Do We Risk  Obscuring the Good Through Teaching Effective and Efficient 21st Century Planning Process?

 

Michael Gunder

 

Head of Department

Department of Planning

The University of Auckland

 

Introduction

 

[Planners] are practical ethicists; their work demands that they make ethical judgements – again and again as they work. Ethical judgements, however embarrassingly little they may be discussed in planning schools, are nevertheless inescapable and ever present in practice. (Forester in Tewdwr-Jones 1995: 171)

 

This paper returns to the issues raised by the Gunder and Fookes (1997) paper first delivered at the 1996 ANZAPS Conference in Adelaide. That paper critiqued an earlier paper by the late Brian McLoughlin (1994) which stated that planning education failed as it did not provide students with a critical understanding of how cities and societies actually functioned. Gunder and Fookes argued from an empirical position in contrast to McLouglin that there was significant critical content in the core component of planning education, at least in Australasia.

 

This paper seeks to re-examine this argument in greater agreement with McLoughlin. It questions whether this identified critical component is often diffused by maintaining a focus on teaching how to analyse and critique planning for good instrumental planning process rather than teaching an understanding of when planning outcomes produce an  ethically good and creative result. It wishes to move the debate on critical content beyond that of Cuthbert (1997) and Gunder (1998a) towards that of Sandercock’s (1997, 1999) planning education as ethical enquiry, with the addition of the word ‘creative.’ A creative ethical enquiry which addresses how cities and societies actually work. An enquiry where we as planning educators and researchers ‘rethink and recast the projects of … planning in terms of not only rationality but of rationality and power, Realrationalität’ and Realpolitic (Flyvbjerg 1998a: 236).

 

The paper will begin with a consideration of current resource management in New Zealand and how this sub-set of planning manages to  displace  from the discipline what many would consider the most  positive value of the activity – creating change in an ethical manner towards the societal and environmental  good. It will then examine how plans can be and are being evaluated. It will suggest that evaluating plans for their effectiveness and efficiency of process does not, in itself, result in an evaluation of whether a plan is ‘good’ or not. The paper will then consider the implication of this  scientific managerial approach to planning on planning education. It will argue that we as educators have a critical responsibility to not allow this purely instrumental rational approach to be used as  a justification to displace and obscure ethical and creative development of our planning students. This is particularly so as planning departments become increasingly under pressure to teach more managerial scientific skills at the expense of alternate perspectives of how the world actually works and for whose interests it appears to do so.

 

Excuse me if the latter sounds like Brian McLoughlin (1994), but he was largely right, if a little heavy handed in his planning school abolitionist approach and in his inability to see the pedagogical value of story telling derived from professional practice. I also warn that this paper raises more questions than it answers, but I suggest that continuously asking questions must be what creative ethical enquiry is all about, subject to also getting the occasional answer.

 
Planning and the Resource Management Act in New Zealand

 

This section will first draw on the now quite extensive literature on the New Zealand Resource Management Act (RMA) to define good planning process in the context of modernist efficiency and effectiveness. It will then examine if this New Zealand planning emperor of bio-physical synoptic process can be clothed by good ethical and creative outcomes for the actors and environment involved. Or phrased a different way, it will ask whether  good community outcomes themselves can, at best, only be accidentally produced in light of the modernist narratives, or mythologies (Murray and Swaffield 2000), sustaining this instrumental RMA process. Can this process itself be evaluated as good even if this means that most of the effected population forgo available opportunities to participate in plan preparation in the achievement of efficiency? Further, what are the pedagogical implications on our planning students as a consequence of  teaching achievement of  this effective and efficient planning process in New Zealand? A planning practice that:

 

fall[s] not between  environmental and social science, but between environmental and management science, concerned with implementing prescribed procedures for regulating production relations with the environment. The social and political dimensions, within which environmental regulation must take place, will be left, if not unquestioned, then uncontested…. [leaving planning to manage merely] known ‘scientific problems’ of production and the environment. (McDermott 1998: 643-4)

