‘For the Record’? Understanding Regulatory Processes through Archival Materials: The Example of Planning Agreements

Abstract

Referring to legal texts does not necessarily provide a clear understanding of how legal practice and principle is used for regulatory ends. In this paper, I consider how archival research can enhance our understanding of regulation. Government and its agents use an array of strategies to regulate the activities of others. Many can be better grasped by a reference to archival materials, especially public records. Below I explain the extent to which empirical study of this kind illuminates one particular instrument used to regulate land use activity, the planning agreement. The purpose is twofold: first, to assess how far referring to public records facilitates the discovery of new or informative material in the domain of land-use control; secondly, to challenge assumptions that government's harnessing of market mechanisms is potentially beyond regulation. Allied to the idea is the extent of government's capacity to regulate other actors by steering (or leveraging) their capacities.1 With the perceived merger of public and private activity in the per formance of governmental functions and government's reorientation towards enabling rather than providing, consonant with New Public Management techniques,2 a use of market forms, especially those of contracting practices for regulatory ends, has been seen as a postmodern phenomenon.3 The public records relevant to the use of planning agreements challenge such assump tions of novelty, locating the practice within the public domain since the