Drafting spatial planning legislation as institutional design: theoretical foundations

This chapter serves as the theoretical base of the book and as the justification of the author’s assertion that in writing a law on the structure, goals and instruments of spatial planning, the law-writer engages in institutional design. Viewing spatial planning as an institution of the state, like education or social care, requires a framework which can be found in institutional theory and the theory of institutional design. This is what the author strives to provide in this chapter, by resorting to the relevant literature. The analysis of state institutions uncovers plentiful examples of their role in fixing behavioural norms, moral standards, statutory obligations, and limitations of action, which nevertheless face established habits and old social connections between state and citizenry. This is a situation familiar to planning theoreticians and practitioners. Institutional design is what the expert committees mentioned in later chapters were doing, when charged to draft a new planning law. In a sense, they were also engaged in a process of structuration, in which, acting as ‘agency’, they were setting up a new spatial planning ‘structure’. In this chapter, the author attempts to relate the theoretical contribution of social science to spatial planning theory, of which the diverse currents - rational, communicative, environmental, radical - have intimate links with the role of the institutions of a democratic state. Although there is no attempt to describe in full the edifice of planning theories, reference is made to very recent writings on the subject. Short summaries are placed in recess at the end of all sections to assist the reader.