Participatory, technocratic and neoliberal planning : governance tensions within the NSW planning system

In this paper, we explore the tensions between the practices of professional planners, the participatory planning frameworks of governments and the neoliberalization of planning governance in Australia. Rather than fitting neatly together, we argue that there are fundamental theoretical and practical tensions amongst these technocratic, participatory and neoliberal governance processes. Importantly, each dictates a different source of power in terms of setting the planning agenda and making planning decisions. Using the New South Wales planning system as a case study, we demonstrate that the introduction of ‘the market’ and ‘local citizens’ as planning agenda setters and decision-makers has proved difficult for the New South Wales Government to manage in planning practice. We draw attention to the way the state might violate the democratic principles that enable the technocratic power of planning professionals if they devolve too much of their decision-making and agenda setting power to ‘the market’ or ‘local citizens’, or indeed both. Using theories of direct/participatory democracy, technocratic/representative democracy and neoliberal/market-centric democracy, we demonstrate where the political power is located to set the planning agenda and to undertake decision-making within each of the three governance processes. We conclude that enabling a suite of governance process in one governance space can disable or undermine important features within the other governance processes