 

In the wider philosophical sense this also raises a number of questions for the planning profession and its mission. This is because ethical concerns must be excluded from scientific problems (MacIntyre 1981, 1992) and problem solving, itself, is only a partially creative process in that it does not produce positive change (Higgins and Morgan 2000), not even positive environmental change. The RMA simply attempts to maintain – or sustain -- the environmental status quo, with any socio-economic creativity strictly removed (Gleeson 1996). Further, the RMA is ‘much more prescriptive’ in its requirements for plans than previous planning legislation in New Zealand (Miller 2000: 130):

 

Plans and Policy Statements must identify significant resource management issues and from these develop an integrated package of objectives, policies and anticipated environmental outcomes which could be achieved through a number of means including rules in Plans and other methods.

 

Section 32 of the RMA (1994: 43) requires a range of methods to be considered based on their ‘efficiency and effectiveness relative to other means.’ Section 35 of the RMA (1994: 47) requires these outcomes and procedural processes of the plan to be monitored so as to allow the ‘authority to effectively carry out its functions under the Act.’ [my underlining]. The RMA is concerned about the efficient and effective problem solving of issues. Yet as Higgins and Morgan (2000: 118-119) note: ‘problem solving can actually inhibit creativity because eliminating the problem reduces the impetus to change to something more positive.’

 

Is then the RMA ‘emperor’ particularly at risk of being naked when the monitoring of implemented plans is prominently employed to measure the successful achievement of easily  quantifiable bio-physical policy and objective outcomes required to demonstrate efficient methods and effective outcomes? Further, if this focus on monitoring easily accountable outcomes is correct, does this potential trend tend to obliterate planning and civic thought from whether the objectives and policies sought in the first place are in themselves serving a more complicated ethical good? This is a ‘good’  of creating or maintaining an environment within which opportunities are maximised for human well being to occur. Are relevant, but difficult to measure  RMA expectations themselves being overlooked in current plans? This includes, to reopen old debates (Upton 1994,1995; Grundy 1995), the question -- are bio-physical plan outcomes alone achieving an environment that allows sustainable access to individual, corporate and/or state enabled provision of well-being  to reasonably occur for all New Zealanders in the current, as well as future generations?

 

Avoidance of these concerns can be argued to reduce the RMA process -- and the planners implementing the RMA -- to that of simply serving the protection and enhancement of property rights for those that have dominant voices and current claims to public and private resources. This is a situation where dominance of voice is largely dependent on both cultural and financial capital (Bourdieu 1998; 2000). Conversely, I would suggest that the RMA is particularly effective in giving the appearance that it is neutral in consideration of socio-economic matters, while preserving the life-supporting capacities of the environment. However, in contrast to this mythology, economic considerations are central to the RMA’s very core of evaluative rationality for the preservation and facilitation of development opportunities for existing resource assets (Memon and Gleeson 1995, Gunder 2000). I suggest that this is  more often in the interests of their current and potential future owners who have a greater propensity for dominance of voice, than not. Short of a future socialist utopia, this rationality will seldom be serving the socio-economic interests of the vast majority of  New Zealanders, even if it does achieve some environmental benefit for all. But is this Harvey’s (1996) environmental justice? I suggest not.

 

This leads to the following sections which  seek to clarify  the question raised by McDermott (1998, 644): are planning schools being increasing being put under pressure in New Zealand to ‘shift from design and social concerns’ to that of  training our planning students to be good process clerks with a ‘singular focus on scientific and legal knowledge’ for the interests of the dominant status quo? If so, is this  at the  expense of not producing ethically mature professional actors capable of effecting  creative public action for the wider common good in  a complex and messy dynamic world of strategic games and oppression well illustrated by Flyvbjerg (1998a)? Central to this question: what is the product of good planning? I suggest that it must be more than maintaining the status quo or simply producing a good plan-drafting and implementation process.

