PLPR’s Annual Conference

PLPR’s annual conference moved online this year due to COVID travel restrictions. Researchers from all over the world have come together in what has become a traditional gathering of land-use policy enthusiasts. This year, Dr. Mualam and Dr. Mathias Jehling organized a special session on National Planning/Zoning and Erosion of Local Decision-Making: Can Panning Survive in the Face of Recentralization? The session featured exciting talks that reflected these policy shifts in the Netherlands, Greece, Turkey, France, Israel and Belgium. The underlying premise of this session was that, over the last few decades, national planners (for example, in Germany, Flanders, Malta, Greece and Israel) have reclaimed planning by introducing a range of tools, policies and regulations that circumvent, trump or ignore more local rules and policies. Although the literature talks a lot about devolution and decentralization, new national rules are being compiled in many countries. They circumvent and bypass local planning through national rules-setting, re-centralization, selective rescaling, transfer of powers back to central authorities, leap over local decisions, speeding up planning procedures, or through the elimination of local independence. These processes and policies are designed to address some of the issues and challenges that national (or upper-tier) governments consider to be important. Erosion of local planning in this way is carried out with the aim of speeding up planning, dealing with crisis situations, providing certain amenities, or simply for political reasons. This session therefore looked at key examples of this turn of events in several countries and discussed the motivations, rationales and outcomes of such policies.