Multiple Scales for Environmental Intervention: Spatial Planning and the Environment under New Labour

Abstract

Since the election of the Labour government in Britain in 1997, there has been a noticeable change in the scales of governance for spatial planning for the environment. The European scale of planning for biodiversity has been reinforced, but there has been a wider shift to one in which the integration of the environment into planning is strongly influenced by global environmental issues and international obligations. This paper explores the implications of this in the areas of spatial planning for biodiversity, and spatial planning for climate change (both mitigation and adaptation). It examines how far global commitments have enabled actors at different levels of governance—national, regional and local—to increase their scope for action and influence on outcomes through appealing to different scales of framing issues and their solutions. The picture that emerges is a complex one. While the commitments to internationally agreed targets for biodiversity and energy generation have partially reinforced the centralizing tendency in national government to see spatial planning as an instrument to deliver these targets, they have also increased the scope for other actors to use networks across multiple scales to generate their own interpretation and action.

Introduction

The heady days of optimism following Labour's election to government in May 1997 included an expectation that planning for the environment would be given its due weight in decision-making. This arose partly from an appreciation of the Labour Manifesto, which included a commitment to ‘put concern for the environment at the heart of policy-making, so it is not an add-on extra, but informs the whole of government, from housing and energy policy through to global warming and international agreements’, and a commitment to ‘a new international environmentalism … with strengthened co-operation in the EU on environmental issues’ (Labour Party, 1997). It arose also from an expectation that Labour, with its large Commons majority, would be able to initiate long-term plans and take a more fundamental perspective on changed development priorities, consistent with the intra-generational and inter-generational equity principles of sustainability.

This paper reflects on some of the achievements and failures of the 10 years of the Labour government in implementing that environmental manifesto through spatial planning, focusing on two critical and related issues: planning for biodiversity, and planning for climate change (both through mitigation—that is, reducing the causes of climate change, such as through shifts in energy policy—and adaptation to climate change—for instance, through the planning response to heightened flood risk) . It is acknowledged that this focus on only selected themes risks replicating any problems of lack of integration across separate and possibly divergent areas of sectoral policy development. It also invites the criticism that, in focusing on the environment as just one element of sustainability, the approach implies an unthinking adoption of the notion that planning seeks to trade off discrete policy objectives, rather than seeking to meet them all equally (Owens & Cowell, 2001). But the paper will show that these topics are intimately linked. It argues that a distinctive feature of these 10 years, compared with the preceding decade of Conservative control, was the accelerated shift from planning being a relatively domestic and insular field of policy activity, where concerns of governance primarily involved central and local governments, to one strongly influenced by global issues and international obligations. The policy areas chosen for review illustrate the new and dynamic issues of multi-scalar governance in which the forms and politics of national and local spatial planning interact with international environmental rationalities. Although the paper examines the UK (and especially England), it is hoped that this will be of wider interest in demonstrating how an off-shore country has responded to these new regimes. The paper therefore provides a brief introduction to spatial and environmental planning in England, before examining the case study topics of biodiversity and climate change. First, the paper explores some of the issues around the emergence of multi-scalar governance.

Multi-scalar Governance in Spatial Planning and the Environment

Much has been made of the tensions between national, regional and local levels of planning: for instance, the conflicts in a policy hierarchy between national policy and the more local territorial or spatial concerns; and conflicts within the Labour government between a strongly centralizing tendency in national government, especially the Treasury, and a simultaneous devolution of some powers, both to the devolved administrations, and to the regions in England (Murdoch & Abram, 2002; Haughton & Counsell, 2004; Cowell & Owens, 2006; Glasson & Marshall, 2007). Central government has needed to develop instruments to influence and negotiate with this newly empowered tier, at the same time as professing the important place of participation at the local community level. However, global and European-scale policies have also profoundly influenced environmental policy and spatial planning, even though land-use planning is strongly defended by central government as a national competence. Indeed, part of the wider scope of spatial planning (as opposed to land-use planning) comes from the European Spatial Development Perspective ([Commission of the European Communities], 1999), and this has involved integrating spatial development with other public policy areas such as infrastructure, social policy and the environment (Allmendinger & Haughton, 2007). This influence has been a feature since Britain's European Union (EU) membership in 1972: for instance, through the protracted negotiations and reluctant adoption by the UK of the EU Environmental Impact Assessment and Strategic Environmental Assessment Directives, it can be argued that ‘[o]ver the course of the last 30 years, British land-use policy has been extensively and irrevocably Europeanized’ (Jordan, 2002, p. 186). But in addition to these procedural measures, in substantive policy areas, the Labour government has had to implement significant obligations arising out of international environmental and sustainability conventions signed by the UK under the Conservatives at the Rio Summit in 1992. These treaties include the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol under the Convention signed by Labour in its first year of government, entailing extensive policy innovations. The allied EU commitments to specific energy sources, and directives such as the European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, have caused the government to consider afresh the relationship between Building Regulations and planning controls, and between new and existing development. Similarly, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity entails commitments not jut to protecting but also to restoring biodiversity, through measures such as national biodiversity action plans. Within the EU, although the EU Birds and Habitats Directives pre-date the election of Labour in 1997, the government needed to update its policy in this area as a result of the significant problems of interpretation and implementation, which had brought the UK government before the European Court of Justice.

