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ABSTRACT
Change of major social institutions sometimes takes place during relatively compressed periods in which previously relatively stable institutions are transformed. Historical institutionalism and comparative historical analysis refer to these turning points as critical junctures, and have developed a valuable set of conceptual frames and research methods for their systematic and comparative study. A core idea of the critical junctures approach is that periods of significant institutional change often result in distinct outcomes in different cases, and sometimes produce enduring consequences in the form of subsequent pathways of institutional development. If this is so, then careful analysis of the dynamics of such change processes, the factors that enable change and those that shape outcomes in each case are important projects for planning history. This essay draws on recent research on permissive and productive conditions of institutional change, the fractal-like quality of multi-scalar institutional change, comparative sequential analysis, process-tracing, and counterfactual analysis in developing an analysis of the broader significance of the European spatial planning policies examined in the papers included in this special issue. A final section considers some of the distinctive characteristics of critical junctures at urban and regional scales compared to those at national or transnational scales in the light of these cases.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
André Sorensen is Full Professor in the Department of Human Geography, University of Toronto Scarborough. His monograph The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the 21st Century (Routledge 2002) was awarded the book prize of the International Planning History Society in 2004. His paper 'Taking Path Dependence Seriously’ (2015) published in Planning Perspectives 30(1):17-38, won the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) Best Paper Award in 2016. He has published over 60 journal papers and book chapters, and four books. His current research examines urban institutions, and temporal processes in urbanization and urban governance from a comparative historical institutional perspective, with a focus on urban land and property development, infrastructure management, and the creation of increasingly differentiated property rights and planning systems in urban settings.
Notes
1 The papers by Zonneveld, Faludi, Dühr, Lingua, and Dąbrowski and Piskorek in this issue each offer reviews of this literature, so this is not repeated here.
2 This bias, and its resulting myopia has been forcefully critiqued by Magnusson in Politics of Urbanism; see also Keil and Mahon Leviathan Undone?
3 The seminal work is Berins Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena; important contributions include Krasner, “Approaches to the State”; Mahoney “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology”; Cappocia and Kelemen, “The Study of Critical Junctures”; Cappocia “Critical Junctures”; and Pierson Politics in Time. Recent work on theory and methods is cited below, see footnotes 13, 22, 23, and 31.
4 Other major variants include rational choice institutionalism, sociological institutionalism, discursive institutionalism, and feminist institutionalism, among others, for reviews see Hall and Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms”; Lowndes and Roberts, Why Institutions Matter; Sorensen, “New Institutionalism and Planning Theory.”
5 North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance.
6 Hall and Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” 938.
7 This argument is developed in Sorensen, “Global Suburbanization” and also clearly in Sutcliffe’s Towards the Planned City (without explicit reference to critical junctures or institutionalism); also Newman and Thornley, Urban Planning in Europe.
8 The concept of path dependence is central to historical Institutionalism. The idea was originally developed in economics in David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY”; and Arthur, “Increasing Returns”; but the significance of such increasing returns or self-reinforcing processes was soon a focus in political science, e.g. Thelen and Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis”; Hacker, “The Historical Logic”; and Ertmann, Birth of Leviathan. Other major works include Hall and Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms”; Mahoney, “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology”; Pierson, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics.” Pierson, in Politics in Time argues persuasively that path dependence may be even more prevalent in politics than in economics, and this argument is applied to planning in Sorensen, “Taking Path Dependence Seriously” and “Institutions in Urban Space.”
9 Krasner, “Approaches to the State,” 225.
10 See in particular, Berins Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena; Hacker, “The Historical Logic”; Pearson, Politics in Time.
11 David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY”; and Arthur, “Increasing Returns.”
12 See Ventry, “The Accidental Deduction”; Atkinson and Oleson “Urban Sprawl as a Path Dependent Process”; Low and Astle, “Path Dependence in Urban Transport”; Quitzau, “Water Flushing Toilets.” Sorensen, “Taking Path Dependence Seriously” and “Institutions in Urban Space” both focus on the path dependent quality of infrastructure institutions over and above the obvious ‘sunk costs’ aspects.
