ABSTRACT
Strategic regional planning is essentially the governance of complexity, where preferences are debated and decisions made about the shaping of future regional development. It is a process whose legitimacy derives from a mixture of statutory purpose and the collective ‘ownership’ which emerges from being developed in open, creative and collaborative ways. An essential feature of regional planning procedures, therefore, is that they provide the scope for debates involving a multiplicity of ideas, values, facts and counter-facts, claims to moral certainties and concerns about conceptual uncertainties. But it is also a forum for examining competing priorities, not least geographical and sectoral ones. For fear of drowning in the detail and ambiguities of all this, regional planning is also continuously on the search for simplicity and transparency in bringing about agreement about how best to guide future development.
