Land developers as institutional and postpolitical actors: Sites of power in land use policy and planning

Introduction

Planning and its role in the development of land and property are highly political. In cities of the global North, landowners and land developers generally have a prominent stake in land development, with some variations by country, although they are often taken for granted and unremarked as policy actors. However, as empirical research shows, with the spread of neoliberal policies, private developers have become more accepted as partners with the state in the provision of urban infrastructure and services, and as key actors in policy processes (Legacy et al., 2018; Macdonald, 2018). At certain moments of well-publicized land conflict or popular opposition to planning policies, the media and public more closely scrutinize land developers, their relationship with state and community actors, and their power over land policy (Sandberg et al., 2013).

This is how our research began: with an examination of popular opposition to ‘greenfield’ ¹ land development that was happening on a local level at the expanding peri-urban fringe of the Toronto region. While we focused on the policies and practices that allowed what seemed to be uncontrolled growth and generated organized dissent to development, we were well aware that these disputes, which were played out through the involvement of local newspapers and community groups, were part of a broader set of relationships and objectives within urban planning and development. This led us to pay more attention to the processes that led to development disputes, including what appeared to be an increasingly active role by development industry actors in the political process and policy changes that culminated in growth management plans. While the terms ‘developer’ and ‘development industry’ are broad, this paper focuses on residential greenfield developers and the related development industry, organized interests that include a wide variety of firms that engage in some aspect of residential land development and/or housing construction on sites outside of existing urban areas.

A growing body of research has investigated the role of developers in urban and regional governance institutions and in processes of spatial restructuring, especially in the global South (Dodman, 2008; Sabbi and Mensah, 2016; Shatkin, 2016; Weinstein, 2014). Research on developers in the global North sheds light on developers’ influence on land policies, especially in British, American and Australian cities (Coiacetto, 2006; Fainstein, 2001; Ruming, 2009) and, to a lesser extent, Canadian cities (Leffers, 2018; Sandberg et al., 2013). Focusing on the UK, MacLeod (2011: 2633) highlights the ‘relational processes’ of land use conflicts in studies of urban politics. Recent research in Australia documents the importance of institutional settings that grant legitimacy and greater influence to development industry lobby groups that frame powerful narratives blaming limited housing supply on land use planning. For example, Gurran and Phibbs (2013) document the impact on government policy of industry submissions and position papers and how these narratives in specific cities forward a growth agenda.

While the growing literature on developers and the development industry is promising, more attention needs to be paid to the multiplicity of ways that developers shape planning and development policies, and how local specificities lead to varied institutional relationships between developers and state institutions in a global world of diverse developer types and development contexts. This paper investigates developers as economic and political actors that are implicated in routine and more ad hoc mechanisms through which they shape planning policies and land use decisions. We pay particular attention to state-sanctioned mechanisms that construe developers as ‘partners’ and privileged ‘stakeholders’ in large-scale urban policy processes that are often justified using discourses of democracy, consensus and collaboration. Our research examines shifts in planning and policy frameworks that strategically, and through ostensibly ‘legitimate’ processes, privilege the interests of land developers over other actors and interests.

In the early 1990s, Healey (1991: 219) reported that research on development processes uncovered substantial ‘spatial and temporal variety’, making it difficult to generalize about specific categories of actors or events. This concern was reiterated by Guy and Henneberry (2000), who cautioned that property development research must consider the wider institutional, social and cultural contexts within which development occurs. They emphasized that developers operating in specific places have unique histories and ways of operating. We contribute to the growing body of research on developers and the development industry that disturbs prevailing and simplistic economic understandings of real estate developers as predictable and rational economic actors. Instead, we investigate the ongoing and shifting relationships and political practices used by developers in the attempt to develop greenfield sites.

