Institutionalising EU strategic spatial planning into domestic planning systems: Italy and England from path dependencies to shared perspectives
Creators: name: Valeria, Lingua
Publisher: name: TU Delft Open
Year: 2016

description: This paper propose to approach the emergence and evolution of the Europeanization of national planning using conceptual frameworks from historical institutionalism, in order to make light on the mechanisms and trajectories of domestic change concerned with EU strategic planning. It seek in particular to examine Europeanization in terms of the extent to which the EU spatial planning has become a driving force for institutional changes in national planning systems. <br>This theoretical framework will be applied to the changes that have occurred in Italy and England’s institutional and planning systems. These countries were chosen both for their differences in political, administrative and planning systems and for their sharing of a common critical juncture, that is the revocation of a planning tier from 2011 and the definition of an obligation to cooperate ("duty to cooperate" in England; obligation of union for diverse municipalities in Italy) for tackling strategic issues that have a supra-local cross-boundary dimension. <br>Going back to the changes occurred to the features of the Italian and England planning systems in the last two decades, the author provides an insight into the attempts to insert and transpose EU strategic planning concepts and instruments into domestic systems, dealing with path dependency and European influence. <br>By reading these dealings in the light of a historical institutionalist approach, the paper aims to enhance understanding of both path dependencies and the actual common issues to tackle and shared perspectives. Key findings concern the modes and degree of institutionalisation of strategic spatial planning promoted by the EU and its cohesion policy. Given the institutional differences in the political, administrative and planning systems, causes and conditions of Europeanization in different planning systems are identified. <br>If the EU cohesion policy asks for performing projects and not-statutory planning practices, in many regulatory planning systems - as the Italian one - the development and institutionalization of strategic planning seems still hard to be achieved, due to the structural features of the planning system and to a historicised attitude toward incremental, adaptive change. In these cases, policy changes come about by layering, that is the creation of new policies without eliminating the old. <br>In more “performative” planning systems, the struggle for change conveys to stronger formal reforms, even by the replacement or elimination of policies and rules. This is what happened in England, where the efforts made in the 2000s to change the culture of planning, with new instruments intended to strengthen planning’s strategic function, were hastily reversed from 2010, through the revocation of Regional Spatial Strategies, a shift to 'localism' and the introduction of an obligation to cooperate for local authorities facing strategic issues.<br>Despite these different pathways and modes to face changes, both the England and Italian planning systems now rely on informal arrangements for strategic planning. If this change is a contested challenge at domestic levels, in the framework of EU practices the Governments expectation for plan-making authorities to undertake joint work on supra-local planning issues is probably the most important accomplishment of Europeanisation.
description: International Planning History Society Proceedings, No 5: IPHS proceedings Delft 2016 Volume 5