Planning in England: New Public Management, Network Governance or Post-Democracy?
| Author | Martin Laffin |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852315581807 |
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
Review of
Administrative
Article
Sciences
International Review of
Administrative Sciences
2016, Vol. 82(2) 354–372
Planning in England: New Public
! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852315581807
Governance or Post-Democracy?
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Martin Laffin
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Abstract
Three frameworks – New Public Management, Network Governance and Post-
Democracy – are applied to identify and explain the direction of institutional travel in
the field of land-use planning in England. These frameworks are used to assess the
extent to which land-use planning has been centralized or decentralized over the last
20 years. The last Labour government (1997–2010) is contrasted with the
Conservative-led Coalition government (2010–2015). Labour introduced planning poli-
cies and an underpinning regional administrative machinery that the latter has replaced
with a ‘localist’ planning system and sub-regional Local Enterprise Partnerships. The
article concludes that both Labour and the Conservative-led Coalition embarked on
policies that involved increased centralization, but that the centralization took different
forms, though both parties denied sub-state institutions the political or other resources
to challenge the central government in Westminster.
Points for practitioners
The dominant analytical perspectives on public administration are New Public
Management and Network Governance. This article introduces a third perspective –
Post-Democracy – not yet applied in public administration. Post-Democracy is devel-
oped here to depict government ministers as ‘political-bureaucratic managers’ oriented
towards maintaining national economic competitiveness and mobilizing electoral sup-
port in new ways as the traditional, mass political party is declining. Consequently,
ministers increasingly defer to business interests and default to a populist politics
that often challenges established bureaucratic and professional interests within govern-
ment. This article examines the implications of this political shift in the case of land-use
planning in England.
Corresponding author:
Martin Laffin, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK.
Email: m.laffin@qmul.ac.uk
Laffin
355
Keywords
Administrative organization and structures, intergovernmental relations, moderniza-
tion, planning, public sector reform, regional and local government
Introduction
As an academic discipline, public administration has neglected land-use planning
as a topic for research and theoretical analysis. The public administration literature
is focused on the general institutional machinery of government, both at central
and devolved levels, and on issues of service delivery, and has neglected substantive
policy fields. Where such fields have been studied, public administration researchers
have mostly focused on the large spending services, such as education or social
services. Indeed, very few studies of land-use planning exist from a public admin-
istration perspective, though the planning literature itself has frequently drawn
heavily on the ideas of New Public Management (NPM) and governance. This
article argues that the study of planning provides telling insights into how public
policy and administrative structures are modernized and changed. It takes up the
questions posed by Kuhlmann and Wayenberg in the Introduction to this special
issue as to how far central governments have deliberately, or incidentally, reformed
sub-central governments at the regional and local levels, and especially whether
these reforms have involved greater centralization or decentralization.
These questions are examined in the case of English land-use planning over the
last 20 years. The last Labour government’s (1997–2010) planning policies are
contrasted with those of the Conservative-led Coalition government (2010–2015).
Labour introduced an elaborate spatial planning system, with an underpinning
institutional machinery driven by the imperatives of economic development and
affordable housing provision, which acknowledged, rather than was driven by,
environmental and sustainability concerns. Soon after the 2010 election, the
Coalition government rapidly abolished some key elements of this system and its
regional institutions, illustrating the power of executive government to act rapidly
in a Westminster system. For the Conservatives, Labour’s planning policies were
too statist and had antagonized their suburban electoral base, mainly in the South-
East of England, and influential business interests in property development. The
Coalition government then reformed the planning system, removing the regions,
creating new sub-regional economic development bodies and strengthening the
powers of sub-local government communities or neighbourhoods to make planning
decisions of local import. The article draws, in part, on research by the author on
economic development and housing policy (Laffin, 2013, forthcoming; Laffin et al.,
2013), which has been updated to cover developments under the Coalition govern-
ment largely by reference to secondary sources.
Three frameworks for understanding public management change – NPM,
Network Governance and Post-Democracy – are identified and used to explore
questions of centralization/decentralization. The article outlines post-war planning
356
International Review of Administrative Sciences 82(2)
policy and then contrasts Labour’s planning policies with those of the Coalition
government. The conclusion assesses the direction of institutional travel – towards
greater or lesser centralization – during these two periods of government.
NPM, Network Governance and Post-Democracy
NPM and planning
The public administration literature over the last 30 years has been dominated by
reference to the ‘New Public Management’. Public management explanations are
typically in terms of a shift towards NPM away from an Old Public Administration
(OPA), which, it is argued, enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of government.
The NPM practitioner proponents are supposedly pursuing a new, rationalistic
agenda to reform inward-looking bureaucracies concerned with due process and
adherence to rules, as against a new agenda focused on outcomes and performance,
efficiency and effectiveness. NPM has been subject to a range of definitions.
Essentially, NPM authors stress: (1) the increased disaggregation of, or separating
functions out from, large governmental bureaucracies into functionally specialized
organizational units; (2) the separation of commissioning from service delivery
(particularly) through extra-governmental organizations that compete for govern-
ment business; and (3) measuring performance through explicit performance stand-
ards and output/outcome indicators rather than process controls (e.g. Dunleavy
and Hood, 1994). Meanwhile: (4) central steering functions are strengthened to
allow politicians to set policy strategically – those in delivery organizations (inside
and outside the public sector) carry out that policy and enjoy significant freedom to
determine the means of achieving the policy objectives set. The logic of NPM has
been to encourage policymakers to ‘depoliticize’ functions (Flinders, 2008).
NPM is associated with administrative decentralization as service delivery func-
tions are shifted onto agencies outside core government or extra-governmental
organizations; meanwhile, political centralization is achieved through strengthening
the strategic control capacity of central government. It is also closely associated
with the Westminster model, which concentrates executive power, and Labour’s
modernization programme (1997–2010) in England has often been portrayed as a
case of NPM or managerialism driving centralization.
Planning can be seen as a mixture of the OPA and NPM. Arguably, strategic
spatial planning approaches (such as the UK structure plans introduced in the 1970s)
anticipated NPM as they stressed outcomes and objectives, as well as the separation
of strategic plan-making from decision-making. Yet, strategic planning shares OPA
assumptions as it involves a process-driven model of legitimacy rather than an
output-based one; the former stresses participation, transparency and public service
values in the design and implementation of public policy. Meanwhile, in practice,
local planning resembles OPA rather than efficient and outcome-driven NPM-type
practices as development control is necessarily process- and rule-driven for import-
ant reasons: the possibility of judicial challenge, the substantial financial
Laffin
357
implications and legitimacy. As will be seen, planning delays and processes have
become a perennial concern of ministers and business interests.
Network Governance
Network Governance has emerged more recently as a framework for understand-
ing public management. Planning practice has long had characteristics that pre-
date the formulation of Network Governance, incidentally underlining the need to
avoid an ahistorical periodization of an OPA–NPM–Network Governance line of
development. Friend et al. (1974), over 40 years ago, conceptualized the planner as
a ‘reticulist’ or networker who worked through complex horizontal, as well as
vertical, relationships. However, Network Governance theorists now make more
ambitious claims about recent changes in society and government as being a ‘para-
digmatic’ shift or ‘a new process of governing; or a changed condition of ordered
rule; or the new...
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