Learning policy—the contextual curtain and conceptual barriers

Many European states are now giving attention to strategic planning as a means of coordinating and democratizing local government. The UK government is not alone in seeing some form of ‘community planning’ as a means of promoting closer sectoral integration in policy‐making and service delivery while also encouraging public participation. This suggests scope for comparative research to inform lesson drawing, especially from Norway, which has been rolling out kommuneplan at the municipality level since 1985. Cross‐national lesson‐drawing is hazardous, however, given the different legal, political and cultural traditions which make policies ‘work’ in particular local settings. In this article these difficulties are acknowledged and ethnographic research is used to explore further problems in lesson‐drawing, especially the very different ways in which concepts of participation and integration are given meaning in particular national contexts. Through comparative ethnographies of community planning processes in Asker Municipality, Norway, and South Lanarkshire Council, Scotland, remarkable similarities are revealed in the language and objectives of the planning documents in each setting, but show that this belies important differences in the relations between administrative and political domains, in the governing role of plan statements, and in the underlying theories of democracy.

[1]  T. Bovaird,et al.  The feasibility of evaluating the impacts of the Local Government Modernisation Agenda: a consultation paper , 2001 .

[2]  New Labour, New Language? , 2000, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[3]  P. Booth.  The cultural dimension in comparative research: Making sense of development control in France , 1993 .

[4]  F. Thompson.  Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services , 1983 .

[5]  Patsy Healey,et al.  Making Strategic Spatial Plans , 1997 .

[6]  T. Sager.  Communicative Planning Theory , 1994 .

[7]  P. Degeling.  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 'SECTORS' IN CALLS FOR URBAN PUBLIC HEALTH INTERSECTORALISM: an Australian perspective , 1995 .

[8]  Steve Martin,et al.  The Joy of Joining Up: Modes of Integrating the Local Government Modernisation Agenda , 2003 .

[9]  Kommunal og regionaldepartementet.  The Planning and Building Act , 2005 .

[10]  H. Sullivan,et al.  Modernisation, Democratisation and Community Governance , 2001 .

[11]  M. Lloyd,et al.  An idea for its time?: Community planning and reticulism in Scotland , 1999 .

[12]  E. Page,et al.  Policy Transfer among Local Governments: An Information–Theory Approach , 2002 .

[13]  J. Murdoch.  The shifting territory of government: some insights from the Rural White Paper , 1997 .

[14]  R. Rose.  Lesson-drawing in public policy , 1993 .

[15]  Steve Martin.  Leadership, learning and local democracy , 1997 .

[16]  F. Castles.  Pressure Groups and Political Culture : A Comparative Study , 1967 .

[17]  Sir David Milne,et al.  The Scottish Office , 1957 .

[18]  M. Lloyd,et al.  A Community Leadership Initiative for Scotland? , 2001 .

[19]  Bill Edwards,et al.  Partnerships, Power, and Scale in Rural Governance , 2001 .

[20]  D. M. Smith,et al.  Geography, Community, and Morality , 1999 .

[21]  Bob Jessop,et al.  The governance of complexity and the complexity of governance , 2005, Putting Civil Society in Its Place.