Public Participation in UK Infrastructure Planning: Democracy, Technology and Environmental Justice

Abstract

Public involvement in environmental planning has become a central concern of academics, policy specialists and planning practitioners in recent years. In particular, public involvement has become a prominent feature of the decisionmaking processes for large-scale infrastructure builds, such as roads, airports and energy technologies. The practice of public and stakeholder engagement (PSE) has been touted as a means to alleviate public opposition to controversial planning proposals that create localised environmental burdens to affected communities. Though PSE in decision-making has become an institutionalised practice in the operation of UK Government departments, there is a contrasting culture of planning policy emerging through a ‘modernisation agenda’ culminating in the Planning Act 2008 - which makes infrastructure planning the purview of an independent Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC). The IPC is a body that has been criticised as being top-down and ‘technocratic’, thus curtailing the democratic rights of local communities. The tensions between these two objectives of deliberative democratic public involvement in decision-making and the streamlining of the planning system to reduce costs and planning delays are explored in this chapter with reference to a practical example of infrastructure planning, namely the development of electricity transmission networks in the UK.

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