ABSTRACT
The chapter presents, in sections 1.2 and 1.3, an account of developments across the world in the area of planning due to impacts of economic globalisation and a global concern for environmental sustainability since the mid1980s. It describes the concepts of civil society and governance as consequences of these developments. In democracies like Australia, planning functions are in the public interest and, hence, overseen and largely undertaken by government. This means that the institutional systems of government are critical to the way that planning works and what it can achieve. Therefore, in sections 1.4 to 1.6, the chapter briefly describes the (very complex) arrangements through which Australian governments carry out the task of planning, before looking at some of the recent trends in planning system reform, placing them in the context of
the muchvaunted shift ‘from government to governance’ (Meehan, 2003, MacCallum, 2009, etc.).
