Stuck In The Middle: Planning Consultants As Intermediary-Actors. The Case Of English Neighbourhood Planning

Planning theory has scrutinised the role and consequences of various forms of citizen engagement in urban governance and spatial planning for decades. Since the 1990s, a progressive and discernible shift in managing urban issues and spatial planning has occurred in numerous jurisdictions. Governmental entities have embraced ostensibly collaborative governance and new planning tools designed to capture and manage the socially innovative capacities of civil society (Bragaglia, 2021). Consequently, planning practice has evolved into a realm where many political, technical, and lay actors are actively engaged, albeit with asymmetrical power relations and varying capacities. These new tools partially redefine the ‘rules of the game’ amongst public authorities, the development industry, and civil society and have required intermediary actors as part of the creation of knowledge markets for the private sector in planning (Raco and Savini, 2019). Indeed, to manage and support the active involvement of lay actors, some planning activity has also witnessed an increasing professionalisation of participation and a surge in consultants (Wargent, et al., 2020; Barry and Legacy, 2022). However, the role of planning consultants as ‘intermediary-actors’ is still understudied in the planning discourse. Additionally, even more limited attention has been given to niche participation consultancy. Most literature on consultants predominantly focuses on the role of consultants active between developers and local authorities. We thus address this research gap by examining the role of consultants involved in a reconfigured set of relationships that includes civil society. It is, therefore, a triangulated process in which we observe and investigate the power emerging from state-society-market relationships and associated ‘action on others’ (Burchell et al., 1991) that planning consultants, as intermediary-actors, exert in influencing policy agendas in the realm of collaborative governance and planning. The contribution delves into the role of private planning consultants as intermediary-actors and their implications for planning theory and practice. It focuses explicitly on niche consultants engaged in servicing neighbourhood-scale community plan-making in England in the framework of neighbourhood plans (post-2011 Localism Act), emphasising their agency and contributing to the comprehension of consultancy roles and co-production dynamics in planning. The aim of the contribution is thus to elucidate the agency that planning consultants, as intermediary-actors, hold in collaborative governance and planning within and beyond neighbourhood planning.