Learning policy—the contextual curtain and conceptual barriers

Abstract

Many European states are now giving attention to strategic planning as a means of coordinating and democratizing local government. The UK government is not alone in seeing some form of ‘community planning’ as a means of promoting closer sectoral integration in policy‐making and service delivery while also encouraging public participation. This suggests scope for comparative research to inform lesson drawing, especially from Norway, which has been rolling out kommuneplan at the municipality level since 1985. Cross‐national lesson‐drawing is hazardous, however, given the different legal, political and cultural traditions which make policies ‘work’ in particular local settings. In this article these difficulties are acknowledged and ethnographic research is used to explore further problems in lesson‐drawing, especially the very different ways in which concepts of participation and integration are given meaning in particular national contexts. Through comparative ethnographies of community planning processes in Asker Municipality, Norway, and South Lanarkshire Council, Scotland, remarkable similarities are revealed in the language and objectives of the planning documents in each setting, but show that this belies important differences in the relations between administrative and political domains, in the governing role of plan statements, and in the underlying theories of democracy.

Notes

Simone Abram, Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK. E‐mail: [email protected] Richard Cowell, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF 10 3 WA, UK. E‐mail: [email protected]

Referred to as Community Plans in Scotland and Community Strategies in England and Wales. For simplicity this article adopts a generic term ‘community plans’.

In both case studies, care was taken to understand the way in which social relations were constituted within the production and mobilization of policy documents. The evolution of community plans was tracked by following various stages of plan production; through in‐depth interviews with different participants, analysis of documents, observation of planning meetings and participation in local networks over the period 1999–2002.

Section 16 of the Bill places a duty on local authorities to “invite; and take suitable action to encourage, all other public bodies the functions of which are exercisable within the area of the local authority and such community bodies as the local authority thinks fit to participate appropriately in community planning”.

There are trade‐offs here for achieving more deliberative, stakeholder‐based models of governance—fieldwork observations and interviews found that the council leader tended to chair community planning partnership meetings like a council meeting, getting agenda items ‘passed’, allowing less time for discussion than when the chief executive of the council chaired the meeting.

Of Norway's 434 municipalities, many have less than 10,000 inhabitants and some less than 1000.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Cowell *

Simone Abram, Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK. E‐mail: [email protected] Richard Cowell, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF 10 3 WA, UK. E‐mail: [email protected]