Land and Limits

Interpreting Sustainability in the Planning Process

Richard Cowell, Susan Owens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134715299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

In a new and critical analysis, this book explores the impact of an influential idea - sustainable development - on the institutions and practices governing use of land. It examines the paradox that in spite of increasing attention to sustainability, land use conflict is as ubiquitous and intense as ever.

1
Old Conflicts and New Ideas

We have failed to see how our economy, our environment and our society are all one.

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair 1999: 3

not all truths can fit into one social world.

Rawls 1993: 197, citing Berlin 1969

Introduction

Conflict over the use of land often seems ubiquitous. As we write, there are many examples to choose from in Britain, but a few will suffice to illustrate the range of issues at stake. In Berkshire, a major company wishes to build its new headquarters in a controversial green field location. Opponents raise the spectre of congestion and pollution and claim that the development would make a mockery of government planning guidelines seeking to reduce car dependency (Hetherington 1999). The local authority, alarmed at the prospect of a major employer going elsewhere, and influenced by the company’s ‘green transport’ plan, grants planning permission after ‘acrimonious’ debate (ibid.: 14; see also Groom 1999a).¹ In Scotland, development interests propose a funicular railway to carry increasing numbers of tourists into the Cairngorms, the UK’s most significant mountain plateau, justifying the project – and around £12 million in public assistance – as a boon to the local economy. Environmentalists fear the impact of more visitors in a remote and ecologically vulnerable landscape. Planning permission is granted, but the decision, along with the case for public finance, is then subjected to challenges from environmental groups and a National Audit Office review.² At the other end of the country, plans for a by-pass that would bisect the renowned water meadows of the cathedral city of Salisbury run into deep controversy, undiminished by a public inquiry and a recommendation that the project should go ahead. The government’s advisory bodies on landscape and nature conservation, consulted about ways of mitigating the impacts of the new road, agree that no measures could effectively do so: the scheme is returned to the drawing board.³ Expanding our focus to the regional scale, we see Britain’s ‘most important planning inquiry for a generation … bring[ing] to a head the battles between environmental protesters and developers’ in the south-east of England (Groom 1999b: 12). Draft regional planning guidance, produced by a grouping of local planning authorities, seeks to improve environmental quality by such measures as encouraging people to drive less, increasing woodland coverage and deflecting growth pressures from the fastest growing parts of the region (SERPLAN 1999). Industry complains that the guidance embodies ‘a presumption against economic development’, the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) that too many new houses are proposed, and the House Builders’ Federation that restrictive policies will increase house price inflation, exacerbate labour shortages and threaten international competitiveness (Groom 1999b: 12).⁴

Many characteristics of these conflicts would have been familiar to Roy Gregory, whose classic book, The Price of Amenity (Gregory 1971), explored some of the great planning controversies of the 1960s: the claims of growth and jobs set against concerns for less tangible environmental qualities; conflicts between different sets of public and private goals; and issues of distributive justice. Much has also changed. Whereas Gregory charted conflicts over projects promoted by nationalised industries ‘in the public interest’, the cases above centre upon more complex mixes of private and public development in the context of a more internationalised economy. The nature of environmental concerns has also shifted dramatically, with ‘amenity’ stretched to include invisible but potentially global threats, such as climate change and loss of biodiversity. What is most striking, however, is the persistent emergence of conflict over the use and development of land, apparently at odds with the more positive, less adversarial future for environmental politics heralded by widespread commitments to sustainable development. It is this paradox that forms one of the central themes of our book.

