Part three provides an international perspective on the English experience of neighbourhood planning to amplify its themes and to place it in the context of debates about global shifts in the spatial scale of governance and empowerment. It discusses the concept of locality, identifies the further potential of community planning beyond land use and explores the impact of different state and governance structures on ideas of localism and devolution. This section reminds us that planning at the neighbourhood level can be assembled differently in different places and at different times. The need to avoid easy readings of universalised shifts towards a generic form of localism in Western democratic countries therefore becomes clear. This section also offers some differing conclusions on the possibilities for the emergence of a more progressive localism and provides further insights into the scope and scale of planning at the neighbourhood level

Simon Pemberton begins this section in Chapter Eleven, exploring neighbourhood planning in the context of a wider notion of community planning, and of a broader range of meanings of localism across the devolved nations of the UK. The chapter serves to highlight the restrictive scope of neighbourhood planning in the English context and returns to the debates about the purposes of planning highlighted in the introduction. The focus on state strategy situates neighbourhood planning firmly within the liberal governance model and its promotion of an entrepreneurial public, while also suggesting that alternative strategies are being followed in different parts of the UK. In Chapter Twelve, Camille Gardesse and Jodelle Zetlaoui-Léger isolate the market dynamics and localist discourses that are central to the theory and practice of neighbourhood planning in England, in contrast to the French tradition of a centralised and republican state. They show how the concept of the central state as the custodian of the public good and the exclusion of the idea of community from the construction of republican citizenship created a ‘French exception’ to the liberal norms of participation in planning. These differing spatial scales of governance direct attention to the role of the central state as opposed to neighbourhoods in safeguarding the principles of equality and redistributive social justice in the uneven outcomes of participatory democratic practice, and highlight, once again, the market logics underpinning the English experience of localism and neighbourhood planning.