We draw on two complementary theoretical frameworks to examine the power of developers, their varied influences and those of associations of development firms that work within and seek to shape the political and planning institutions at centre stage in the local land development process. These frameworks are interpretive institutionalism (e.g. Bevir and Rhodes, 2010; Lowndes and Roberts, 2013; Somers, 1998) and theories of postpolitics, especially variants utilized in urban studies and urban planning (e.g. Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012; Legacy et al., 2018; Macdonald, 2018; Swyngedouw, 2005, 2018). Institutionalist approaches focus on the role of key actors, ideas and strategies in influencing the trajectories of political institutions (Lowndes and Roberts, 2013; Sabbi and Mensah, 2016). The interpretive institutionalism framework that we employ pays particular attention to the power of actors and ideas, and how these play a part in the stability and dynamism of institutions and organizations (Bevir and Rhodes, 2010; Lowndes and Roberts, 2013).

Postpolitical theory includes a range of frameworks concerned with the ways that state power, while claiming greater democratic inclusion, can instead be used to undermine democracy. Political philosopher Jacques Rancière (2004) argues that democracy must include possibilities for dissent, but that consensus politics, which purports to be democratically inclusive, in actuality refuses dissent in favor of consent. Rancière is concerned that democracy, which he defines as ‘the institution of politics itself as the aberrant form of government’ (2004: 6), may be replaced by a consensus politics that forecloses on possibilities for disagreement. Scholars concerned with a ‘postpolitical turn’ in planning practice investigate the (sometimes) hidden role of powerful actors in collaborative planning processes (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2005). Some postpolitical theorists have emphasized that collaborative planning processes control the terms of public debate, in effect undermining the participation of many oppositional voices (Legacy et al., 2018; Rancière, 1998; Swyngedouw, 2005).

Drawing on theories of interpretive institutionalism and postpolitics, our research documents in detail the orchestration, within an institutionalized state-led planning process in the Toronto region, of an exercise that quite blatantly privileged the economic interests of land developers. At the same time, the process provided a stage upon which dissent could be publicized. However, through careful state management, opponents were ultimately restricted in their ability to challenge preferred land use planning outcomes. More insidiously, these outcomes were championed as being in the public interest, cast as wins for urban growth management and environmental protection, even as gains made by development interests were downplayed. We also show that the orchestration was not entirely successful, and the dismissal of dissent not fully realized.

The empirical evidence informing this paper derives from research on the development industry in the Toronto region, Canada and land conflicts associated with major regional planning reforms between 1998 and 2005 that culminated in a greenbelt and growth management plan. We draw upon two related research projects. The first is a long-term study investigating land use conflicts in the Toronto region that focused on residents’ and environmentalists’ activism to curb development proposals and pass legislation to preserve nature and control growth on the Oak Ridges Moraine (ORM), an environmentally sensitive post-glacial landscape spanning a 60-km arc north of Toronto, Canada (Sandberg et al., 2013), and to support enactment of a larger greenbelt plan. This multi-method research included participant observation prior to provincial legislation at 15 public consultations, public hearings at municipal councils and the provincial legislature, and demonstrations at the legislature and at real estate sales offices. Personal interviews with 40 public officials included mayors, councillors, planners, regional and provincial officials, developers, lawyers, environmental scientists and members of the Oak Ridges Moraine Advisory Committee. We conducted 25 interviews with exurban residents, rural and environmental activists and representatives of land trusts. We analyzed planning reports and policy documents by local, regional and provincial governments, transcripts of debates in the Ontario legislature and provincial legislation, as well as media coverage over two decades in Toronto and regional newspapers on the lands covered by the ORM and Greenbelt legislation. The second study, conducted between 2011 and 2014, focused more specifically on developers and the development industry as key actors in the conflicts over the future of the lands encompassed by the ORM. This research is based on 30 interviews with planners, developers, planning consultants and environmental activists, as well as document and archival research related to new land use planning legislation introduced in the early 2000s in the Toronto region.

