What is it about?
This is a paper about the way in which certain types of think tank seek to influence the public debate around planning - involving first critique then solutions. In order to justify their funding and indeed continued existence, there is an in-built tendency within think tanks to promote major reform and to seek to impose their own ideological thinking on which ways these reforms should remaking planning policy.
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Why is it important?
Drawing on a large number of interviews with a wide range of think tanks, other advocacy and professional groups involved in planning, plus policy makers, this paper provides unique insights into the remaking of national policy as a political process. It is the first article to directly and substantively deal with the role of think tanks in shaping planning policy. It has implications too for our understanding of the role of think tanks more generally in shaping policy debates
Perspectives
This proved to be a fun paper to write - in part as I had not foreseen the way in which the paper would eventually take shape, with its emphasis on unpicking the ways in which economic libertarian think tanks sought to 'create' planning as a problem which they felt their solutions could solve. Most people who have read it have told me how much they enjoyed the interviewee quotes - and I must say, looking back, that is a real strength.
Professor Graham Haughton
University of Manchester
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Think tanks and the pressures for planning reform in England, Environment and Planning C Government and Policy, July 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0263774x16629677.
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