Experiments in democracy: Knowing, caring and acting in neighbourhood planning and beyond

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Land use planning is one of the most controversial aspects of local life, generating more political heat than almost any other local policy issue. The new UK Government intends to publish White Papers on planning and devolution during 2020, setting out how they intend to resolve their apparently paradoxical promises of more local control and more deregulation of planning. This provides an opportunity to influence policy development before new legislation is passed, making this proposal a particularly timely intervention.Neighbourhood planning (NP) is the Government's flagship model for local engagement with planning, a striking case of the international trend towards increased public participation in policy / decision-making. Continued funding was committed in March 2020, but as with the rest of the planning system, it could be facing radical changes. It is the most popular of a raft of 'community rights' granted by the 2011 Localism Act, with nearly 12 million people covered by more than 2,400 neighbourhood plans. It allows community groups to write their own statutory planning policies, and is portrayed as an antidote to a planning system that was too complex, technical and exclusive. It claims to promote democracy by widening 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.My research examines these claims, drawing on theories and methods from Science and Technology Studies (STS) that explore how 'experiments in democracy' work in particular locations. NP relies on participatory practices, rather than formal representative democracy, to underpin its legitimacy. Different practices draw on different sources of authority to produce different types of legitimacy. These sources of authority sometimes appear to be at odds with each other. Understanding how they combine and conflict requires new forms of analysis and evaluation, which my research provides. I show how some types of legitimacy support or undermine others, and how this constrains communities' abilities to represent and plan for the aspects of neighbourhood that concern them most. This partially undermines the democratic claims made for NP, while simultaneously enabling real differences to be made. My analysis indicates ways that the democratic claims made for NP could be strengthened.This fellowship builds on the findings of my PhD research to increase their impact among practitioners and policy-makers, and to develop and extend my theoretical contributions to interdisciplinary scholarship. Informed by this analysis of legitimacy and democracy, I will create a network including scholars from different disciplines, practitioners and stakeholders that will work together to change the real-life practices of participants in NP and the policy framework that governs it. The work will also make an innovative contribution to the emerging field of STS scholarship on participation. It will sensitise research in diverse fields to new ways of thinking and doing representation and legitimation, where these practices are increasingly complementing and/or undermining standard accounts of democracy. It will deepen and diversify the stakeholder and research networks that I already have, develop my profile with a robust publications and impact record, and put me in a strong position to take the next step on an impact-oriented academic career.In summary, the fellowship aims to- develop the practices of neighbourhood planners and support agencies- inform changes to national policy- bring new insights from a novel analysis to planning studies and STS- inform research across inter/disciplinary fields that are concerned with emerging forms of participatory and localist governance and democracyUltimately, it aims to better enable people to have real influence over the ways in which the places they know and care about will change.