This interaction of global environmental commitments with local and national competences requires a wider conception of multi-scale planning, and recognition of the need to explore the interactions between levels of government; not just in a conventional top-down way, but by examining the opportunities for trans-scale influence and networks. It requires us to examine ‘the dynamics of scale and the heterogeneity of institutional contexts’ (Adger et al., 2003, p. 1095), with different regulatory frameworks having to acknowledge different supra-national and sub-national scales of decision, but also the formal and informal networks of actors and interests operating across and within these tiers. For instance, Bulkeley and Betsill, in their trans-national study of cities' response to climate change, argue that the multi-level interpretation of governance ‘captures both the multiple levels at which governance takes place, and the myriad actors and institutions that act simultaneously across these levels’ (2003, p. 29; 2005). International initiatives such as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) Cities for Climate Protection have offered many UK urban authorities the scope for developing trans-national networks that have influenced their own local implementation of global imperatives. Similarly, in their study of nature conservation in the contested and pressured spaces of estuaries, Gibbs, While and Jonas conclude that ‘the implementation of [new international] commitments is very much contingent on the outcome of political struggles at different scales of territoriality and in particular places’ (Gibbs et al., 2007, p. 355). Moreover, the existence of these multiple scales allows proponents in any struggle to frame the problem and scope for action at different scales (Lindseth, 2006). Lindseth contends that the governance of climate change in particular, as both a global and local issue, had during the late 1990s extended from being solely at international or national level to include local climate action. However, these scales of action are not predetermined, independent variables, but can be used strategically by groups ‘to pursue a particular agenda’ (Lindseth, 2006, p. 740). Using a distinction between spaces of dependence (such as the inter-relation of local interests and conditions) and spaces of engagement (broader sets of relations constructed by actors, for instance to secure their local space of dependence), and Hajer's (1995) discourse coalitions, Lindseth argues that actors can build discourse coalitions around scales to frame the debate. He concluded that, in the case of Stavanger in Norway, at both national and local levels there were opposing discourses around how far the exploitation of natural gas was consistent with climate change mitigation. So far from using the global scale of climate change to argue against a fossil-fuel based development, the appeal to that scale in effect served to allow a wider decision-space, and local climate change commitments were overlooked.

It might be expected that the Labour government in Britain, with its strongly centralizing tendency, would allocate a merely instrumental role to spatial planning in implementing nationally agreed environmental objectives. The article therefore explores the extent to which this assumption is challenged or reinforced by the complexity and specificity of outcomes negotiated through these appeals to and constructions of different scales.

Targets, Integration and Scrutiny in the UK

One of the impacts of the commitment to international environmental obligations (explored in more detail by each of the themes below) has been the integration of specific targets into the domestic planning system, from greenhouse gases and the proportion of electricity generated from renewables, to an increase in the area of certain habitats. This use of targets has been part of the new local government settlement of performance measurement, and has been the subject of much comment in policy fields such as education and housing; but what has been less remarked on is that some of the environmental targets expected of spatial planning are internationally agreed ones. This has added not just to the tensions between the tiers of planning, but also to tensions between departments of state tasked with delivering the policies and proposals to meet the targets. There have been two ways in which the Government has sought to ensure their implementation: through the mechanisms of integrating the environment into decision-making across government departments, and through setting up institutions (such as the Environmental Audit Committee and the Sustainable Development Commission) to scrutinise that performance.

These institutional innovations have been important at a time of major institutional reform at central, regional and local planning levels, some of which (such as the separation of department of state for the environment from that with responsibility for spatial planning) have been argued to work against the integration of environment into planning policy and decision-making. In particular, through the independent critical scrutiny of central government performance, they have allowed the development of a ‘space of engagement’ that has not only moderated the usual criticism of local planning authorities by central government, but has allowed different actors at local and regional levels to gain influence at the national level by presenting evidence to their inquiries. Moreover, for most of the period from 1997, two non-departmental bodies—the Environment Agency, and English Nature (latterly Natural England)—provided not only considerable continuity in policy for the natural environment, but also, through some interchange of key personnel with major environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) and regional planning bodies, comprised a network of shared action and understanding, incorporating global, European and regional perspectives. Both are statutory consultees within the English planning system, and this enabled them to develop a strong influence, particularly on the regional tier of plan-making, and to create a space of engagement around a strongly interventionist discourse (such as in favour of a spatial planning response to climate change; Wilson, 2006a).

