agenda is in conflict with other government priorities (see also Baker et al, 2007). Given these tensions, there is a clear need to explore what planners at the coalface think about public participation.

Just as the requirements of targets present a ‘top-down pressure’ on public sector professionals such as planners, so participation presents a ‘bottom-up’ check on their discretion (Taylor and Kelly, 2006). Participation is not the only such bottom-up check, however. As introduced in Chapter One, there has been a rise in the use of the language and ideal of ‘the customer’ across public services in recent years, particularly in the local government context in which planning sits. This idea of ‘the customer’ grew from John Major’s 1991 ‘Citizen’s Charter’ (Bolton, 2002) and continued under Labour administrations, the ideal of the customer being central to new public management (Clarke, 2004). There has been a clear attempt to create a ‘customer-oriented’ bureaucracy (Korczynski and Ott, 2004). Swain and Tait draw on Rose (1999) to conceptualise the logic of customers as part of a wider process of neoliberal reform that sees bureaucrats as impediments to the working of the free market and so in need of change: ‘One way of doing this was not to govern bureaucracy better but to transform the very ethos of the public sector’ (quoted in Swain and Tait, 2007, p 240). It also leads to new modes of citizenship (Raco, 2007).

This rise of ‘the customer’ has been widely commented on in general literature about public service reform, but has clearly had an impact on local government planning specifically. Kitchen writes that planning is an activity with customers, but suggests that ‘for the public sector this is a more recent idea which in some circles was resisted because planners saw themselves as being responsible for a general public interest which was by definition superior to individual interests’ (2006, p 101). This raises clear questions about how the customer discourse has been implemented in planning. Indeed, Rosenthal and Peccei (2006c) highlight the importance of a context-specific understanding of the deployment of consumer discourses; elsewhere they write that:

The ‘sovereign customer’ is seen to demand great individual attention, flexibility and novelty in the provision of services, as well as goods…. Service quality has thus become a major management preoccupation…. A key problem for managers is how to ensure appropriate behaviours on the part of front-line workers: those employees who actually meet the customer and deliver the service. (Peccei and Rosenthal, 2001, p 831)

There are, therefore, questions about how much planners use the term ‘customers’ and what the implications of the customer discourse are for local government planning, and these have important links to relations between planners and the public. In this chapter we consider, in turn, evidence relating to how planners have reacted to the ongoing efforts to make planning more participatory and more customer-responsive over recent years.

Conceptualising participation

The topic of public participation in planning has received considerable academic attention over the years, and there is still lively debate around the idea (Alfasi, 2003). Within this debate, there is even contestation about the very definitions of ‘public’ and ‘participation’ (Thomas, 1996; Barnes et al, 2003). Discussion of participation is often understood with reference to Arnstein’s ‘ladder of participation’ (Arnstein, 1969). This ladder represents not just a classificatory device; there is also the underlying implication that the higher rungs are somehow better.

In general, debate in the planning literature is broadly split between those seeking a more participatory planning and those questioning its implications in practice. There are arguments on both sides of the debate about the effectiveness of public participation in planning, and whether there should be more of it. The arguments are both theoretical and practical, with a debate between those who consider increasing dialogue will lead to better decisions and those who argue that participation is a form of governmentality. The central theoretical debate thus often draws on Habermas, on the one side (see, for example, Healey, 1997), and Foucault, as well Nietzsche and even Machiavelli on the other (see, for example, Flyvbjerg, 1998).

Rydin and Pennington suggest that ‘within the literature on environmental policy and planning, public participation is usually considered an unalloyed good’ (2000, p 153). Those supporting a more participatory planning justify this through rationales of building ‘institutional capacity’, social, intellectual and political capital and community cohesion (Healey, 1997; Innes and Booher, 2004; Taylor, 2007). It is argued participatory planning can better capture the pluralism of values and knowledge (including lay knowledge) in a modern society whose preferences have not been properly captured by the technocratic bureaucracy (Myers and Macnaghten, 1998; Coburn, 2003; Petts and Brooks, 2006). Democratic rationales are offered (Bedford et al, 2002; Innes and Booher, 2004; Taylor, 2007), arguments are made around improved policy outcomes and implementation (Rydin and Pennington, 2000; Taylor, 2007) and arguments around empowering and educating citizens (Lowndes et al, 2001b). The strongest proponents of a more participatory planning argue for ‘collaborative planning’ based around an inclusionary, deliberative approach and drawing on a Habermasian concept of a deliberative democracy (Innes, 1995; Healey, 1997, 2006; Forester, 1999a).

Drawing on Foucauldian critiques of power, a critical interpretation argues that in practice participation fails to live up to these persuasive theoretical and professional ideals (Ellis, 2004). Barnes, Newman and Sullivan are concerned that much of the participation literature is highly normative, and comment that ‘The practices of public participation, while appearing to be empowering, may be a new form of domination’ (2007, p 70). Those on this side of the debate argue that in practice outcomes are not always beneficial for the public interest due to the dominance of certain interests, an emphasis on short-term objectives and reproduction of existing power structures (Campbell and Marshall, 2000; Bedford et al, 2002; Hillier, 2003). There is concern about the difficulty of achieving consensus in the face of existing power structures (Flyvbjerg, 1998; Tewdwr-Jones and Thomas, 1998; Pløger, 2001) and the unrepresentativeness of those involved in planning public participation exercises (Thomas, 1996; Campbell and Marshall, 2000; Rydin and Pennington, 2000; Bickerstaff and Walker, 2001). There is also evidence that those who do get involved tend to promote individual rather than collective interests (Campbell and Marshall, 2000; Warburton, 2002). Thus collaborative planning ‘assumes a unified, coherent voice that is seldom realised in practice’ (Barnes et al, 2007, p 199).

These arguments are well versed. There is, however, a large gap in the literature, and that is an overview of how planners as a professional group are reacting to the ongoing drive for participation (and indeed, the tensions between this and other government objectives). This is despite some of the literature suggesting planners have a key role in making planning more participatory. This is a striking absence since the role of the frontline planner is clearly so important in implementing public participation and other policies. Indeed, the concerns raised in the literature are not simply abstract or theoretical; they are materialised in and through the experiences of planners at the coalface. Their testimony provides a way of exploring the seriousness of those concerns, and whether perception matches discourse. Some of the existing literatures do portray an implicit picture of what planning professionals think about the participation agenda, but all too frequently this is without much supporting evidence. There is usually an assumption that planners have a negative attitude to participation, hence a number of authors call for the necessity of fundamental change in planning practice, with calls for a ‘culture change’ in planning to further promote collaborative approaches (Healey, 2003; Gonzalez and Healey, 2005). Such calls reflect a wider concern about overcoming the professional cultural barriers and institutional inertia to further encourage meaningful participation (Taylor, 2003; Petts and Brooks, 2006). Coulson (2003) and Jones (2002) also note that adequate skills and commitment by professional staff are vital to the success of public participation.

A cursory exami...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• 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