Governing through instruments? The challenging revival of spatial planning in European politics
An ambiguous attitude of politicians (and of sociologists) towards planning is linked to the “governance” discourse. Planning as key practice in governing is often, for example, veiled by the (redundant) label of “strategic planning”. The plan is a govern
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Governance vs. planning
An ambiguous attitude of politicians (and of sociologists) towards planning is linked to the “governance” discourse. Planning as key practice in governing is often, for example, veiled by the (redundant) label of “strategic planning”. The plan is a governing instrument in which a systematic analysis supports a political project, and as such it cannot be non “strategic”. In planning, the political project (as a set of actions) is rooted in a systematic analysis of the resources available to implement precise objectives. These objectives reflect a centralized definition of public utility, which can be the result of the highly personal analysis of the decision-maker (intuitive, political, i. e. based on contacts) or on a systematic analysis, committed by him/her. Even in its more pessimistic and reductive interpretations, inspired by the different notions of limited rationality, planning in itself is always in contradiction with the propensity at the core of the idea of “governance” of allowing the decisions to be the result of the complex (and in their results, unpredictable) pressures of, or contacts between, stakeholders, in all the possible definitions of the expression “stakeholders”. Renate Mayntz, following the development of the core paradigm of political governance (Steuerungstheorie), regards the phase of prescriptive theory “planning” of the 1960s as a preliminary moment of reflexion, “when governments aspired explicitly to steer their nations’ social and economic development in the directions of defined goals; a moment, “with the planning euphoria waning”, immediately followed by a step of more thorough reflexion on policy development questions (1998). Coherently, at first the popular success of the governance discourse corresponded to a radical denial of the plan as a governing instrument. The neo-liberal perspective, which in large part initially contributed to its promotion, and the cultural submission to the supposed excessive complexity of society and the unpredictability of its changes, led in the 1980s, in some cases to a refusal of the plan (the “planning through projects” leitmotiv in architectural theory), more often to proposals for minimal planning based on the demand: demands from some segments of society and demands from developers. In territorial transformation, governing by the “government” was to be limited to safeguarding a minimal coherence between the projects and possibly to offering the necessary infrastructures.
B. Egner et al. (Hrsg.), Regieren, DOI 10.1007/978-3-531-19793-7_10, © VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2012
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Annick Magnier
Paradoxically, in the last twenty years, the discourse on governance has on the contrary been sustaining a revival of the theory of the centrality of the plan, more precisely of “new” territorial plans. This return of the plan as a celebrated governing instrument, especially visible in urban and land planning, the uncomfortable, hence often ambiguous, endeavours to harmonize the plan
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