Introduction: frames, foci and fragmentation of effort

Those operating within traditional planning paradigms have struggled to capture and reconcile the range of knowledges and diversity of preferences that could inform and shape practice in policy formulation and decision-making arenas. Some may argue that any such aim for all-inclusivity can only ever be aspirational, given the complexity likely to be involved. Notwithstanding the resource limitations and the sheer number of considerations that so often constrain laudable ambitions, however, there are also attitudinal barriers and prevalent power geometries that act to shape method and policy. These factors must bear at least some of the responsibility for the opprobrium so often accompanying plans and development proposals and the ineluctable decisions provoked by such efforts to shape the environment.

A significant issue accompanying the broader imperfections of policymaking and planning systems has been the disconnect between decision-makers and those directly affected by planning policies and new development. That is to say, politicians, as well as professional planners, have struggled to reconcile or mediate individual or group interests with a wider public interest and have failed to communicate or to find satisfactory means of adjusting goals or formulating satisfactory governance arrangements – in short how to shift towards a more consensual pragmatism (Harper and Stein, 2006). This situation has impeded the development of the relations and repertoires envisaged by Healey (1998, 1531) to build ‘social networks as a resource of institutional capital through which new initiatives can be taken rapidly and legitimately…fostering the institutional capacity in territorial political communities for ongoing “place-making” activities’. The sentiment is that structures, processes and skills for more inclusive and ‘collaborative’ planning are needed for a legitimate and effective planning to be fostered to serve a networked yet diverse society.

Thus the development of knowledge and capacity, as well as the structures and processes, conducive to collaborative planning models are claimed to be needed to transform practice, to ease conflict and ultimately to help produce better more sustainable places. Mechanisms to foster such paradigmatic and cultural change (and associated structural accommodations) have remained a feature of planning debate for a generation, and still remain in question given the buildup of attention and the serial and chronic failure to take associated challenges seriously among the planning polity.