Planning for Biodiversity

Biodiversity illustrates some of the very real tensions in delivering sustainable development in a way consistent with all sustainability principles. The global and national biodiversity policy community has long argued that we need to take an ecosystem approach to the management of all development, on the grounds that the threat to biodiversity arises as much from the indirect impacts of development, as from the direct losses of habitat. This has inevitably run into conflict with other interpretations of sustainability imperatives. The Heads of State of the EU member states had agreed to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2010 (CEC, 2001), a target adopted (in modified form, as significantly to reduce the rate of loss) by the global Convention on Biological Diversity (to which the UK is signatory) in its action plan of 2002. The EU's 2006 update on its commitment highlighted two particular threats to EU biodiversity: ‘First, that of ill-considered land use and development. Member States have particular responsibility, through improved planning, to reconcile land use and development needs with the conservation of biodiversity and maintenance of ecosystem services. Second, the increasing impact of climate change on biodiversity. This reinforces the imperative for effective action on greenhouse gas emissions beyond the Kyoto Protocol targets’ (CEC, 2006).

The EU has extended its conception of nature to an ecosystem-based one, recognizing the need for dynamic change and nature's role in providing essential services such as flood-attenuation and health benefits. Its protection therefore requires horizontal integration into other sectors and vertical integration at different spatial scales beyond the confines of traditional site and species designations and legal protection. The British environmental NGOs (through their umbrella network, the Wildlife and Countryside Link) and statutory agencies had been pressing for some time for an update to policy on biodiversity protection and enhancement, to bring it into line with the UK's obligations under European law, and the adoption of the new policy in 2005 (ODPM, 2005) acknowledged that the Birds and Habitats Directives require the designation of sites as Special Protection Areas or Special Areas of Conservation, and their protection through the role of the Natura2000 network of European sites. The effect has been to give greater certainty of protection to such sites, with strict procedures and conditions to be met in the event of any exception—the IROPI test (imperative reasons of over-riding public importance) (CEC, 2000). This has presented particular difficulties of implementation for conventional British planning, whose conceptions of discretion, flexibility and pragmatism collide with the continental tradition of absolute necessity and mandatory requirements, but also for other Member States, necessitating clarification from the Commission (CEC, 2007) that these reasons have to be of public (not private) interest, and of over-riding (not just major) importance. But recognition of the wider, dynamic role of ecosystems is likely to require additional considerations in protecting the Natura network.

This article explores three examples where the planning system has proved a contested space for this conflict. Firstly, international commitments to biodiversity protection and restoration challenge the globalization and competitiveness agenda (as evidenced by debates over the development of UK ports); secondly, the social objectives of access to affordable housing (through major house-building programmes); and, thirdly, other environmental objectives (such as shifting to non-carbon energy sources). The cases show that, while there have been some notable successes in the protection and enhancement of biodiversity through the planning system during the 10 years of Labour, implementation has revealed tensions at all scales of planning.

Biodiversity and Ports

There have been a number of tests of this interpretation of the national interest in the support by government for the expansion and development of UK port facilities. The UK ports policy, published in 2000, set out a view of the national interest in a competitive world of globalized trade (DETR, 2000a). For instance, approval was granted in 2002 for the expansion of Felixstowe South in 2002 in the face of objections by English Nature. In the case of the Dibden Bay Container Port in Southampton Water, the government confirmed the Inspector's recommendation of refusal on the basis of the environmental impact of the proposals on internationally important sites designated under the EU Directives (Department for Transport, 2004), but it is clear that the decision was also made in the context of judgements of likely consent for other applications for major ports affecting other European sites. In 2006 Bathside Bay, Harwich was granted consent, with a compensatory site of 138 ha to replace 69 ha of inter-tidal mudflats and salt marsh; and in 2007 London Gateway (a deep-water port and associated commercial development on the Thames Estuary at Shell Haven) was approved in principle. In each case, European and internationally designated conservation sites have been affected. Similar negotiations around impacts and compensatory provision have been replicated in many coastal zones elsewhere in Europe (Weston, 2007) and around the UK, such as the Humber estuary, where Gibbs et al. (2007) describe the challenge presented by the proposed designation of large parts of the estuary as a Special Area of Conservation, compared with the previous nature conservation planning regime that accommodated port interests and shipping lanes.

Some argue that this system of considering individual port expansion in isolation reinforces the need for a wider national framework to moderate the inter-regional competition for such infrastructure, in which the northern regions are losing out (Town and Country Planning Association [TCPA], 2006a). However, as most port development decisions fall to central government rather than local planning authorities for decision, the interpretation of the over-riding public interest of expansion, and the consequent regime of compensatory habitats, may reflect a centrally-led view of nature conservation as serving global and local private economic interests. The government has adopted a scalar strategy of appealing to national interests in the context of global competitiveness. Nevertheless, this strategy is significantly modified by other actors' strategies (such as those of the statutory and non-governmental agencies) of arguing that the coherence of European network requires consistent protection across Europe, as well as local protection of the landscapes within the Natura network.