 

 

 

 

The Problems of Evaluating Good Plans

 

Practising planners often differentiate between high-quality and low-quality plans, but cannot explicitly define the characteristics of plan quality. The planning literature is surprisingly narrow when it comes to differentiating between high-quality and low-quality plans. The planning profession has generally avoided this issue and focused on the technical methods used for plan preparation and the political processes of plan-making. (Berke et al 1997: 452)

 

Berke et al’s (1997; 1999) research evaluated the characteristics contributing to  good plans in New Zealand. They acknowledged two types of diverse evaluative methodologies. These were first, postmodernist and related critique with a focus on language, power and dominant stakeholders, and second, social science empirical analysis using a set of quantitative evaluative characteristics for statistical modelling. While acknowledging postmodern forms of plan evaluation, the study team dismisses the need for this form of critical critique because ‘contemporary plans are increasingly being derived from decision making processes that empower diverse groups and thus better account for diverse cultural perspectives’ (Berke et al 1997, 253). 

 

I would suggest that Berke et al largely  miss the point of critical analysis with their liberal acceptance of this  rather idealistic  position that diverse groups all have access to equal voice in current plan preparation in New Zealand, or elsewhere. Indeed their own later findings contradict this assertion, if in a rather tired class focused manner:

 

Compared with wealthy districts, poor districts tend to be less politically organised, have less access to formal authority structures, and thus have less ability to create plans that prevent adverse effects generated by powerful development interests in a free-market economy. (Berke et al 1999: 659)

 

Indeed Berke et al’s (1997; 1999) disproved  original position strongly  supports McDermott’s (1998) concern that the RMA legislation encourages a shift in planning’s underlying objectives  in New Zealand from those of achieving ethical social and environmental justice to those of the objectives of managerial science for effectiveness and efficiency in market activity with little regard to equity, fairness and the exercise of power – economic or other. This shift is reflective of the state giving up its pastoral  role of caring for its citizens towards a common welfare good. It replaces it with a role of corporate manager ensuring economic regulation and market stabilisation for individual achievement of well being, with no regard to individual or corporate position, potential or ability (Gunder 2000).

 

Recent research by Lovell (2000) on the Eden Park Stadium floodlighting resource consent process in Auckland well documents how the Eden Park Trust Board were able to capture the District Plan notification process to lay favourable conditions for their development plans well before local residents were aware of their ambitions. Gunder (1998b; 2000) documents how Auckland City Council manipulated their own District Plan process for similar development advantage on the Britomart site. Hillier and Van Looij (1997: 7) illustrates in Australia how articulate ‘middle-class’ interests shapes the ‘planning process… discussion and outcomes.’ Flyvbjerg (1998a) documents this strategic manipulation by dominant stakeholders masterfully in his opus on city planning in Aalborg, Denmark. Of course, this is all postmodern critique dismissed as unnecessary by Berke et al (1997) to understand what is needed for a ‘good’ plan. A plan that is good for whom?  But, of course,  liberal social scientists do not ask this question as it is one of values, morals and ethics,  not fact.  Yet we all know from Foucault (1971; 1980) that discourses of value can only become factual knowledge through contingency, luck and the strategic application of power over time -- but that is forbidden postmodern thinking!

 

For over thirty years Faludi (1998; Mastop and Faludi 1997) has expressed strong interest in evaluating plan quality from the perspective of modernist rationality, with a particular focus on strategic plans. His 1998 paper addresses three ways to look at planning theory  that  is equally applicable to his evaluation of plan quality. These are:

 

·        Procedural – what is  the object to be achieved by creating a plan;

 

·        Methodological – how does the process work and how are decisions made; and

 

·        Sociological – what are the conditions and embedded assumptions that allow a plan to occur or new ones to evolve.

