Introduction

This book explores the relationship between one of the most important innovations in recent political discourse – environmental sustainability, and an idea that has slipped from public attention in recent years – planning. The principal aim underlying Planning Sustainability is to encourage advocates of environmental politics to consider whether their arguments may gain in analytical precision and normative power if ‘planning’ – in all its different senses – were more central to their thinking. At present one can discern a reluctance not just to utilise the conceptual vocabulary of planning, but more generally to consider the state as a conceptual and normative terrain of particular significance in the analysis of environmental politics.