Introduction

This is a book about neighbourhood planning, a ‘community right’ introduced to England by the Localism Act 2011, which allows community groups to write their own land use planning policies for their towns, villages or parts of cities. This means that they can now do what previously only credentialled experts working within the machinery of government could, a move which has been described as ‘arguably the most radical innovation in UK neighbourhood governance in a generation’ (Wargent and Parker, 2018: 379). As the opening quotation from the Planning Advisory Service (a government-funded programme providing support to Local Planning Authorities [LPAs] to help them understand and respond to planning reform) highlights, neighbourhood planning emphasises the importance and centrality of the knowledge and care that local people have for the place where they live, derived from their experience of living there.

Portrayed as an antidote to a planning system that was too complex, technical and exclusive, proponents of neighbourhood planning claim that it promotes local democracy by widening and deepening participation in planning, one of the most controversial aspects of local life in the UK. As the government's flagship initiative for local engagement with planning, and for localism and community control more widely, it was intended to extend and pluralise the range of voices and sources of knowledge that can be influential in planning: enabling the people who know and care about a place to make their own decisions about how it changes. This book charts some of the challenges faced by two neighbourhood planning communities and how they responded to them, told from the perspective of someone working closely with them.

But it is also a book about the dilemmas and potentials of participatory governance more widely, in the context of an increasing, international perception of democratic deficit, in which citizens feel disconnected from and distrustful of those who make public decisions on their behalf (Foa et al, 2020).