Of the rise to prominence of ‘sustainable development’ it is hardly necessary to say very much here: this history has been thoroughly documented elsewhere (see, for example, Adams 1990; Elliott 1999; Holdgate 1996; Redclift 1987). Famously crystallised by Brundtland, sustainable development drew together ecological imperatives, the continuing need for development and concerns for global and inter-generational equity (WCED 1987).⁵ Promising to ‘transcend national differences and political interests’ (Yearley 1996: 100), it resonated with the themes of ecological modernisation already gaining currency in academic and policy communities, particularly in its insistence on the interdependence of environment and economy.⁶ Most significantly, sustainable development seemed to move the debate beyond ‘limits to growth’ and therefore to mark a departure from the old forms of conflict between development and conservation. Its multi-faceted nature allowed a wide range of governmental, commercial and voluntary organisations to embrace it and support its use in guiding future policy.

However, apparent universality of appeal did not lead to singularity of definition or noticeable coherence of approach. Competing interpretations of ‘need’ and ‘development’, and difficulties in delineating the ecological and social conditions for sustainability, quickly fractured the consensus. Nowhere did the schisms become more visible than in attempts to define principles and apply them to specific activities or environments – precisely where sustainability had to be interpreted if its appeal was to amount to more than ‘rhetorical genuflection’ (Blowers 2000: 371).⁷ By the mid-1990s, many felt that sustainable development had become ‘a much abused term’ (Quinn 1996: 20) that proponents accused each other of hijacking. The finger was pointed at business interests for gilding their ‘green image’ (Blowers and Glasbergen 1995: 164); at the rich countries for seeking to sustain their dominance (Yearley 1996); at environmentalists for adopting ‘morally repugnant’ interpretations (Beckerman 1994: 191, 1995); and at government technocrats for emphasising their own claims to expertise over broader political agendas (see discussion in Rydin 1995). Borrowing a distinction made by John Rawls in his theory of justice, we might argue that the concept of sustainable development – the broad meaning of the term – became widely accepted, but the conception, which includes the principles required to apply a concept, remained (and remains) in profound dispute (Rawls 1972, 1993; see also Adams 1990; Jacobs 1999; Redclift 1987).⁸

Yet even if sustainable development fails to provide a straightforward ‘figure of resolution’ (Myerson and Rydin 1996: 26), it would be difficult to deny the discursive power of an idea that, in less than two decades, permeated policy agendas so as to become almost ubiquitous. The fact that Brundtland could promulgate the concept with such effect suggests that it must have been, in some sense, an idea whose time had come. This raises a number of interesting and important questions. How does an idea come to have influence in this way? How is it transmitted and developed? And to what extent can ‘the knowledge-based power of persuasion’, in which ‘ideas and discourses themselves may be powerful entities’ (Litfin 1994: 18, 15), challenge more traditional forms of domination and control? Such questions, in a more general sense, are of growing interest to scholars and policy makers. There is increasing evidence that traditional forms of policy analysis that emphasise agency, structures or institutions fail to capture the important role of knowledge, ideas and argument in the political process (see, for example, Fischer and Forester 1993; Hajer 1995; Kingdon 1995; Litfin 1994; Majone 1989; Radaelli 1995; Rein and Schön 1991; Sabatier 1987, 1998; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993; Weale 1992; Weiss 1991); at the same time, power (in the coercive sense) is seen by many as integral to the legitimation of particular arguments and beliefs (Flyvbjerg 1998). Exploring the influence of a ‘new’ concept like sustainable development, which in fact has long antecedents (Owens 1994), may throw further light on the cognitive aspects of policy making. On the one hand, we might expect interpretations of sustainability – the emergence of particular conceptions – to be constrained by existing institutions, so that the new idea could be absorbed seamlessly with little threat to the status quo; alternatively, we might postulate that the very process of interpretation could stimulate institutional learning, leading ultimately to meaningful and lasting policy change.⁹

We have chosen to explore these issues in the context of policies concerned with the use and development of land. Not only do such policies demand the interpretation of sustainable development in terms applicable to hard decisions but, as we show in Chapter 2, the various processes of land-use planning and regulation have repeatedly been identified as key instruments for delivering a more sustainable society. In many respects, and in many countries, it is land-use planning that has acquired the political burden of reconciling development pressures with environmental concerns. We now turn, therefore, to a consideration of the significance of land in relation to sustainable development before looking briefly at the role of planning and identifying some of the more specific issues to be addressed in this book.

