The Political Economy of Legislative Change: Neoliberalising Planning Legislation

Abstract

The ideas associated with neoliberalism have become deeply entrenched within state institutions in a large part of the world, and these ideas have a specific political economy. Accompanying them is the notion that the market should discipline the political system (Sager, 2011) and therefore the general population, if we accept the mainstream assumption that the political system is a representation of the will of the people. The recent explosion of literature on neoliberalism (see Peck, 2010) has demonstrated that the concept is a powerful lens through which to examine regulatory and institutional transformation at a range of spatial scales and different socio-political contexts. Of particular import here is the work which emphasises that neoliberalism is not a static concept but a dynamic process. Here, neoliberalism can be seen as a form of regulatory reorganisation to impose, extend and consolidate marketised commodified forms of social life (Brenner et al., 2010). It is, as Peck (2010, p. 9) notes, about the capture and reuse of the state in the interests of shaping a ‘pro-corporate, free-trading “market order” ‘. However, the process by which this happens (neoliberalisation) is rarely identical from one place to the next, at different scales, or indeed, across different socio-political contexts. In other words, processes of neoliberalisation are dynamic, slippery and highly adaptable, and this is precisely what contributes to the persistence of neoliberal ideas.