The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. In the next section, we review some related literature on interpretive institutional theories and theories of postpolitics. We then outline the land development process in the Toronto region and the significance of our case study and examine some of the actors and conflicts that fueled legislation. Next, we examine the mechanisms employed by developers and development industry associations to shape policy in their ongoing relationships with local and provincial governments. Finally, we assess the contributions of institutional and postpolitical theories to a more multi-faceted analysis of the influences of developers and their industry on land use change in the region.

Interpretive institutionalist approaches: implications for planning

Recent iterations of institutional theories attempt to explain ‘political life’ by paying attention to formal and informal ‘rules of the game’ in governance and politics and how they shape the behaviour of actors (Lowndes and Roberts, 2013: 9). Institutionalism in the most general sense is the study of the interrelationships between organizations with their historically developed patterns of rules and norms, the actors that operate within those institutional contexts and the investigations of how these interrelationships work to render institutions stable or subject to change (Bevir and Rhodes, 2010; March and Olsen, 2005). Various institutionalist approaches have been used in political analyses, each with their own foci (March and Olsen, 2005). More structuralist versions of institutionalism emphasize the rules and procedures, rather than the actors and ideas, within a given institution or organization. For example, drawing on historical institutionalism, Sorensen (2018: 33) construes ‘urban property, infrastructure, and governance institutions and the places they produce’ as path-dependent effects of previous decisions that were made within specific institutional contexts. Once ‘locked-in’, rules and procedures are difficult to change, according to this framework. More constructivist approaches, such as interpretive institutionalism, emphasize the power of actors, ideas and informal routines more so than the formal rules and systems that are often associated with institutional analysis (Barzelay and Gallego, 2006; Bevir and Rhodes, 2010). Interpretive institutionalism privileges neither the agency of actors nor the structural frameworks within which they operate, but rather evaluates the ‘relational processes of interaction’ between entities (Somers, 1998: 766), or as Krueger et al. (2018: 572) frame it, the process of ‘“meaning making” by agents who create and recreate their milieux as part of broader political-economic contexts’. Hence, institutional elements, such as traditions, norms as well as more codified legal rules, can be construed as somewhat fluid components of institutions that change over time, through the actions of actors with specific beliefs and values, both incrementally and conjuncturally, especially in response to contestation and negotiation.

Planning scholars have been drawn to institutionalist theories primarily to evaluate the potential for public participation within institutionalized planning processes (González and Healey, 2005; Maiello et al., 2012), and to investigate factors influencing stability and change within planning institutions (Coaffee and Healey, 2003). González and Healey (2005), using a rather structuralist sociological institutionalism (they refer to it as ‘structure-agency institutionalism’) suggest that a collaborative planning framework can foster ‘governance innovation’ (i.e. increased avenues for public participation). Other scholars are more critical. MacLeod (2011) argues that community-led partnerships often silence dissident voices. Swyngedouw (2018) documents the depoliticized and techno-managerial forms of governance that coopt and institutionalize democratic collaboration. In contrast, investigating a large-scale urban environmental planning process in Rio de Janeiro, Maiello et al. (2012) conclude that the effectiveness of public involvement and buy-in to the planning process is contingent upon the locus of power and the planning process. They find that it is the actors and their willingness and ability to foster community engagement that renders processes successful or not, although the scale is important, with locally driven processes being more successful than top-down processes deriving from central government agencies. The tensions between collaboration and public involvement as a form of democratic engagement and the opportunities for powerful actors and interests to dominate these processes has been a central concern for urban and planning scholars. Going further, Etherington and Jones (2018) argue that depoliticization is a neoliberal state strategy for deferring the political; their empirical research on Sheffield highlights the continuing and pivotal role of the state as the arena for performing politics that supports growth.

