The Work and Impact of Neighbourhood Development Plans post-adoption

Neighbourhood planning was introduced as a new level of participatory neighbourhood-scale planning in England under the 2011 Localism Act. Most of previous studies have focused on mainly the emergence of neighbourhood planning and the preparation of neighbourhood development plans. There are no in-depth academic accounts of neighbourhood development plans ‘post-adoption’, whilst development plans in England have considerable and practical power to influence and shape the growth of the real world. This thesis aims to identify and explore the work and impact of neighbourhood development plans after their adoption based on empirical evidence, tracing how the neighbourhood development plans are used within the planning system and contexts. To do this, multiple embedded case study design with the mixed quantitative and qualitative methods is employed for scrutinising four selected neighbourhood development plans.
This thesis deploys and reworks the concept of the communicative work of development plans proposed by Healey (1993) as a conceptual and theoretical tool. This concept is extended to understand the nature and influence of a development plan within its continuing and interactive contexts and further reproduced by reflecting and adjusting to the particularities and attributes of neighbourhood development plans as a relatively new form of community-led plans. The findings highlight that neighbourhood development plans and neighbourhood planning groups themselves seek to remain actively involved in post-adoption planning processes, interacting constantly but sometimes in quite different ways with their external planning environments. The research provides deeper insight into the work of neighbourhood development plans and their interactive power and influence. In turn this insight can provide practical guidelines for those who produce or revise neighbourhood plans and those who support them.