 

Faludi (1998) acknowledges that while much of his earlier planning theory research was concerned with process and methodology, more recently he has concluded that it is the sociology of plans and planning that is most crucial to understanding the underlining planning theory behind what makes a good plan. Undoubtedly this level of planning resides in an analysis of the rhetoric, normative values and exercise of influence/power deployed by actors  in planning decision making (Throgmorton 1996). Flyvbjerg (1998a) calls this form of analysis narratology.  For Tewdwr-Jones (1995: 171) in the arenas and forums of the profession  ‘value judgements form the discretionary basis to planning.’  These are issues of the particular, not universals, thus hermeneutic and related sociological and philosophical methodologies are fundamental to theoretical understanding of the good and even the effective in planning processes and the plans these processes produce (Naess and Saglie 1999; Flyvbjerg, forthcoming).

 

Clearly, an understanding of how values influence decision making on the part of the practitioner and how these values are embedded in plan processes are essential to evaluating if a plan is good or bad.  Flyvbjerg (1998b: 210) suggests that ‘[e]mpowering civil society is a central concern for the project of democracy,’ and by implication the drafting of good community plans for the conduct of human actions. These concerns require planners wishing to construct creative and ethical plans to have an understanding of how power privileges and restricts voices within civil society and how values and facts are constructed and/or rationalised in related planning discourses. Even the RMA’s First Schedule Clause 3 (1) allows planners drafting plans to consult with whom they wish. Who they actually consult with and why they do so may be crucial to producing equitable and good plans. But, as alluded to above, full consultation with a civil society of active, aware and empowered community residents may be contrary to efficiency in plan production. However, I suggest, if planners drafting plans are driven to do so as an aspect of creative ethical enquiry, this need not be the case as a consequence of the more robust plans produced, even if RMA planning still precluded significant social and environmental change for the good.

 

 

 

Creative Ethical Enquiry and Planning Education

 

Any academic discipline which wants a place at the trough, but is unable to offer predictions and the technology provided by the natural sciences, must either pretend to initiate science or find some way of obtaining ‘cognitive status’ without the necessity of discovering facts… They either describe themselves as concerned with ‘values’ as opposed to facts, or as developing and incubating habits of ‘critical reflection.’ (Rorty 1987: 38-39)

 

Rorty’s assertion is still true, at least in New Zealand. Further, the encouragement of creative ethical enquiry is at best on the periphery of this quote and more general perceptions of what comprises traditional university education. A recent review of the Department of Planning  at the University of Auckland by five academics – two non-planners (a biologist and analytic philosopher), one New Zealand (who unfortunately had to withdraw at an early stage of the review), one Australian and one British planning academic – recommended that we spend even more than the current five courses (nearly 20 percent of the current undergraduate programme) on developing further our students quantitative managerial science skills in areas such as cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment. No mention was made, for or against, the considerable number of courses concerned with ethical development of our students, nor was the concept of developing creativity on the part of students, particularly in experiential studio type learning, even mentioned. For these academics it appeared ethics and creativity played no role in their epistemologically orientated worldview on their perceptions of what a university education in planning should include. Yet as Sandercock (1997: 95) notes:

 

There is an information explosion around us, a phenomenal increase in data, words, paper. This explosion should not be mistaken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom. Some knowledge is increasing, at least quantitatively; but other kinds of knowledge are being lost…Ultimately it may be the knowledge of the good that is most threatened by all other advances. (Sandercock 1997: 95)

 

As Rorty initially wrote at the start of the post-modern deconstructive period on the fallacies embedded in modern rationality:

 

We are the heirs of three hundred years of rhetoric about the importance of distinguishing sharply between science and religion, science and politics, science and art, science and philosophy, and so on. The rhetoric has formed the culture of Europe. It makes us what we are today . . . Galilleo, so to speak, won the argument, and we all stand on the common ground of the ‘grid’ of relevance and irrelevance of that victory. (Rorty 1979: 330)

 

