KTH ROYAL INSTITUTEOF TECHNOLOGY

Why is public sector planning still in use?7th Nordic Planning Research Symposium

Stockholm, 21 August 2015

Björn Hasselgren, PhD, Royal Institute of Technology

Different perspectives and purposes

- Why use public sector planning when markets often work well and generally foster good coordination and efficiency?

- Markets do not take justice and distributive aspects enough into consideration and communication is vital to democracy

- Could it be the case that public sector planning is more about retaining public sector influence and power than about communication and democratic planning ideals?

Different assets and different measures/values

Public goods

Rela-tional goods

Private goods

Democratic processDistributive justiceCoercion

Market processCommutative justiceVoluntarism

Deliberation and processual outcomeVoluntary or coercive?

The planner role

Activist planner- pragmatism- discovery- recombination- ”critical”

towards markets

- autoritarian?

Entrepreneur- pragmatism- discovery- recombination- market based- bottom up

Neutral/Weberian-driven by ethics and moral standards-neutrality in relation to markets

Sager Weber,de Gay

Schumpeter,Kirzner,Montemartini

Unexpected similarities?

Spontaneous

ordering

Criticial Planning Theory

Neo classical equilibrium focus

Coasean "social cost"

bargaining

Private goods

Public goods

Economic efficiency focus

Relational focus

Some reflections

- Perhaps stronger similarities between the activist planner (CPT) and entrepreneurship research than generally discussed?

- Creative destruction and critical communicative planning different measures with similar goals and effects?

- Public sector planning as a tool for public sector influence more than democratic tool and concern?

Björn Hasselgren, PhDRoyal Institute of TechnologyUrban Planning and Environmentbjorn.hasselgren@abe.kths.e+46-70-7623316@HasselgrenB