The obligation to designate and protect sites of European value remains a powerful one: the Government in 2007 published proposals to designate the whole of the Severn, Dee and Humber Estuaries as Special Areas of Conservation, significantly extending the areas of European and internationally valued sites. However, in doing so, it realized that this might present problems for meeting other environmental objectives; namely those for renewable energy generation in the form of offshore wind or tidal power, and the government cited these global and European energy commitments in its submission to the European Commission (Defra, 2007a). It seems likely that, following the Sustainable Development Commission's (2007) supportive report on tidal power, the government is likely to continue to lobby the EU to allow all such developments to count as of over-riding public importance. By contrast, the environmental NGOs argue that a sustainable response to climate change requires meeting our low-carbon targets without risking further damage to essential biodiversity and ecosystem functions.

Biodiversity and the Appropriate Assessment of Plans

The government has been able to negotiate its way through conflict with one element of European biodiversity policies, by granting consent for major port expansion using the provisions of habitat compensation. But another Natura 2000 provision—that of the appropriate assessment of plans in case they have any adverse impact on the integrity of European designated sites—has brought direct challenge to the government's targets for house-building under its Sustainable Communities Plan (ODPM, 2003). As with the initial reluctance to designate European sites where they might conflict with national economic and trade imperatives, so the government took a narrow view of Article 6(4) of the Habitats Directive, until a judgement of the European Court of Justice in 2005 against the UK (prompted by the environmental NGOs constructing the agenda at the European scale) expressly confirmed that it had to apply to spatial plans. Appropriate assessment (AA) under the Directive is complementary to the other assessment systems of Environmental Impact Assessment and Strategic Environmental Assessment, but has additional force in that it specifically requires decisions on the content of the plan to be based on its findings (Dodd et al., 2007). This nicely illustrates the impact of European commitments on domestic spatial planning processes, and the strategies of proponents to appeal to different scales of obligation. It has had significant impact both on the regional tier of planning, with enquiries into draft regional spatial strategies being required to give extra time to allow for a formal AA process, and on the local tier, with Local Planning Authorities needing to come together in partnership to adopt a consistent cross-authority view. Moreover, it has set central commitments (not just to higher housing targets but also to speeding up the delivery of those through the plan-led system) at odds with regional assemblies and also in direct conflict with its own statutory nature conservation body, English Nature/Natural England.

The timing of the European Court of Justice judgement meant that many draft regional spatial strategies, which were going through the formal examination or proposed changes process, had to have an appropriate assessment screening undertaken, such as that for the North East (Treweek Environmental Consultants, 2006) and the East of England, where an initial assessment by consultants of the regional spatial strategy had concluded that a more detailed appropriate assessment was not needed. The government's original proposed changes to the Plan following the inquiry were based on this initial assessment. However, representations against the changes, including those from the regional assembly and Natural England, challenged the assessment, and, as a result, the Government Office commissioned further work by different consultants. The outcome was publication by the government of revised changes to the plan, principally to state expressly that the plan would avoid damage to the integrity of European or other internationally designated sites, or that any possible adverse effects would be mitigated (Government Office for the East of England, 2007).

In South East England, the treatment of the Thames Basin Heaths shows the penetration of this into local as well as regional planning. Designated in 2005 as a Special Protection Area under the Birds Directive, the sites are an important lowland heathland, supporting internationally important populations of three bird species. The heaths are nevertheless already highly fragmented, and their extent affects 15 local planning authorities under intense development pressure in Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire. Partly because of the fragmented nature of the heathland, and partly because the birds are ground-nesting and highly vulnerable, not just to direct damage from development but to indirect damage from disturbance by human populations and their pets, the requirements for AA therefore affected a great proportion of all residential developments within the area. English Nature had asked that LPAs undertake an AA of any plan or proposal including those for a dwelling, conversion or new build, within 5 km of the Special Protection Area (English Nature, 2005: see Figure 1). The outcome of the plan inquiry (English Nature, 2006; Burley, 2007) has been to prompt the sub-regional partnership to produce a document (Thames Basin Heaths Joint Strategic Partnership Board, 2007), setting out in considerable detail the requirements for avoidance or mitigation provision through sites of alternative natural greenspace on the basis of developer contributions based on a standard tariff.

Figure 1. Thames Basin Heaths Special Protection Area and extent of zone of influence.

Alongside this integration of European-led ecological requirements into spatial plans at regional, sub-regional and local scales, there have also been moves to plan for biodiversity at the broader landscape level, beyond the designated sites representing the remaining fragments of semi-natural habitat. The approach to more pro-active planning for habitat restoration and re-creation has adopted the continental European model of ecological networks (Hodcroft & Alexander, 2004), both to integrate ecological planning with other sustainability objectives such as health and well-being, and to enhance biodiversity's resilience under climate change (Piper et al., 2006). Moreover, spatial plans are also including quantitative targets of habitat creation or restoration derived from the Biodiversity Action Plan process, itself a response to the requirements of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. For instance, the draft East of England Plan contains a policy ENV3 that planning authorities should promote biodiversity in accordance with the Biodiversity Action Plan targets to maintain 100% of semi-natural woodland, and by 2010 to restore 1, 700 ha and to create 1, 400 ha (Government Office for the East of England, 2007). This illustrates the penetration of international commitments into the heart of the local planning process, and the opportunities presented to the environmental lobby by the ability to articulate supra-national framing of obligations.