The dilemma of collaborative planning: a postpolitical critique

There has been a growing literature on the role of collaboration and stakeholders in addressing urban land use disputes and planning for the future of land. Healey (1998) argued that planning practice has ostensibly changed from the realm of supposedly objective experts offering solutions to problems, towards strategic and collaborative planning where many different public and private groups and individuals collaborate to develop planning strategies. The ‘collaborative turn’ in planning can be seen as part of a broader shift in urban governance. With neoliberal forms of governance that have come to characterize late capitalism, states have moved away from institutional arrangements that manage physical urban development and social welfare—managerialism—towards an emphasis on economic development—entrepreneurialism—especially evident in public–private partnerships (Harvey, 1989). Yet, the weak capacity of local governments to meet economic development demands has resulted in the partnerships and collaborations between governments and various business and community agencies (Healey, 1998). According to this account, governance and institutions have shifted away from command and control, hierarchical and bureaucratic regimes characteristic of the post WWII welfare state, towards a form of governance that takes on an institutional form as ‘supportive “container” of the economic, social and environmental relations that pass through it … building up collaborative relationships with “stakeholders”’ (Healey, 1998: 1535).

Governance (as opposed to government) implies a shift away from hierarchies towards networks (Bevir and Rhodes, 2010). One result of this shift is that planning itself has changed from the realm of (ostensibly) autonomous experts who develop ideas and present them to governments, towards strategic and collaborative planning where many different public and private groups and individuals collaborate to develop planning strategies (Healey, 1998: 1537). Optimistic readings of collaborative planning conceptualized this shift as an opportunity for more innovation, inclusivity and citizen participation, contrasted with interest-based conflict and win–lose planning (González and Healey, 2005). Collaborative planning approaches have become institutionalized in planning practice in countries such as the US, the UK and Canada as administrative requirements for public consultation and engagement.

Critics of the ‘collaborative turn’ draw on the concept of the postpolitical to focus attention on the hidden ways that collaborative planning exercises can stifle ‘real’ politics characterized by dissent and debate (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012) and ‘the costs of consensus politics’ (Legacy et al., 2018: 176). Most theorists of postpolitics draw on French political philosopher Jacques Rancière’s concern that democracy, which he defines as ‘the institution of politics itself as the aberrant form of government’ (Rancière, 2004: 6), can be replaced by a consensus politics that refuses dissent. For Rancière (2004: 6), politics (or political dissensus) disrupts the logics of orderly government imposed by a dominant state; democracy is the ‘institution of politics’ that disrupts this form of government. Rancière argues that a postpolitical consensus serves to undermine this disruption, replacing contestation with an order that makes dominant forms of governing seem rational and indisputable.

In the context of urban conflict and planning disputes, Swyngedouw (2005) finds that tensions often occur between the promises of improved transparency and enhanced democracy through collaborative planning processes, and non-accountable non-representational forms of participation dominated by political and economic elites. Swyngedouw (2005) argues that debate and disagreement have been replaced by exercises geared towards conflict resolution, often by using experts and technical forms of knowledge and by curating participation and limiting the realm of alternatives. The planning system thus becomes a ‘carefully choreographed process’ intended to minimize disruption to the status quo (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012: 90). While the outcomes of collaborative planning are not predictable and civil society actors often do make some gains, some scholars argue that there is also a danger that collaborative planning disguises the power of elites to control both the process and the outcomes (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012; Legacy et al., 2018).

In the planning realm, the inclusion of corporate actors in advisory committees, expert roundtables and panels, and collaborative stakeholder processes can be interpreted as postpolitical exercises that reframe the power of dominant economic development actors as problem-solvers in the service of the public interest. Solving problems and speeding up deliberative processes are the primary goals: planning exercises may be viewed as a means to restore the order that fosters a climate of economic certainty, rather than encouraging heightened democratic engagement that can become messy and time-consuming (Legacy et al., 2018). Based on empirical research on Australian cities, Macdonald (2018: 237) labels these ‘development-enabling planning strategies’. In efforts to streamline new land use plans to accommodate growing populations and the need for an expanded tax base, planners and politicians may propose strategic stakeholder exercises.

