The Politics of Communication between Planning Officers and Politicians: The Exercise of Power through Discourse

The relationship between local government officers and elected members is central to the decisionmaking processes associated with planning, as with many other areas of public policymaking. Legal responsibilities and issues of accountability and legitimacy lie at the heart of the relationship between officers and members, with interaction mediated and constituted through ritualised communicative encounters such as committee meetings and associated reports, and less formally through ad hoc contacts. Given the importance of this relationship it is striking that there has been relatively little research into the influences on officers and members within everyday planning practice. In this paper we will explore the extent to which a consideration of the language used in planning practice can inform our understanding of the relationship between planners and politicians. Thinking within the planning field about the role of language as a mechanism for reflecting and constituting power has been dominated by the work of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault. However, despite the increasing attention focused on the importance of language and communication, work within the planning community has tended to concentrate on normative issues of how planning ought to operate in society rather than situating these theories within the ‘real’ world of practice. The objectives behind the case study research evaluated in this paper are therefore twofold. First, to explore the role of language and discourse in reflecting and constituting relations of power in a planning authority on the south coast of England and, second, to explore the value of Foucault's and Habermas's ideas as tools of research in planning. On the basis of this study we conclude that there are some important theoretical and methodological difficulties in connecting the ideas of Habermas and Foucault to the world of everyday planning practice.