Moral Obligations, Planning, and the Public Interest: A Commentary on Current British Practice

Planning, as a form of state intervention administered at the local level, is inevitably subject to the pressures and vagaries of governmental and societal change. The recent past has been a particularly turbulent period for local governance and this has inevitably impacted on the role of planning practitioners and the expectations placed upon them. As a consequence, fundamental value questions have arisen concerning the role and purpose of planning and, in addition, the hegemonic status of a unifying ethic of professional responsibility has been called into question. Our aim in this paper is to explore the different obligations which at various times influence the individual planner's behaviour or actions, with the further purpose of exploring the changing nature of planning and the consequent implications for contemporary conceptions of the public interest. The main body of the paper consists of an analysis of the competing tensions of contemporary practice as viewed from the perspective of the obligations owed to individual values, professionalism, employing organisations, politicians, and the public. In the course of this exploration we examine the ways in which these tensions have been influenced and heightened by the reconfiguration of the relationships between the state, society, and the individual which occurred during the 1980s and 1990s as part of the neoliberal agenda of successive Conservative governments in Britain. We conclude by considering the extent to which the notion of the public interest still has value as a legitimising frame of reference for public planning.