Conflicts over greenfield development

From 2000 to 2005, peri-urban land development in the Toronto region was characterized by the political influence of the development industry as stakeholders and collaborators with the state and civil society in the passage of policies to manage growth and conserve nature. However, changing political regimes also meant shifts in the relative policy influence of different interest groups. With a population of nearly six million in 2016, the Toronto region (colloquially known as the Greater Toronto Area or GTA) has historically been one of the fastest-growing regions in Canada: the growth rate was 6.2 percent between 2011 and 2016 (Statistics Canada, 2017). Approximately 40,000 units per year of new housing were built in the Toronto region between 2015 and 2016 (CMHC, 2017). As most urban growth in Canada occurs at the periphery of large cities (Gordon and Janzen, 2013), municipalities at the periphery have been under the most pressure to accommodate growth in the past decades.

Municipalities in the Toronto region rely on development charges and property taxes from new developments as a source of funding for local services. Intense pressures from the development industry for approvals to build greenfield subdivisions on the urban periphery of the Toronto region from the late 1990s to the present generated conflicts over hundreds of development proposals. Particularly contentious were development proposals on the ORM. Due to its hydrogeological significance as a groundwater recharge area, and as the site of headwaters for numerous rivers and watersheds, farmland and sensitive natural areas, local residents, environmental organizations and related professionals became active in opposing development on multiple sites across the ORM (Wekerle et al., 2007).

To resolve land conflicts shortly before a provincial election, the Conservative provincial government that was in power in 2001 appointed the Oak Ridges Moraine Advisory Panel (ORMAP) to develop a consensus-based planning process that would appease development interests, environmental groups and local municipal planning authorities by appointing carefully selected panel members from several sectors. Participants included regional politicians, four environmental organizations, three developers owning lands on the ORM, one representative of the agricultural industry, one representative of the aggregate industry and one academic. The expectation was that by working with a mediator over a limited time frame these panel members, many of whom were adversaries, could deliberate, arrive at a consensus and de-escalate a contentious political issue. The process itself was heavily controlled by the provincial government. Over the summer of 2001, to appease a network of anti-development groups that included homeowners and environmental groups, the ORMAP hosted open houses, public consultations and closed-door stakeholder meetings (Sandberg and Wekerle, 2010). At the end of this process, in late 2001, the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Act (2001) was passed, authorizing the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan (MMAH, 2002a).

In the fall of 2003, a provincial election replaced the Progressive Conservatives with a Liberal government that exploited existing momentum and fulfilled election promises to create a greenbelt that included the ORM Plan on the northern peri-urban periphery of Toronto. Stakeholder and public consultation processes in some ways mirrored the ORM process but also gave more power to provincial civil servants and politicians. In early 2004, the Liberals appointed a stakeholder advisory body, the Greenbelt Task Force (GTF), to develop principles and lead public and stakeholder consultations. The composition of the GTF included representatives of municipal and regional municipalities, five development industry representatives (including two developers) and five non-governmental organizations (NGOs), of which four represented environmental organizations. The GTF met weekly to develop recommendations, after which provincial inter-ministerial teams produced a greenbelt plan authorized through the Greenbelt Act (2005).

The inclusion of developers in stakeholder panels used to shape land use policy represents a relatively infrequent and public opportunity for developers to influence greenfield policy in collaboration with civil society and state actors. More common and routinized are the various ways in which developers are able to wield power and shape land use legislation through day-to-day interactions with state officials and well-organized institutionalized engagement of development industry associations with public officials. In this paper, we examine both mechanisms—episodic influence and normalized practices—that offer developers opportunities to shape land use policy and implementation. Episodic influences often occur through collaborative planning exercises; normalized practices refer to the ongoing and institutionalized contacts among developers, public officials, politicians and civil society actors. These mechanisms came into play in processes to create legislation for the ORM and greenbelt.

