Land Use Law and the Environment

Abstract

The emergence of the environment as a mainstream political issue in Britain during the 1980s cannot be understood without an appreciation of the role of the land-use planning system. This system best seen as the constantly evolving web of law, policy and convention which regulates and orders a range of land uses in the United Kingdom1 has been a powerful influence on the distinctive form in which environmental issues have emerged in a British context. This has been so not simply because of the regulatory constraints the system has provided, but also because of the 'cultural' framing created by the discourse and idioms of town and country planning law. These have helped shape certain of the forms in which environmental tensions have been conceptualized and have found public expression. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to throw light on how, in recent years, land use planning law and its institutional forms have been exploited as an arena, in the process helping to frame and shape elements of a distinctively British environmental agenda. Underlying this approach is the author's belief that in particular national cultures, environmental issues and, more generally, political agendas about the environment are not simply 'givens' to be found existing objectively in nature as, so to speak, a set of instantly recognisable physical issues. To be sure, they tend to be manifested in particular physical problems, but the issue of which issues emerge as environmentally significant in particular cultural contexts, why, and in what forms, is not explicable only in terms of objective physical observation. Rather, such questions are social and cultural. Indeed, notions of 'the environment' in particular contexts have been social constructions, the products of frequently turbulent processes of social 'negotiation' in complex cultural settings, rather than self-evident sets of unproblematically identified physical problems for which 'solutions' must then be sought.2 Legal commentaries on the relationship between law and the environment3 tend to take the range and nature of environmental problems as self-evident or given. The key questions then become whether, given these 'problems', legal