From post‐political to authoritarian planning in England, a crisis of legitimacy

Abstract

This paper argues that the crisis of post-politics has sparked an authoritarian turn in spatial planning in England. That, the proposed reform of the English planning system in 2020 is a defining moment, marking not only the failure of consensus-seeking politics in governing dissents, but also the rising authoritarian responses to fix it. This is manifest in the intensification of state control, strengthening of executive power and decline of democratic institutions, with a shift of emphasis from techno-managerial to Accepted ArticleThis article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved executive-punitive practices, and from seemingly consensual to openly antagonistic approaches. This drift to authoritarianism has been justified by invoking a 'state of exception' whereby the established rules and procedures are displaced by the appeal to 'exceptional' circumstances such as, emergencies, national securities, and global pandemics. We draw on a case study of shale gas 'fracking' in England to show how authoritarianism has crept into planning processes through, changes in legislation, reconfiguration of rules, rescaling of decision making, and shrinking of democratic spaces. We discuss the role of a 'political moment' in the politicization of fracking, arguing that the return of the political has engendered antagonistic and exclusionary practices, rather than the agonistic pluralism that planning scholars have called for. In managing planning conflicts, consent, compromise and cooption are increasingly complemented or replaced by discipline, control and explicit exclusion. Instead of denying, neutralizing or suppressing antagonism by calling for consensus, authoritarian politics exaggerates it by establishing frontiers between legitimate and non-legitimate voices of dissents. The paper concludes by emphasizing that the authoritarian turn can only offer a contingent and fleeting solution to the failure of post-political planning to deliver neoliberal pro-growth goals. It cannot eradicate the crisis of legitimacy in planning; nor can it foreclose the political struggle for fixing its meaning and purpose.Acknowledgments: This paper is based on a Doctoral research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant number: ES/P000762/1). We wish to thank, the ESRC for their support, Professor Anthony Zito for his contribution to the discussions on the issues covered in this paper, Professor Matt Sparke (the editor) and four anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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