ABSTRACT
In 2004, the Scottish Executive published its first national spatial strategy – the National Planning Framework – as part of a deliberate programme of modernising the spirit and purpose of the statutory land use planning system in Scotland (Scottish Executive 2004a). In practice, the National Planning Framework is inextricably bound up with devolution and the creation of the Scottish Parliament and a Scottish Executive (now the Scottish Government). These institutions have distinctive legislative and tax powers which differ in breadth from those prevailing elsewhere in the devolved UK (McNaughton 1998). Devolution has fundamentally changed Scotland’s constitutional, political and institutional position and reflects, to some extent, the influence of a modern political movement which had progressively campaigned for greater relative autonomy for Scotland within the UK unitary state (Mitchell 1996; Ritchie 2000). Devolution has further changed the political and institutional context for policy making in Scotland and has allowed an opportunity for the devolved state to articulate its own distinctiveness in terms of planning and governance. The National Planning Framework may be considered totemic in these processes of change and thinking.