Planning for Climate Change

A related example of the dynamics of multiple scales of action in influencing planning under New Labour is that of the planning response to climate change. UK governments recognized early on the importance and urgency of climate change, and Labour built on a number of initiatives from their predecessors, such as the creation of the Global Atmosphere Division within the DETR, and in 1997 the UK Climate Impacts Programme. Labour's first Climate Change Programme was published in 2000 (DETR, 2000b), which promised that the Government would produce guidance to planning authorities on the issue. However, the actual production of such guidance proved highly problematic and contentious for a government not just committed (at that time under its modernizing planning agenda) to reducing the extent and depth of central statements of policy (and hence reluctance to add a new Planning Policy Statement on climate change), but also committed to an increasingly divergent policy framework under devolution. Under the Kyoto protocol the UK was moving towards adopting formal targets for greenhouse gas reductions and shift to renewable energy sources, and it was recognized that climate change might impact on all aspects of spatial planning (Campbell, 2006), but government proved reluctant to adopt an explicit policy that these targets be implemented through spatial planning. The problems presented by this approach have been characterized as a conflict of policy discourses: the traditional planning stance of discretion and enablement, as against the climate change community's arguments for urgent and authoritative action (Wilson, 2006a). Rather than formal policy, as requested by regional and local planners, environmental NGOs and the climate change policy networks such as UK Climate Impacts Programme, the Government preferred a voluntaristic approach of encouragement of good practice, publishing guidance in 2004 (ODPM, 2004a).

However, the political salience and urgency of climate change gave lobbying room for a number of environmental groups, coordinated by the TCPA, and including regional climate change partnerships, research groups, and the Local Government Association, to press government into re-thinking its stance. The groups produced a draft national policy statement on climate change (TCPA & Friends of the Earth, 2006): through a strategy of adopting a global scale of reference, appealing to the need to meet our global responsibilities for carbon reduction, and to consider the impacts of climate change on all aspects of planning for the use and development of space (such as water resources, flood-risk, housing and economic development), the coalition persuaded the Government to change its mind. From initially only a cursory mention of climate change in PPS1 of 2005, criticized by pro-active local authorities and environmental NGOs for its minimalist stance (Wilson, 2007), the Government has significantly shifted to explicit attention in publishing a planning policy supplement on climate change (Department for Communities and Local Government [CLG], 2007c).

By appealing to different scales of framing the space for action—global, national, regional and local—different actors in the climate change policy community have changed the agenda for discourse, taking opportunities of multi-scalar governance beyond the narrow confines of conventional policy consultation. This paper now examines the impact of such discourses through two substantive policy areas: planning to reduce the causes of climate change (through developing renewable energy sources), and planning to adapt to unavoidable climate change (through planning for flood-risk).

Planning for Climate Change: Renewable Energy

In addition to the powerful driver of international climate change policy, specifically the international and EU obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, and the adoption of domestic and European targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions, the government has been faced with a major energy gap, as a result of the ageing of its conventional (fossil-fuelled) and nuclear power generation capacity, and decline in North Sea oil and gas production, with, by 2007, a consequent shift from the UK being a net exporter of energy to being a net importer. This has all happened within the framework of a commitment to continued opening up of the electricity markets to competition, following the UK's model of privatization of the sector. The consequence has been a stream of national energy policy documents, with a Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (2000) report, two energy reviews (Performance and Innovation Unit, 2002; DTI, 2006a) and two energy White Papers (DTI, 2003, 2007), in addition to the climate change programme (DETR, 2000b) and its revision (Defra, 2006).

The Kyoto Protocol came into force in 2005, but the government already had a domestic goal to go beyond the Kyoto target, and aim for a 20% reduction of carbon dioxide below 1990 levels by 2010. The first Energy White Paper (DTI, 2003) had set a longer-term goal of 60% reduction by 2050 (and it is now expected that this is not enough, and that 80% reduction will be required to stabilize climate change at acceptable levels). The White Papers set out many ways of reaching these targets, by sector and by tier of government, with alternative energy sources, such as renewables, and energy conservation and energy-efficiency measures all expected to provide a significant role. At European level, the EU is committed to a target that 12% of energy (22% of electricity) be generated from renewables by 2010; the UK share of this was agreed at 10% of electricity consumption by 2010, with an aspirational target to double that by 2020.

