Getting the Planners Off Our Backs: Questioning the Post-Political Nature of English Planning Policy

There is now a large body of work that seeks to understand the evolution of planning systems across the globe, particularly the adaptation of planning to/under varying forms of neoliberalism. Some of this research seeks to provide empirical insights into new state spaces and the actors that occupy them. Others have made theoretical explanation of the reform agenda their goal. In sum much of the literature now points to an academic understanding of government policies on planning as representative of a ‘new moment’, characterized by a post-political narrowing of debate on what the fundamental objectives of the activity should be. In this contribution, we find grounds to agree with aspects of this analysis that takes the post-political as an explanatory framework. However, using the passage of the UK Localism and Decentralization Bill into law as the Localism Act 2011, we argue that the process of enacting planning reform was accompanied by acts of manipulation (heresthetics) and decontestation that accord more closely to traditional and long-standing methods of political action motivated by ideology.