Land, environment and sustainability

As a source of sustenance, resources and wealth, land ‘is literally the base upon which all human societies are built’ (Caldwell and Shrader-Frechette 1993: 3). Most of the profound changes in the physical and social conditions of human existence have had important land-use dimensions, including, over a long time span, the shift to sedentary agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, large-scale urbanisation (strongly associated with the rise of formal, public, land-use planning) and the globalising influence of information technology.¹⁰ But land is much more than a material base: it is imbued with diverse, sometimes contradictory, social and cultural meanings – as property, when ‘mixed with human labour’ in the Lockean sense (Locke 1988), as a wider ‘biotic community’, deserving of a ‘land ethic’ (after Leopold 1949), and ‘as a vast mnemonic system for the retention of group history and ideals’ (Lynch 1960: 126). Not surprisingly, therefore, land has been the subject of persistent political struggle (Caldwell and Shrader-Frechette 1993; Grove-White 1991; Whatmore and Boucher 1993), and we might expect the governance of land-use change to present a challenging set of issues for the theory and practice of sustainable development. Certainly, land presents problems for the more sanguine, eco-modernist interpretations of sustainability, which see salvation in improving eco-efficiency, or ‘doing more with less’. While it is demonstrably possible to reduce the energy or materials intensity of the economy (and thus the environmental impacts of growth), relationships between economic activity, land and environmental change make analogous assertions about land-use intensity much more problematic (Owens and Cowell 1994).¹¹ Theorists of ecological modernisation have tended to focus on pollution and resource consumption while saying little about ‘intuited nature’ (Mol 1996: 315; see also Christoff 1996) – the spiritual, aesthetic and intrinsic qualities of the non-human world that are so often central to conflicts over the use and development of land.

Part of the difficulty is that changes in land use are linked to environmental change through a multiplicity of direct, indirect, sometimes cumulative and often uncertain effects. These links operate at different scales and have economic, legal and political dimensions: conflicts arise between multiple rights and jurisdictions, which ecological science alone can rarely if ever resolve. Interactions between neighbouring land uses have focused the minds of scholars for centuries, as ‘nuisances’ of noise, odour or pollution have spilled beyond properties and sites (Agricola 1950; Coase 1960). Later came the recognition that impacts can cross national boundaries, as, for example, when land-use decisions in one country influence air or water quality in another. In the twenty-first century, ‘the issue of global climate change makes all nations neighbours’ (Caldwell and Shrader-Frechette 1993: 162), as, one might add, do other transnational concerns in which land use is deeply implicated, such as loss of biodiversity. In many instances, the growth of global agreements and international organisations concerned with environmental issues has modified traditional assertions of national sovereignty over land resources, already weakened by the effects of ecological and economic processes operating beyond state or local control. In the case of the Cairngorm funicular project, for example, environmental objectors were able to point to the international significance of the summit habitats and the risks posed to montane plant and bird communities by global warming. But internationalisation presents strong countervailing forces: communities can be reluctant to subject mobile economic capital to restrictive land-use policies, as illustrated by business responses to SERPLAN’s regional guidance, discussed above.