The consequences for domestic planning at regional, sub-regional, local and householder level have been immense. The attempt to drive this target through the planning process has revealed great tensions between actors at all levels of the planning system: between central departments of state; between regional assemblies and their constituent local authorities; between central government and district planning authorities; and between different members of the environmental NGO community (for instance, the Wildlife and Countryside Link was created partly to find areas of agreement amongst groups often in opposition over the landscape, biodiversity and carbon aspects of renewable energy projects). The outcome has been partially to undermine the role of local planning in delivering capacity (Strachan et al., 2006). A series of highly negative phrases in reports coming out from the trade and energy ministry and other energy interests (such as the British Wind Energy Association (2004)) on planning delays for energy projects contributed to the Government's perception—already expressed in 2001 in its proposed reforms to major infrastructure projects, and reinforced by the language of the Barker (2004, 2006) reviews—that the planning system needed fundamental reform.

Initial recommendations were for moderate change (namely, the Government to make clear whether there is a national case for energy projects; regional planning bodies and development agencies to give greater prominence to renewables targets; and more pro-active local planning for energy developments). But the 2007 Energy White Paper, published at the same time as the Planning Reform White Paper (CLG, 2007a) proposed more fundamental reforms to planning (DTI, 2007). Added impetus was given by the recognition that the government, having been on course to meet its Kyoto targets, was not on target for its domestic goal (Figure 2; Defra, 2007b). Central government and productionist interests were therefore able to cite global environmental commitments to reinforce changes to local planning.

Figure 2. Kyoto target and carbon dioxide emissions (Defra, 2007b). Source: Defra, BERR, AEA Energy and Environment.

Urban Renewables and Micro-generation

At the same time, there has been growing interest in micro-generation as a source of renewable energy, with coalitions of groups employing the space of engagement with global imperatives to address climate change with more local scales of dependence through local authority planning powers. Urban local government has led the initiative, from the experience of Woking Borough and its locally owned ESCO (electricity supply company), to the development of the ‘Merton Rule’. This initiative has been promoted also as a local-level adaptive response to climate change, in terms of the need to provide greater resilience to extreme severe weather events through moving away from a centralized to a more distributed generation system. It has demonstrated the ability of local government coalitions to combine local and global scales of climate change mitigation action, using the possible failure of the UK to meet its targets agreed under its international obligations, with local climate change adaptation responses, as impacts are likely to be experienced at the local level.

The national planning support for renewables inherited by the Labour government dated from 1992, and was expressed in the standard terms of encouragement and enablement rather than of mandatory requirement. It fell to a local authority, London Borough of Merton, to show what a locally adopted policy could do to drive better practice. Merton proposed that its Unitary Development Plan include a policy that at least 10% of the energy requirements of new non-residential development above a threshold of 1, 000 m² be provided from onsite renewables. Despite being strongly opposed initially during the Unitary Development Plan preparation by the Government Office for London, on the ground that it was an excessive obligation on the freedom of action of developers, Merton persisted; the Plan inspector accepted it, and the policy was adopted as part of plan. The scope of the policy was extended by the London Borough of Croydon to cover all development, either new-build or conversion, with a floor-space of 1, 000 m² or 10 or more residential units, and has been rolled out through local government networks across a wide range of LPAs. From initial government opposition, the Merton Rule, as it has become known, has been cited as a trailblazer in the DTI's micro-generation strategy (DTI, 2006b), and has been internalized (albeit in a weakened form) by central government, and imported into the revised national planning policy on renewables in 2004. Paragraph 8 states that ‘LPAs may include policies in local development documents that require a percentage of the energy to be used in new residential, commercial or industrial developments to come from on-site renewable energy developments’, although the PPS still emphasizes the need not to place undue burdens on developers (ODPM, 2004b). The government's own review of the uptake of PPS22 (ODPM, 2006) found that 90% of new style plans reflected a Paragraph 8 or Merton Rule policy—a remarkable rolling out of an initiative that originated from a local authority (even though Merton and Croydon were excluded from the survey as their plans had been referred to government offices before 2004). The TCPA's contemporaneous survey showed that 80 LPAs had adopted similar policies, and that over 170 were working them up (TCPA, 2006b).

This case shows the major differences between a cautious, developer-oriented government, keen for planning policy to be expressed in terms of enabling rather than requiring certain conditions, and an active local government level prepared to insist on more demanding standards (Wilson, 2007). It also shows that a multi-level understanding of environmental policy is essential, recognizing the opportunities presented to and taken up by the local tier in response to international environmental commitments to moving to a low-carbon economy, and the potential for them to influence higher scales of decision-making. TCPA and other proponents of this approach argue for its benefits not just for climate change and meeting renewable energy obligations, but also for the potential of creating a market for micro-renewables worth £650 million, and for driving through energy efficiency as a means of reducing the quantitative requirement for onsite renewables. Moreover, it is argued that, through bringing small residential extensions within its remit, the policy will affect existing development as well as new-build. This article does not have space to consider the parallel work on driving greater energy efficiency in new and existing development through the story of the Code for Sustainable Homes, but it is clear that the government has had to change tack considerably from its initial emphasis on a voluntary and not unnecessarily gold-plated code to its current recommendation that the Code be mandatory (CLG, 2007b).