Conclusions

Most large Toronto region development firms are deeply embedded in planning and political institutions, and we have argued in this paper that these relationships serve to minimize uncertainty and are important for developers as they navigate an increasingly complex institutional land use planning framework. In the Toronto region, large-scale collaborative planning exercises have given developers additional opportunities to meet face-to-face with other, often adversarial, stakeholders to press for their priorities. This further legitimates their claims with the public. Although some research on developers pays attention to the relationships between corporations and state agencies (e.g. Charney, 2007; Coiacetto, 2006; Lawton et al. 2013; Ruming, 2009; Sabbi and Mensah, 2016; Weinstein, 2014), and the privatization of planning (Jung and Lee, 2017; Shatkin, 2016), only a few studies examine developers’ influences within land use planning institutions and focus on their roles within postpolitical planning exercises (Legacy et al., 2018; Macdonald, 2018). And while some researchers, especially in the global South (e.g. Sabbi and Mensah, 2016), have found that developers work to circumvent the planning and regulatory system, we have found that developers are more likely to influence and re-shape, rather than attempt to bypass these institutions.

As Lowndes and Roberts (2013) suggest, how political and economic life are organized matters. Developers and the development industry are often privileged and well-positioned to insert their private interests into public policies both in high profile cases of land conflict and in the routine approvals and policy negotiation processes. While institutions may shape relationships of power, some institutional actors may resist or strategically use particular rules for their own purposes (Macdonald, 2018). Developers occupy a privileged position utilizing a multiplicity of opportunities open to individual development companies and their industry associations to participate in shaping the land use planning system in the province of Ontario. Often the day-to-day operations and connections of developers to state actors are in the shadows, mostly hidden from public view and scrutiny. Protracted public land conflicts bring these actors out of the shadows and into the spotlight, if only momentarily. In this paper, we draw upon institutionalist theoretical frameworks to understand how land use planning and development processes and institutions are populated by actors and their ideas, working contingently within local spatial contexts shaped by social, cultural, historical and economic forces. Development interests legitimately participate in consensus-based planning exercises to strengthen their position and make their case in person. While some postpolitical analyses suggest that consultation exercises are often state projects designed to choreograph pre-defined results that appear to empower diverse interests while maintaining existing power relations (e.g. Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012), this is not always the case.

Recent empirical research (Macdonald, 2018) suggests that state and corporate interests have only partial and unpredictable control of the outcomes of strategic planning exercises; they may also generate oppositional politics, as we have seen in high-profile land conflicts in the Toronto region (Gilbert et al., 2009; Sandbert et al., 2013). While developers may benefit disproportionately from stakeholder and other forms of consultation by drawing upon the resources of powerful individuals and a well-organized industry, such exercises may also surface new political claims (Swyngedouw, 2018). The original rationale for the ORM stakeholder panel was to quickly resolve a land use dispute and can, therefore, be framed as a postpolitical exercise where only sanctioned forms of ‘opposition’ were permitted. What emerged from the process was a newly energized segment of the public, journalists and environmental groups that continued contesting government decisions, influencing provincial electoral politics and attempting to shape the very planning and development institutions into which they inserted themselves as participants. However, as interpretive institutionalist theorists argue (Bevir and Richards, 2009), beliefs, actions, discourses and relationships make a difference to policy outcomes. The complexity of local circumstances—place and place attachments, local politics, history, the power of movements—shows that planning and participatory exercises often resist complete co-optation. As Macdonald (2018) finds in her Australian research, postpoliticizing efforts are often only partially successful, as networks of opponents to development challenge the influence of urban actors on urban policy. Close, grounded, empirical research (e.g. Legacy et al., 2018) highlights the importance of these local and place-based aspects of how planning and development institutions work, and suggests a need to scrutinize political exercises closely. In Ontario, planning legislation to protect the ORM and create a greenbelt was strongly influenced by networks of homeowners and environmentalists, thereby limiting the options for land developers, despite their powerful political connections. That said, the work of activism and resistance is never complete once and for all, and the theories we use to explain urban politics similarly require constant re-examination.