Efforts to engage with communities in spatial planning have been criticised as being tokenistic, vehicles for co-option or designed to promote neo-liberal agendas. The introduction of neighbourhood planning (NP) in England under the Localism Act (2011) is claimed by proponents to be a step change in the way that local communities are involved in planning their own areas. However, little empirical evidence has yet emerged to substantiate such claims, or provide details about the practices and experiences of NP. The paper highlights that there are numerous parties involved in the co-production of Neighbourhood Development Plans and there are numerous instances where ideas, policies and priorities that emerge from within neighbourhoods are being ‘rescripted’ to ensure conformity to a bounded form of collaboration.

English planning system reforms can be understood as part of a broader reorganisation of public services involving private sector providers supplying new markets and taking on functions previously delivered by public servants. While planning activity has long featured a number of different actors, there has been limited discussion of the role that private sector actors play in an increasingly fragmented, and task-oriented system which requires knowledge and skills-sets which local planning authorities (LPAs) typically do not possess. Thus the paper discusses how a ‘fragmentary planning’ has emerged in England, and the implications for governance and research in this area.

This paper builds upon literature examining the foreclosing of community interventions to show how a resident-led anti-road-noise campaign in South East England has been framed, managed, and modulated by authorities. We situate the case within wider debates considering dialogical politics. For advocates, this offers the potential for empowerment through nontraditional forums. Others view such trends, most recently expressed as part of the localism agenda, with suspicion. The paper brings together these literatures to analyse the points at which modulation occurs in the community planning process. We describe the types of countertactics residents deployed to deflect the modulation of their demands, and the events that led to the outcome. We find that community planning offers a space—albeit one that is tightly circumscribed—within which (select) groups can effect change. The paper argues that the detail of neighbourhood-scale actions warrant further attention, especially as governmental enthusiasm for dialogical modes of politics shows no sign of abating.

Neighbourhood planning is arguably the most radical innovation in UK neighbourhood governance in a generation, with over 2,200 communities in England now involved in statutory development planning at the neighbourhood level. Following incremental policy reforms, we argue that neighbourhood planning has reached a critical juncture where the future of the initiative is at stake. In this article we reflect on existing research to assess the policy to date before imagining what an optimised version of the policy might look like. Despite being a state-led initiative, central government has failed to provide an image of success for neighbourhood planning which we argue has held back widespread innovation and progressive participation. We therefore outline a normative guide against which future iterations of neighbourhood planning might be assessed, and employ this in order to imagine a more comprehensive form of neighbourhood governance.

Despite intermittent recognition of the input of private planning consultants in the UK planning system, there remains a paucity of empirical studies into their roles and influence in contemporary practice. Drawing on interviews with both public and private planners in England, this paper explores the nature of the public-private entanglements that increasingly define local planning practice. These include the heterogeneity of the consultant market, the rationales employed to justify consultant use, the nature of the expertise being deployed, and the asymmetrical nature of public/private relationships. The paper argues that the demands made on the public planning system and the planners that operate it are driving teleological explanations of the use of private expertise, displaying an ambivalence to the fact that Local Planning Authorities are in a position of critical dependency with private sector consultants. In concluding, it is argued that the knowledges that underpin planning practices are increasingly shaped by the market, with the potential to undermine planning’s public interest purpose.