Planning for Climate Change: Adaptation

Adapting to unavoidable climate change has been a relatively neglected aspect of government policy at national and local levels, perhaps because prevention (confusingly called mitigation in the climate change policy community) has been seen as more urgent and essential, although the series of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) assessments and the UK's Stern (2007) review have emphasized the need for both mitigation and adaptation. The impacts of climate change are likely to be felt particularly at the local level of planning systems, including individual households; for instance, through flooding or disruption to water supplies. But whereas in the energy debate local planning has been criticized for its failure to assist central government in delivering internationally agreed targets (despite the evidence of the Merton initiative), in the case of flood-risk the planning has been criticized for ignoring the realities of climate change, and allowing too much development in the wrong place, following too enthusiastically a model of development promoted by the government of providing new homes, urban renaissance and brownfield regeneration.

National policy on planning and flood-risk has undergone extensive revisions to respond to the experience of very serious and extensive floods from spring 1998 and throughout the early 2000s up to summer 2007, and to respond to expected impacts under climate change. For instance, there were major changes between the draft of national policy on development and flood-risk and its final version in 2001, and further revisions in 2006 (CLG, 2006a), reflecting a major shift in the way in which we plan for floods. This shift represented a further example of the impact of appeals to different scales of action, through learning from the experience of other countries: in this case, the experience of the Netherlands. With its long tradition of managing water in order to manage land, the Dutch have recently undergone a paradigm shift in their attitudes to water: from keeping water out to making space for water. The shift has been in response to a number of triggers: the need to evacuate 200, 000 residents in the expected river flooding of 1995 (the Netherlands receiving downstream flows of the Rhine and Maas); the erosion of some of its softer coastal dunes; the conflicts with European biodiversity legislation; salination of some polders; and the anticipated impacts of climate change (de Vries, 2006; Voogd, 2006). The Environment Agency for England and Wales has, through its professional and research networks, taken a keen and pro-active interest in Dutch experience. The Dutch room for rivers policy has been reflected in Making Space for Water (Defra, 2004)—albeit in a more typically English form, with no express requirement to compare with the Dutch water test, in which cubic capacity for flood storage has to be converted into spatial allocations.

Nevertheless, all levels of domestic planning have needed to adjust to the new regime of strategic and local flood-risk assessments (Howe & White, 2004; Wilson, 2006b), to recognize fluvial, coastal and, significantly, urban flooding, and to accommodate flood events rather than exacerbating them. The Environment Agency's role as a statutory consultee has been strengthened, and, if an LPA persists in approving a major development contrary to its advice, the Government has a new call-in power. The Environment Agency regularly reports on the effectiveness of its advice, and names those LPAs who it regards as not complying (Environment Agency, 2007). The reasons give by local planning authorities primarily relate to previous commitments to development on that site. But the government's own Sustainable Communities Plan has created significant dilemmas for both the Environment Agency and for the regional, sub-regional and local areas tasked with its delivery, as many of the areas (such as Ashford in Kent, Thames Gateway and Northampton, and north of Milton Keynes) have extensive areas within flood-risk zones 2 or 3 (the most serious). The Environmental Audit Committee, for instance, in its review of the Sustainable Communities Plan, expressed its concern about ‘the scale of development that will take place in the Thames flood-plain as a result of growth in the Thames Gateway’ (Environmental Audit Committee of the House of Commons, 2005, para. 71). Similar reservations have been expressed about the water-resource implications of development under a changing climate. The Committee, the Environment Agency, local authorities, and the private sector in the form of the insurance industry and water utilities, have, when it suited their purposes, used the realities of global and local climate change to challenge a central element of government spatial planning policy.

Although for an island nation, it might be thought that supra-national policy obligations for water and flooding were less relevant, these examples of the planning response to flood-risk and water resources illustrate how environmental policy networks at different scales, and appeals to the need to adapt to global or local impacts of climate change, can be employed by different agencies to challenge economic and social drives to increase the level of house-building.

Discussion

The outcomes of this set of multi-scale processes and influences on the domestic planning system in England have been complex and in some areas contradictory. There are a number of alternative but not mutually exclusive ways of characterizing the changes.

Firstly, despite the rhetoric of much government guidance, we can see a shift in conceptions of planning from one of enabling to one of planning as delivering. At the scale of global environmental issues, this has entailed delivering protection of ecologically valued sites, or compensation for their risk of damage or loss through the provision of replacement habitats or other alternative natural areas; it has entailed the inclusion of quantitative targets for biodiversity restoration and creation in regional and local plans; and the setting of targets for certain forms of energy generation to be achieved through planning consents (both national and local). The policy language employed in the fields of Natura 2000 sites, local onsite renewables, and, to a lesser extent, avoidance of zones of highest flood-risk, has moved from encouragement to requirement. But, at the same time, government frustration with local levels of planning—for instance, at not achieving its renewables targets, reflecting an instrumentalist view of local planning—has reinforced the centralizing tendency in government, given institutional force through the 2007 White Paper's proposals for the centralization of decision-making for key infrastructure.

