Rural Policies in the Gloucestershire Structure Plan: 2. Implementation and the County—District Relationship

The Secretary of State's amendments to the Gloucestershire structure plan served to dilute the potentially innovative policy statements with regard to resource dispersal to declining rural areas. This paper is an investigation of the attempts by the county planning authority to persuade other agencies that the diluted approved policy should be interpreted and enacted in the spirit of the more innovative intentions of the draft policy. Evidence is presented of attempts via various mechanisms to transfer institutional values generated at county level to the actions and decisionmaking of other organisations, particularly the district councils. Although some transfers have occurred at policy level, the enactment of policies in most cases has not reflected the intentions of the county authority. Such intentions have been frustrated both by the nature of the institutional culture operating at county level, where prorural dispositions were subject to the higher priorities of financial constraint, and by the fundamental preservation by other agencies of their own (albeit declining) powers of financial allocation. Policy implementation has therefore taken the form of a centrally constrained, low-cost search for visible policy responses which rely increasingly on the resources of the private and voluntary sectors.