Planning and Governance

Abstract

This chapter reviews the dimensions of governance, and the different modes which governance can take. It explores in particular the nature of planning, as a style of governance characterised by a policy-driven, or planning, approach and how far this may co-exist with specific governance modes. It thus builds on the policy analysis approach to planning outlined in Chapter 2. It then confronts the critique of policy analysis as grounded in instrumental rationalism, serving technocratic and corporatist modes of governance, to argue for new directions in governance modes which are more sensitive to the ‘consumers’ of public policy rather than the government ‘producers’ of policy. These new directions make use of a policy-driven approach, but vary in their relative emphasis on ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ institutional infrastructures. The chapter concludes with an argument for a democratic pluralist mode of governance and a collaborative style of planning to help in realising it. This argument builds on both a normative concern with more people-sensitive modes of governance and a practical concern with the management of local environmental change in situations of multiple and often conflictual stakeholders, typical examples of ‘shared-power worlds’ (Bryson and Crosby, 1992). The approach to governance developed here expresses an institutionalist approach through its emphasis not merely on the interactive nature of governance processes but on the way social networks weave in and out of the formal institutions of government and develop governance mechanisms within themselves, and through the recognition that reasoning is a much wider activity than is captured in the model of technical-instrumental rationality and rational planning processes.