Planning and the Political Market: Public Choice and the Politics of Government Failure (2002)

Planning and the Political Market: Public Choice and the Politics of Government Failure, Mark Pennington, London, The Athlone Press, 2000, 217 pp., £47.50 (h/b), £17.99 (p/b) Writing soon after publication of the government's Green Paper on the Planning System, with the most fundamental debate on planning for many years taking place, this was an interesting book to review. It provides a critical context for understanding the macro role of the planning system in terms of the state and the market economy. The work is insightful but flawed and frustrating. Pennington uses public choice theory to argue that the land use planning system is a case study of 'government failure'. Public choice theory, or the economic theory of politics, applies economic modes of reasoning to analysis of collective choice and democratic decision making. It examines the role of economic incentives within the political market place, the institutional structures of the democratic state, and the actions of the 'rational individual' within this context. Pennington's intention is to 'question the merits of government intervention' (p. 2) and to make 'a powerful case for relying to a much greater extent on property rights solutions and ''imperfect'' market processes' (p. 2). The book provides a theoretical analysis of the impact of planning, in terms of housing, transport, urban policy and environmental sustainability. It is argued that problems such as inequitable housing markets or unsustainable commuting patterns are due to or exacerbated by planning policies such as urban containment. This is because the processes involved in planning do not provide an institutional basis for individual values of environmental goods to be assigned or for the underlying structure of public preferences to be represented in the political market. The result has been policies which generate contradictions and externalities. By contrast, deregulation, such as in the housing market, would lead to greater provision of facilities overall, a fall in prices and a smoother process of benefits 'filtering down' to low-income groups. Planning and the Political Market also discusses the participation of interest groups, using particular case studies. Pennington believes that special interest capture and rent seeking are an endemic feature of political markets. The logic of collective action (the ability of groups to mobilise) is that individual incentives are the prime motivation, and inequalities of access to the political system do not derive from wealth inequalities but from underlying incentive structures. The house building and construction interests have been successful in extracting benefits from the planning system because the granting of monopoly rights on land, via planning permissions and plan allocations, mean that building companies achieve individual competitive advantages and have incentives for collective action. At the other end of the scale, environmental groups concerned with global issues may attract supporters, but cannot mobilise these members into action due to lack of individual incentives. Other chapters of the book look at the inPuence of the planning profession, politicians and growth coalitions. The latter of these is particularly interesting to one engaged in urban regeneration, and it shows how initiatives to deregulate planning, in order to facilitate growth, have merely led to different forms of regulation. This is due to the inherent anti-growth bias of the planning system and to the inPuence of lobby groups and bureaucratic interests, whose support is needed by business coalitions. …