Much of planning education, like many  other university disciplines still dominantly stuck in modernist rationalities, still proceeds ‘from the tacit premise that education is a matter of transmitting neatly packaged bodies of knowledge’ (Baum 1997: 23). The RMA and the embedded instrumental values of managerial science tend to reinforce this simplifying, but obscuring, mind-set. Yet Higgins and Morgan (2000: 118) argue that developing creativity in planning students is crucial to developing good planning practitioners. They define creativity as ‘the ability to repackage or combine knowledge in a new way which is of some practical use or adds value’ [their italics]. This recombinant creativity and ethical enquiry about values in particular, rather than universal, concrete situations can be  quite at odds with the neatly defined  packets of knowledge and epistemological concerns of universal and eternal truth and fact core to the philosophy of science. The latter is a dominant ethos evolved from Descartes and  Galileo’s proto-science which is still prevalent in the research university’s  continuing Cartesian anxiety towards the loss of rational prediction and truth, at least in regard to human action (Berstein 1983; Flyvbjerg, forthcoming )! Do not tell anyone that Sir Isaac Newton was primarily an alchemist at odds with the Cartesian position (Dobbs 1991; Shapin 1998)!  Bourdieu (2000) calls this scientific avoidance of  realrationalität  in the everyday world -- the scholastic fallacy. As he notes:

 

Having observed the ignored or repressed difference between the common world and the scientific worlds, one can endeavour, without ‘primitivist’ nostalgia or ‘populist’ exaltation, to conceptualize what remains practically inaccessible to any self-respecting scholastic thought: the logic of practice. (Bourdieu 2000: 50)

 

As Forester (1999: 177) argues; planning education, literature and research ‘that remains intellectually inarticulate about questions of value’ and the actions of daily professional practice results in ‘questions of better and worse processes and outcomes’ being ‘hardly [of much] worth’. For Forester (1999: 182):

 

Planners cannot  really ignore these nuanced questions of better and worse, and until our ‘planning theory’ helps us to understand these value questions better, it will be deeply flawed – and we will all be the worse off.

 

As I have argued before (Gunder 1998a), planning education has a crucial role to promote students understanding of the importance of human values, local truths and power in the ‘everydayedness’ of  professional practice while incurring multiple opportunities for students to develop their creative abilities.  To do so, one component of planning education must draw on the post-structural and hermeneutic literature. This will allow students, both at university and as they become practitioners, to have the necessary tools and insights to play and explore the public stage. This is  a place of rhetoric, strategic games and negotiation – all of which occurs under the deployment of power and knowledge to distort rationality into rationalisation (Flyvbjerg 1998a). As recent research is showing (ibid; Gunder 2000; Lovell 2000), a significant arena for this imposition of value is in the plan preparation and implementation process.  I suggest that developing an understanding of planning as creative ethical enquiry will result in our students  developing  planning actions – plans – with both good processes and outputs that also, more importantly, ensure a good and just society and environment.

 

Conclusion

 

In New Zealand critics such as Owen McShane (1998) attack planners and in particular their implementation of the RMA. Similarly, in the U.K. context, planning is often less than favourably perceived, ‘many members of the public associate town planning mainly with development control and think of the profession as regulatory, bureaucratic and reactive’ (Higgins and Morgan 2000: 119). I suggest that the underlying grounds for these concerns are partially ideologically and legislatively created, but are also reflections of poor planning outcomes where they really count. This is a failure in ethically good and creative outcomes for change towards a better environment – bio-physical and social. Both ethical and creative positive outcomes, at least in New Zealand, I would suggest, are more often lacking in plans than occurring – even if these plans are procedurally good. This is due to more than simply the, so called,  exclusion of socio-economic considerations in the RMA predicated plans. This is because the plans are used to re-inforce – or sustain -- the status quo without reflective thought on the part of the plan creators.