13 There is a large and evolving literature on critical junctures. Particularly important are Berins Collier and Collier (1991) Shaping the Political Arena; Mahoney, “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology”; Cappocia and Kelemen, “The Study of Critical Junctures”; Pearson, Politics in Time; Soifer, “The Causal Logic of Critical Junctures”; Bengston and Ruonavarra, “Comparative Process Tracing.”
14 Berins Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, 29.
15 Mahoney, “Legacies of Liberalism,” 6–7.
16 Cappocia and Kelemen, “The Study of Critical Junctures,” 352.
17 Cappocia and Kelemen, “The Study of Critical Junctures,” 368.
18 Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City; Hall, Cities of Tomorrow.
19 Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies.
20 Isaiah Berlin, cited in Cappocia, “Critical Junctures and Institutional Change,” 158.
21 Soifer, “The Causal Logic of Critical Junctures,” 1573.
22 For detailed case examples, see Berins Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena; Mahoney, The Legacies of Liberalism; Thelen, How Institutions Evolve; Mahoney, Colonialism and Postcolonial Development.
23 On sequences of reaction and counter-reaction during critical junctures, see Mahoney, “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology”; Falleti and Mahoney, “The Comparative Sequential Method”; Bengtsson and Ruonavaara, “Comparative Process Tracing.”
24 Soifer, “The Causal Logic of Critical Junctures,” 1584.
25 Cappocia and Kelemen, “The Study of Critical Junctures,” 343.
26 Cappocia and Kelemen, “The Study of Critical Junctures,” 357.
27 Cappocia and Kelemen, “The Study of Critical Junctures,” 356.
28 See Grismala-Busse, “Time Will Tell”; Faletti and Mahoney, “The Comparative Sequential Method.” Sewell, “Historical Events,” 877.
29 Bennet and Checkel, Process Tracing from Metaphor to Analytic Tool, 7; see also Falleti and Lynch, “Context and Causal Mechanisms.”
30 Faletti and Mahoney, “The Comparative Sequential Method,” 212.
31 See, e.g. Bennet and Elman, “Complex Causal Relations and Case Study Methods”; Collier, “Understanding Process-Tracing”; Mahoney, “The Logic of Process Tracing Tests”; Grismala-Busse, “Time Will Tell”; Rohlfing, “Comparative Hypothesis Testing”; Bennett and Checkel, Process Tracing; Bengtsson, and Ruonavaara, “Comparative Process Tracing.”
32 Faletti and Mahoney, “The Comparative Sequential Method,” 212.
33 Mahoney, The Legacies of Liberalism, 5.
34 For example, Sykora “Revolutionary Change, Evolutionary Adaptation” describes local government reform processes following the collapse of the eastern block in this way.
35 Faletti and Mahoney, “The Comparative Sequential Method”; see also Pierson, Politics in Time, ch. 3 for analysis of cumulative sequences and tipping points.
36 The original paper was Goldstone, “The Problem of the ‘Early Modern’ World.” first diagrammed in Mahoney, “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology”; and reproduced in Faletti and Mahoney, “The Comparative Sequential Method,” 224.
37 See Pierson, Politics in Time, ch. 3, 79–102.
38 Healey, Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies.
39 Faludi this issue, “European Spatial Planning,” 7.
40 See Tsebelis, “Veto Players”; Immergut, “Health Politics in Western Europe.”
41 Faludi this issue, “European Spatial Planning,” 8.
42 Faludi this issue, “European Spatial Planning,” 10.
43 Faludi and Waterhout, The Making of the European Spatial Development Perspective; see also Faludi this issue, “European Spatial Planning” footnote 53 for a bibliography.
44 see footnote 37.
45 Faludi this issue, “European Spatial Planning,” 8.
46 Dühr, this issue, “A Europe of ‘Petites Europes.’”
47 Lingua this issue, “Institutionalizing EU Strategic Spatial Planning.”
48 Dąbrowski and Piskorek this issue, “Strategic Spatial Planning in Central and Eastern Europe” (ms p.24).
49 Magnusson, Politics of Urbanism, 4.
50 Sewell, “Historical Events,” 871.
51 Streek and Thelen, “Institutional Change,” develop one possible explanation for such alignment in their argument that in recent decades movements in the direction of neoliberalization have been systematically easier than movements in the opposite direction.
52 Lingua this issue, “Institutionalizing EU Strategic Spatial Planning,” 7.