Abstract
Neighbourhood planning in the UK is a striking example of the international turn to localism and public participation, the statutory weight afforded to it setting it apart from many other initiatives. Its promoters portray it as a straightforward transfer of power from state to community. However, its legitimacy relies upon complex, hybrid forms of representative, participatory and epistemological authority. A growing literature is interrogating the relations between neighbourhood planning groups – the collectives utilising these new powers – and the neighbourhoods for which they speak. This paper brings empirical evidence forward to build on such work by exploring how the identities of neighbourhood planning groups are constituted. Three different and sometimes conflicting relational identities are characterised. Each identity is associated with particular material relations, types of knowledge and ways of representing the neighbourhood, and consequently produces different forms of legitimacy. Analysing identities in this way aids understanding of the practices through which legitimacy is achieved in experiments in democracy that rely on hybrid forms of authority. It may also open possibilities for intervention that speak to some of the concerns raised in the literature about these hybrid forms.
Highlights
Claims to be shifting power downwards and outwards from the state to local communities, and increasing citizen participation in decision-making, are commonplace in late Modern democracies
Developing the identity-multiple analysis and foregrounding the associations of material relations, knowledge and legitimacy sketched out here may help to better understand how groups negotiate the hybrid forms of authority that neighbourhood planning invokes (Bradley, 2015; Sturzaker and Gordon, 2017)
Neighbourhood planning is framed by its promoters as devolving power to pre-existing, well-defined communities
Summary
Claims to be shifting power downwards and outwards from the state to local communities, and increasing citizen participation in decision-making, are commonplace in late Modern democracies. The NPG is enacted as arising out of the neighbourhood in order to be able to face it and reflexively engage with it on the one hand, and to represent it, to mediate between it and other actors on the other.
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