 

To overcome this lack of confidence in planners, planning education has an obligation, I suggest, to  produce practitioners concerned about ethics, creativity and even morality. This is what we try and achieve at the University of Auckland. Yet, at least in New Zealand, we may have an emerging problem in this regard. A letter to the editor in the September 2000 edition of the New Zealand Planning Institute [NZPI] Planning Quarterly from one of our recent Masters of Planning (Honours) graduates expresses concern. He has one of the few  New Zealand community planning positions. This is a  planning job  that is concerned about addressing  issues of  socio-economic need required to achieve a good liveable community, not a planning job  relating primarily to the RMA. In his letter he states a perceived potential risk of exclusion from successfully passing the membership panel for full membership in NZPI. This is because he is gaining little experience in RMA oriented planning. Yet he is constantly reflecting philosophically on his practice and feels he has a good insight into what good planning is all about (and I agree that he does) – one of the most important criteria for membership. His concerns are reinforced by a recent article on gaining membership in the same journal written by the NZPI’s previous Vice-President (Reaburn 2000). This article axiomatically focuses on the RMA for a discussion on new practitioners developing the necessary planning philosophy for professional membership in the Institution. Antidotally, I would suggest, other members of the Institution, and even some planning educators,  have expressed a similar RMA only orientation to planning in New Zealand. I have concern that this may well be an emerging problem where planning has become totally emerged in process in New Zealand at the cost of the good and this may be the very reason for current negative public perceptions about the profession.

 

I would argue  that we have a responsibility as planning educators to overcome this truncation and transfer of the profession to the sub-set of environmental resource management within the wider-set of managerial science. To do so we have to evaluate good plans and planning as being more than effect and efficient process. This demands evaluating and teaching planning as an ethical creative enquiry which attempts to understand how the range of human actors really behaves, and how and why they do so, in the shaping of environments, cities, regions and societies.

 

References:

Allmendinger, P., 1996. ‘Development control and the legitimacy of planning decisions - a commentary,’ Town Planning Review, 67(2): 229 - 233.

Baum, H.S., 1997. ‘Teaching practice,’ Journal of Planning Education and Research, 17: 21-29.

Berke, P.R., Crawford, J., Dixon, J., Ericksen, N., 1999. ‘Do cooperative environmental planning mandates produce good plans? Empirical results from the New Zealand experience,’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 26: 643-664.

Berke, P.R., Dixon, J., Ericksen, N., 1997. ‘Coercive and cooperative intergovernmental mandates: a comparative analysis of Florida and New Zealand environmental plans,’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 24: 451-468.

Bernstein, R.J., 1983. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bourdieu, P., 1998. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, P., 2000. Pascal Meditations, Cambridge; Polity Press.

Cuthbert, A.R., 1997. ‘Trial by Facts: A riposte to Gunder and Fookes,’ Australian Planner,  31 (4): 213 - 220.

Dobbs, B.J.T., 1991. The Janus faces of genius: The role of alchemy in Newton’s thought, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Faludi, A., 1998. ‘From planning theory mark1 to planning theory mark 3,’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, Anniversary Issue: 110-117.

Flyvbjerg, B., 1998a. Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Flyvbjerg, B., 1998b. 'Habermas and Foucault: thinkers for civil society?' British Journal of Sociology, 49(2): 210-233.

Flyvbjerg, B., forthcoming. Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again,  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foucault, M., 1971.The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.,  New York:  Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M., 1980. Power/Knowledge, Brighton: Harvester Press.

Gleeson, B.J., 1996. ‘The perils of market environmentalism,’ Environment and Planning A, 28(11): 1910 - 1916.

Grundy, K.J., 1995. “Re-examining the Role of Statutory Planning in New Zealand”, Urban Policy and Research, 13 (4): 235 - 247.

Gunder, M., 1998a. ‘Planning Beyond the Fetish of Modern Ideology,’ Australian Planner, 35  (2): 68 - 76.

Gunder, M., 1998b. "The  Free Lunch Public Transport Centre: A New Zealand case study on how to acquire 2,900  new car parking spaces and $0.4b in public debt,” World Transport Policy & Practice, 4 (3):  8-15.

