National planning - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 274

circumstances in which initiatives might be brought into play, identifying the available
choices and offering informed judgements on their relative merits to decision-takers -
be they political leaders, board members or whoever.
Planning within government organisations is more problematic because of the
context of political accountability in which it takes place. The 'validity' which members
of the public ascribe to decisions is likely to depend on the manner in which choices
are seen to have been identified and evaluated along the way, and the opportunity
people have had to contribute. Decisions involving development (including transport
developments) are especially contentious because they typically involve very visible
changes in local environments and/or freedoms of movement. It is also almost
inevitable that they involve shifts in the balance of benefits and disbenefits enjoyed
at different places by different social groups - factors which can impact on property
values, the profitability of businesses and individuals' quality of life.
Public planning in this field necessarily engages with, and impacts upon, a variety
of groups (e.g. developers, transport operators, businesses, residents). The choices
under consideration have to be developed in ways which are practically deliverable
and which ultimately can command public support. Overall planning in relation to
development therefore needs to be conceived as a broader process for facilitating the
translation of aspirations into effective actions, taking account of opportunities and
constraints and mediating between disparate interests and stakeholders.
There is a body of literature on the nature of planning in this context. Some of
this is normative in character (i.e. seeking to identify those features which will enable
the planning contribution to be most effective) - see for example Faludi (1989) and
Healey (1997) as representatives of very different theoretical positions. Some is more
behavioural in nature (i.e. seeking to identify what processes are actually followed in
the name of planning) - see Vigar et al. (2000).
Within the 'proceduralist' tradition represented by Faludi the norm is taken to
consist of a 'rational' planning process involving the explicit identification of aims
followed by a systematic examination of possible choices and their merits relative to
these (Box 17.1).
Although this lends itself to 'technical' planning exercises conducted in the back-
offices of public authorities or consultancie,s its efficacy rapidly diminishes in the
face of the real-world complexities posed in seeking to reconcile a variety of different
conceptions and aspirations amongst different stakeholders. The 'communicative'
approach advanced by Healey offers an alternative conception, viewing planning
policies and their implementation as 'active processes of social construction, that is of
human invention':
Public policy-making, and processes of local environmental planning, may thus
be reconceptualised as processes of intersubjective communication in the public
sphere, through which mutual learning takes place.
(Healey 1997 p. 55)
As we will see, the official requirements set for formal planning exercises embody
elements of both of these approaches, with systematic, evidence-based procedures
being coupled with practices aimed at public engagement and consensus-building. Both
dimensions of planning activity are extremely demanding and professional planners
are typically faced with pursuing them in the context of imposed timetables under a
variety of resource constraints. In reality their task is better expressed as designing and