Local self-determination, process-focus and subordination of environmental concerns

ABSTRACT

Globalization and region enlargement has increased the emphasis of local authorities on being competitive for inward investment and taxpayers. This can lead to a subordination of environmental concerns. In order to secure environmental and other national interests, planning and regulation at supra-local level is required, especially if the local authorities have different motivations and goals from the central government. The central government policy guidelines of the Norwegian planning system and the possibility for regional state authorities to make objections are an apparatus to protect national interests in planning. However, there has been a significant change in the central government’s practice when deciding on objections by regional state authorities against municipal plans since the new right-wing Norwegian government came into power. The losers from the changed practice are the environmental interests, widely defined. The new government’s prioritization of local self-determination and planning processes rather than contents resonates with key features of neoliberalism, but also with important elements of communicative planning theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Local self-determination
• national interests
• planning process
• plan contents
• environmental concerns
• neoliberalism

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank JEPP’s three reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier version of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Arvid Strand is a researcher at the Institute of Transport Economics in Oslo. He has been Professor of Planning at several Norwegian universities, and is especially engaged in research on relations within land use and transport planning and the implementation problems within these fields.

Petter Næss is Professor of Planning in Urban Regions at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Much of his research deals with urban sustainability, with a particular focus on influences of urban structures on travel behavior. Other research interests are driving forces of urban development, planning theory, and philosophy of science.

Notes

1. https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/Statlige-planretningslinjer-for-samordnet-bolig--areal--og-transportplanlegging/id2001539/.

2. https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/planning-building-act/id570450/.

3. Externalities are social costs not included in the profitability analyses of the agents of the market, but shifted on to other people or the environment. Pollution is an example of such costs.

4. Situations where the efforts of individuals to promote their own interests lead to non-optimal results both for society and for the individuals involved.

5. Municipalities that might wish to act in a globally solidary way, for example by reducing their carbon dioxide emissions by abstaining from potential economic growth, may see such efforts as useless as long as they cannot trust that other municipalities will also do their part to reduce emissions.

6. Brenner (2003, p. 309) points at attempts by national-scale state institutions to reassert regulatory control as a counter-trend in response to the increasingly decentred or relativized national-scale political–economic governance generally characterizing neoliberalism.