ABSTRACT
Since taking office in 2010, neighbourhood planning has been part of a suite of mechanisms connected with the UK Coalition government’s broader agendas of ‘Localism’ and the ‘Big Society’. They chime with global agendas of subsidiarity, participation and citizen engagement, but have particular manifestations in the UK context. As expressed by the Localism Minister the agenda seeks to ‘hand over power and responsibility so that local communities have real choices, and experience the real consequences of those choices’ (Clark 2010). This statement reflects one of the key critiques of the current planning system, that it is overly centralised, and top-down with the planning professional seen as being distant and technocratic without any idea of what goes on in the ‘real world’ (Farnsworth 2011). However critics of the Coalition’s manifestation of localism are sceptical about its commitment to genuine local empowerment, seeing it as an opportunistic window to roll back the state (e.g. Parvin 2011).