Gunder, M., 2000. ‘Urban policy formation under efficiency: The case of Auckland City Councils’ Britomart project,’  Environmental Planning & Management in New Zealand, ed. By Memon, P.A., Perkins, H.,  Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 294 - 308.

Gunder, M., and Fookes, T., 1997. ‘Planning School Programs in Australia and New Zealand: A comparison of accredited programs - vocational vs critical content,’ Australian Planner, 34 (1): 54 - 61.

Harvey, D., 1996.Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Higgins, M., Morgan, J., 2000. The Role of Creativity in Planning: The ‘Creative Practitioner,’ Planning Practice &  Research, 15(1/2):117-127.

Hillier, J., Van Looij, T., 1997. ‘Who Speaks for the Poor?’ International Planning Studies, 2(1): 7-25.

Lovell, A., 2000. Power, Politics and Planning: The Eden Park Case Study, MPlan Research Project, University of Auckland.

Mastop, H., Faludi, A., 1997. ‘Evaluation of strategic plans: the performance principle,’ Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 24: 815-832.

McDermott, P. 1998. ‘Positioning planning in a market economy,’ Environment and Planning:  A, 30: 631-646.

MacIntyre, A., 1981. After virtue: a study in moral theory, London: Duckworth.

MacIntyre, A., 1992. ‘Utilitarianism and Cost-Benefit Analysis: An Essay on the Relevance of Moral Philosophy to Bureaucratic Theory,’ The Moral Dimensions of Public Policy Choice: Beyond the Market Paradigm, Ed. by Gillroy, J.M., Wade, M., Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 179 -194.

McLoughlin, J.B., 1994. ‘Centre or periphery? Town planning and spatial political economy,’ Environment and Planning A, 26: 1111 - 1122.

McShane, O., 1998. Land Use Control Under the Resource Management Act: A Think Piece, Ministry of the Environment, Wellington.

Memon, P.A., Gleeson, B.J., 1995. "Towards a new planning paradigm? Reflections on New Zealand's Resource Management Act", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, Vol. 22, pp109 -124.

Miller C.L.,  2000. ‘Alternative Methods in Resource Management: A New Zealand Example,’ Planning Practice & Research 15(1/2): 129-134.

Murray, J., Swaffield, S., 2000. ‘Policy myths in resource management,’  Environmental Planning & Management in New Zealand, ed. By Memon, P.A., Perkins, H.,  Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 74 – 79.

Naess, P., Saglie, I-L., 1999. Planning research and theory of science,  Department of Development and Planning, Aalborg University, www.i4.auc.dk/petter/dokumenter/vitskteoeng.htm.

Reaburn, P., 2000. ‘Talking Philosophically,’ NZPI Planning Quarterly, 137: 23-24.

Resource Management Act 1991. Reprinted as on 1 March 1994, Wellington: Government Press.

Rorty, R., 1979.  Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rorty, R., 1987. ‘Science as Solidarity,’ The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and argument in scholarship and public affairs, ed. by Nelson, J.S, et al, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, pp38 - 52.

Sandercock, L., 1997. ‘The Planner Tamed: Preparing planners for the twenty first century,’ Australian Planner, 34 ( 2): 90 - 95.

Sandercock, L., 1999. ‘A Portrait of Postmodern Planning: Anti-Hero and/or Passionate Pilgrim?’ Plan Canada 39(2): 12-15.

Shapin, S., 1998. The Scientific Revolution, University of Chicago Press: London.

Tewdwr-Jones, M., 1995. ‘Development control and the legitimacy of planning decisions,’ Town Planning Review,  66(2): 163 - 181.

Throgmorton, J.A., 1996. Planning as Persuasive Storytelling: The Rhetorical Construction of Chicago’s Electric Future, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Upton S., 1994. Address to the Resource Management Law Association by Hon Simon Upton, Minister for the Environment, Wellington, Parkroyal Hotel, 7 October, 1994. 

Upton S., 1995. ‘Purpose and Principle in The Resource Management Act,’ The Stace Hammond Grace Lecture 1995, University of Waikato.