However, the decision-maker, whether national or local, will still face a conflict of seemingly contradictory international obligations to protect and enhance biodiversity through climate change mitigation and adaptation. Indeed, it may be that the anticipation of such conflicts has caused the government to reconsider its proposal, strongly argued for by the environmental NGOs (Wildlife and Countryside Link Marine Task Force, 2007), to extend the planning system in the radical Marine Spatial Planning Bill, first promised in the Labour Manifesto of 2005.

A second way of characterizing the shifts in the integration of environmental commitments into planning is therefore not so much an instrumentalist view, nor a centralizing view, as one of deregulation. For instance, in order to enable greater take-up of micro-generation schemes (and to meet popular conceptions of role of planning in inhibiting climate change action), the government has freed up the scope of permitted development rights to enable more onsite domestic renewables (CLG, 2006b). However, tensions around the degree of obligation expected of the planning system are likely to remain, and tensions between deregulation and greater centralization of regulation will continue. These tensions will be felt not just in the post-2007 spatial planning system for major infrastructure, but in other forms of government support for the energy sector. For instance, there are conflicts between the corporatist emphasis on large-scale energy generation schemes, requiring national decision-making, and the more distributed network, with small-scale alternative sources, which many argue will provide greater resilience under conditions of climate change. It is therefore likely that different agencies will continue to appeal to alternative conceptions of global sustainability in order to further their case for action. Moreover, a further consequence for spatial planning both of an ecosystem approach and of the climate change policy drivers has been the extension of planning concerns from simply new-build to addressing existing development as well—in effect, a regulatory extension of the scope of the spatial planning.

That agencies have been able to utilize multiple scales of action and discourse has been a third feature of environmental planning under Labour. The need to respond to climate change, framed and indeed partly constructed as a global and local issue, has given local authorities, who might otherwise be seen as being disempowered, opportunities for locally generated action and initiative that runs counter to this centralizing tendency. Some authorities have specifically adopted what Lindseth calls scalar strategies, in which problems and preferred solutions are framed in terms of scale (Lindseth, 2006). They have been able to do this both through the existence of legal international obligations, to which appeal can be made over the level of national government, and also through engaging with political, professional and research networks, both domestic networks such as the Nottingham Declaration, and global networks. The 280 local authority signatories to the Nottingham Declaration, under the auspices of ICLEI, commit to corporate action to tackle climate change and to respond to its impacts (LGA Climate Change Commission, 2007). With Bulkeley and Betsill, we can conclude that ‘local governments have not just responded to predefined policy goals set within national and international arenas, but represent an important site for the governance of global issues in their own right’ (2003, p. 3). But it is also clear that, with environmental issues being both global and local, and requiring not only protection of environmental assets but also new developments in renewables, there are shifting coalitions of central, regional, local and international interests, which can call on call on global discourses of neoliberal competition as well as local and European sustainability discourses.

We can therefore see all these examples as ones of contestation between alternative understandings of sustainability in revealing arguments about the different scales (global, European, national and local) of evaluation of environmental resources and their importance. They raise questions, for instance, about whether European designated sites are sufficiently protected at a national level, and whether, if such sites are lost in order to produce energy from tidal power, compensatory sites should be found necessarily in the UK or elsewhere in Europe. Moreover, there is a case for a greater level of protection of these sites to provide resilient natural systems able to adapt to climate change (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, 2007).

Finally, we can also see that the environment as a field of policy argumentation has matured from being a separate field of specialist interests to one much more integrated into spatial planning decision-making, but with its own issues of apparently contradictory pressures between climate change mitigation measures such as renewables and maintenance of adaptive capacity.

Conclusions

These are new dilemmas of multiple environmental decision scales facing the planning system. The policy landscape for planning and environment has changed significantly during the 10 years of New Labour, away from one with a focus primarily on domestic policies to one where the planning system at all domestic levels is exposed to global debates and international networks. At the same time as planning policy and solutions are being framed at different scales, different actors at the same scale, such as different departments of state, are having to negotiate complex if not conflicting rationalities of evaluating environmental sustainability. The consequences of this shift have been new challenges for the conventionally problematic goal of vertical and horizontal integration of the environment into decision-making, and of traditionally discrete sectoral policy areas. The outcome is a renewed focus on the role of spatial planning in achieving this integration. National government, in signing up to international obligations and targets, has had to look to the local level to deliver those obligations, but the system cannot simply be construed as a top-down one in which these targets are cascaded down. Government agencies and stakeholders at all levels have used different forums and networks to influence both other tiers in any hierarchy, but also other players at the same level.

New Labour's strong drive for a conception of UK national interests based on a model of global, regional and urban competitiveness has come up against another set of global imperatives arising from international environmental obligations, and it is to be expected that the arena of planning has been one where these different rationalities have played out. Whatever institutional arrangements government makes in future for spatial planning to resolve these tensions in favour of a single-minded conception of the national interest, the tensions of satisfying multi-scale commitments will remain.

Notes