The Indian Supreme Court sits in panels and can have up to 31 judges. This chapter explores how the Indian Supreme Court developed its current structure and the impact of this structure on its functioning. It argues that the Supreme Court’s structure has a range of inter-related effects that includes increasing access to the Court, producing a “polyvocal” jurisprudence that destabilizes stare decisis, spurring experimentation among judges, fostering a “Chief Justice dominant” Court, and reducing the perceived partisanship of judges. Mapping the structure of the Court, as well as the Court’s relationship with the rest of the judiciary, helps us appreciate how judges ultimately interpret the law and the Constitution not in isolation, but within a larger judicial architecture.

Neighbourhood planning is rooted in community dynamics, in the relationships and interactions that bind people together. These interactions may create what Tönnies (1887) described as a ‘unity of will’ and a sense of shared identity (see also Cohen, 1985), although they can also be a source of division, as fractures form between competing groups and diverse interests (Panelli, 2006). Broadly, communities are constituted of networks of social exchange and it is through these networks that community action is realised, often grounded in the emergence of ‘community leaders’ and in the coalescence of groupings that play a key role in catalysing interest around planning, development and broader service issues. In this chapter, we examine these groupings and these dynamics within the case study communities, drawing out the context for neighbourhood planning. This chapter also elaborates on the catalysts for, and motivating factors behind, community-based planning: who drives the process and who is co-opted or selected to move things forward. It presents an initial view of 10 communities from the perspective of groups, always including the parish clerk, tied to the parish councils. These are not necessarily viewed as primary nodes within local networks, but as practical entry points into communities, which is what they proved to be for the purposes of the study.

The study parishes

Throughout the chapters that follow, parishes are referred to using a notation that is designed to conceal their identities. Some of the information and views relayed by these ‘parish groups’ (PGs) was clearly confidential and not for public dissemination. For this reason, the 10 study parishes are referred to as ‘PG1’ to ‘PG10’. Sometimes the identity of parishes is revealed in the narratives and quotations presented. Where this clearly does not infringe on confidentiality, no attempt is made to conceal their identity. The case study parishes are shown in Figure 7.1 How community activism is triggered within different places is inevitably affected by the different experiences of the parishes. This issue is examined later in this chapter. On occasions, community activity gestates slowly as interest in local issues takes root; but sometimes it happens suddenly as passions are inflamed and communities seek to right what they view as great wrongs.

The ‘localism’ of the UK coalition government is rooted in some of the ideas introduced in the last chapter. It connects with a participatory and collaborative (or ‘iterative’) understanding of how the structures of governance should function (Corry and Stoker, 2002; Stoker, 2004, 2007) and, like other collaborative approaches that operate at the interface with ‘communities of interest’, is viewed as an antithesis to centralised control, exerted through executive decision-making structures. With individualisation and globalisation as its backdrop, it is presented as the means to achieve democratic renewal and to rebuild trust between policy communities and communities of interest. Local control over service delivery and community input into policy making seem to have an obvious meaning, and these are not new ideas. In the mid-2000s, Labour's programme of local government modernisation was frequently described as a form of ‘new localism’ (Davies, 2008, p 3). And during that period, others regularly noted the turn towards localism that appeared inherent in UK public policy (see Morphet, 2004a; Coaffee and Headlam, 2008). Localism is not new, but has deep roots in state theory and particularly in those discourses that focus on the relationship between local and central government and the extent to which the former can be freed from centralised control while still working to secure success in big government initiatives and programmes, in pursuit of a wider public good. However, use of the term is often couched in political rhetoric and conceptual uncertainty. Like other misused terms, ‘sustainability’ being the most obvious example, it can mean different things to different audiences. The purpose of this chapter is to clarify the origins of localism, to review the part it looks set to play in the coalition's ‘Big Society’ and then to focus on its ‘neighbourhood planning’ component and how this, framed by the broader ambition of localism, has become government's chosen mode of iterative governance and democratic renewal.

The centre and the local

Localism seeks a revision of the relationship between central state and governance structures at the local level, with a view to coping with the increasing diversity of individual and community needs and aspirations.

The political and policy framework in which local government operates, and which determines its relationship with key policy actors and with community and interest groups, has been heavily amended over the last 15 years. Successive Labour governments from 1997 drove forward a programme of state modernisation and local government reform that appeared to challenge executive forms of ‘top-down’ control, by centralised departments and agencies, giving momentum instead to collaborative and participative forms of ‘governance’, characterised by bottom-up input into decision-making processes by a range of local actors from across the public, private and voluntary sectors. Labour's reform programme, carried forward in several pieces of major legislation, sought to respond to an undercurrent of frustration with the failed politics of the 1980s and 1990s, which seemed locked within a model of executive, centralised power. The New Labour project from 1997 onwards was one of devolution of responsibility for decision making away from the centre, to new political structures in the Home Nations and the English regions and to existing local state apparatus, albeit revamped, modernised and better connected to broader community interests. The passing of responsibility further down the ‘chain of command’ to community governance structures, later dubbed ‘communities in control’, was famously claimed as evidence of government's commitment to ‘double devolution’ (Mulgan and Bury, 2006).

The legislation designed to realise a ‘governance shift’ in the UK, and specifically in England, is reviewed later in this chapter. But before dealing with the detail of local government reform, and contrasting its objectives with those of systemic changes to planning, it is useful to explore the roots of this process. All British governments, including the current coalition government, have during the period outlined above, appeared to concede power to the local state and to communities. Power has seemingly bled from the public to the private realm, bringing those who were previously governed into the process of government. There is, of course, a broader debate as to whether power has in fact relocated, or whether the emergent apparatus of collaborative governance is designed simply to appease local populations without bringing any genuine change. This question is examined through the lens of neighbourhood planning in England, but here we begin with a focus on the drivers of democratic and functional renewal, rooted in what has been viewed as a ‘disaggregation’ of state and society, ongoing in Western democracies for at least the past three decades.