ABSTRACT
Planners have long been concerned with the nature of planning as a decisionmaking process involving a variety of actors communicating, negotiating, bargaining and arguing over the ‘right’ way forward. The communicative school is the most recent body of literature that has sought to theorise the inter-personal relationships between actors in the planning arena (e.g. Forester, 1989, 1993, 1999c; Healey, 1992b; Sager, 1994). This school has received praise and an enthusiastic reception from the academic community for awarding almost a renaissance to planning theorising (Innes, 1995; Mandelbaum, 1996; Alexander, 1997). Notwithstanding the ongoing difficulties of ensuring that communicative theory is empirically fitting (Tewdwr-Jones and Allmendinger, 1998; Hillier, 2000; Phelps and Tewdwr-Jones, 2000; Tait and Campbell, 2000), in the way Forester (1993) has called for, this literature has opened up some reflective debate about the very purpose of planning theory, its tributary and cadet branches, and ways forward.