If land use is of such significance for sustainability, it seems appropriate to focus attention on the planning and regulation of land-use change. All modern societies engage, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, in some such activity, and in a number of countries land-use planning has come to be accepted as an instrument for co-ordinating economic, environmental and social policies (Healey and Shaw 1994). It was an obvious candidate, then, for a central role in the delivery of sustainable development, a role widely endorsed by governments, diverse interest groups and land-use planners themselves. According to some observers, the challenge has been taken up with noticeable effect. Meadowcroft (1997: 167), for example, claims that planning for sustainability is now ‘a real world activity of officials and ministries’, encompassing the restructuring of traditional planning activities and genuinely novel developments. In the chapters that follow, we examine such claims, taking a critical look at interpretations of sustainable development in planning – their conceptual underpinnings, the instruments available and their manifestations in practice. We ask, in relation to the broader themes of knowledge, power and institutional learning identified above, whether sustainability has offered – or seems likely to offer – anything genuinely novel or radical. Has it, for example, proved its integrative potential in reconciling growth and ‘amenity’, or fulfilled its promise as an inclusive, participatory ideal? Recognising that there might be a twoway process, we consider not only whether the sustainability agenda has changed planning but also how the particular dilemmas encountered in the planning process have informed the sustainability debate. Thus the interface of sustainable development and land-use planning becomes the lens through which we address wider questions about the impact of a ‘new’ idea on established institutions, policies and practice.

Our main focus is on land-use – sometimes referred to as spatial or physical – planning.¹² In the UK, from which we draw much of our analysis, this means an emphasis on ‘development’ as defined in town and country planning legislation, which largely excludes the land-use changes associated with agriculture or forestry.¹³ But it is abundantly clear that planning in this relatively restricted sense cannot be treated in isolation from other aspects of environmental policy, including, for example, pollution control, the management of water resources and waste, and nature conservation. Not only must these different aspects interact, but the boundaries themselves have also long been matters for dispute (see, for example, CPRE 2000a; Healey and Shaw 1994; Miller 1993), with tensions highlighted afresh by the demands of sustainability. For many commentators, the very nature of environmental systems requires ‘an integrated and holistic approach’ (Evans 1997:5), linking land-use planning to other aspects of environmental protection and to policies in sectors such as energy and transport, which often seem to conflict with planning objectives. Certainly, as we shall show in chapters on transport, nature conservation and minerals, we must look to a wider context to understand the capacity of planning systems to respond to new ideas and deliver particular goals. Where ecological and economic processes operate at scales beyond the reach of local, territorially defined regulation, important questions arise as to how planning can be a proactive force in the quest for sustainable development. Throughout, we seek to avoid an insular, technical account of ‘land-use planning’, remaining sensitive to the porosity of the system’s boundaries, the limitations of its traditional remit and its relatively modest part on a wider political stage.

The remit of land-use planning

There are more fundamental questions about the proper role for planning in general, and regulation of the use of land in particular. For some, land-use planning is a justifiable infringement of private property rights only in so far as markets fail because of the well-known problems of externalities and public goods. Beyond this, intervention becomes at best a distortion of market forces and a threat to competitiveness, at worst a form of coercion. Essentially, in this view, the market is seen as the institution that will best satisfy consumer preferences and lead to improvements in welfare.¹⁴ The role of planning is to correct for conditions where land prices provide an imperfect guide to land use, and thus to enable markets to operate more effectively (although some would question its capacity to do even this; see, for example, Pennington 1999). For other commentators, however, planning can and should do more than mop up after market failures. Through its commitment to public engagement (however imperfect the current arrangements), it could provide a forum for dialogue in which citizens, collectively, might choose outcomes that differ substantially from those reflecting the aggregation of consumer preferences (Sagoff 1988). Many see (idealised) planning as a dialogical institution, aspiring to the kind envisaged by Habermas (1986, 1987), one that provides ‘a space for conversation between competing conceptions of the good’ while meeting the requirements of pluralism that such a space be neutral between those conceptions (J. O’Neill 1998: 18). Such ‘communicative rationality’ has been a clear influence on planning theory, reflected in the work of a number of prominent thinkers (see, for example, Forester 1999; Healey 1993, 1997, 1998a).

But there are other, important, ways in which the role of planning can be conceived. A moment’s thought reveals that for many of its proponents (and in practice), planning has always been more than a facilitator of markets or a neutral forum for dialogue. Rather, it is seen as an institution for promoting ...