ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with concerns that it can be hard to articulate local issues in terms of strategy or principle (Gallent and Robinson, 2013; Wargent and Parker, 2018), and considers three ways in which the WSHWNP adopted a strategic approach: 1) grappling with the requirement for neighbourhood plans to support the strategic objectives of the relevant local plan by questioning what ‘strategic’ really means in this context and at what scale strategy should be determined, 2) developing its own spatial strategy to maximise its chances of achieving its aims, especially the aim to secure separation between settlements, and 3) devising a temporal strategy for the production of the neighbourhood plan to maximise the potential to influence the emergent local plan. Both opportunities and obstacles encountered in seeking to develop a neighbourhood plan in a strategic manner are explored, and the implications of these for the places and spaces of neighbourhood planning are excavated. In doing so, the importance of moving away from considering neighbourhood plans as finished documents to focus more on the process of their production in optimising the effectiveness of neighbourhood planning is highlighted.
