This review is drawn from (Hasan, Sacha. 2012, Civil Society Participation in Urban Development in Syria)
Institutional issues are present in every urban development debate, as it concerns the planning and management of resources in order to potentially achieve the aspects of sustainable development. However, to achieve this, it is important to define who is the planner and the manager, their capacities, the legal framework within which they function. Furthermore, it is important to define areas for possible improvement within this framework and its resulting organisational structure, in order to increase the efficiency of the planning system within any given governance context (Devas & Rakodi, 1993; Haddad, 2009).
Institutions can be defined as ‘organizations or sets of conventions, policies or legislation which regularize social behaviour. Institutions operate at all levels from the household to the international arena and in all spheres from the most private to the most public’ (Matsaert, 2002, 2). In social sciences, institutional analysis ‘responds to the question of which organizations carry out policy reforms, and what are their characteristics. It can be conceived as the stakeholder analysis of the government agencies, non-government organizations and firms that implement or support the public action choices that underlie a policy reform studies’ (WB, 2009, 1).
In this context, institutional analysis is used to ‘assess the capacity and behaviour of organizations that carry out reforms. This helps identify constraints within an organization that may undermine policy implementation. Such constraints may exist at the level of internal processes, relationships among organizations, or system-wide’ (WB, 2009, 1). Furthermore, this analysis ‘evaluates formal institutions, such as rules, resource allocation, and authorization procedures. It also evaluates soft institutions, such as informal rules of the game, power relations and incentive structures, that underlie current practices. In the latter sense, it identifies organizational stakeholders that are likely to support or obstruct a given reform’ (WB, 2009, 1).
In the context of urban planning, literature has emphasised the linkage between a comprehensive institutional approach and good planning governance, for more sustainable outcomes. For example, Healey (1997) acknowledged the emergence of a paradigm shift in understanding planning from the 1970s rational comprehensive model using political economy analysis, to an institutional and communicative approach in the late 1990s. In this, Healey (2007) emphasised the importance of examining the spheres of relations and institutional sites that link different groups in society together as they interact through a diffused urban governance context. Governance, in this sense, was defined by Healey (2007) to be the landscape that ‘focuses on strategies that treat the territory of the urban not just as a container in which things happen, but as a complex mixture of nodes and networks, places and flows, in which multiple relations, activities and values co-exist, interact, combine, conflict, oppress and generate creative synergy’ (Healey, 2007, 18).
To analyse urban planning governance, Healey (2007) provided a three-level analytical framework. The first level examines the interactions which occurred in a specific event of spatial strategy-making. The second level is an institutional approach which looks at the routines of practices and discourses of the formal government, established agencies and the informal groups and networks (Healey, 2007). These two levels provide an analysis of the society actors and their spheres of relations. The third level of Healey’s analytical framework is concerned more with the ‘cultural assumptions’ of those involved in ‘doing governance’ and their prioritising achieve a more suitable governance module (Healey, 2007). In other words, the third level examines the urban mental models/frameworks (formal or informal) that shape the structure of the given governance context.
Another example of institutional analysis of urban development governance was introduced by Jenkins and Smith (Carley et al, 2001), who proposed three paradigms to label the stages of planning evolution during the 20th century, to shift from a rational to a relative perspective of viewing planning. The first is the command and control paradigm which is of a fixed vision of urban development translated in ‘master plans’ or ‘blue-prints’. In this, planning was of a central nature where the government was in full power over decision-making. This model of planning, however, was widely criticised in the 1960s leading planning to shift to the second paradigm of planning as ‘a process of conflict mediation’. In this, a range of interest started to find their opportunity for a voice within the system reducing the government control over decision-making. This challenged the political-administrative nexus to keep control of both processes and agendas during the 1980s (Healey, 1994, 253). This new model of interaction led planning to further shift to the third paradigm of ‘inter discursive policy formation’ – which is based on embedding planning practice within its social context, where planning policies are based upon the wide range of interests of society actors via a collaborative consensus building rather than competitive interest bargaining.
In the paradigm shift described above, Jenkins and Smith (Carley et al, 2001) used an institutionalist analytical framework to describe the evolution of the planning process. This consists of three themes. The first examines the key actors, the state, the market and the civil society, who affect the process and their interest and spheres of relations. The second theme – and this is very much dependent on the results of the first one – is an institutional analysis which concerns with the mental models – and this includes the formal legal frameworks and the informal socially accepted frameworks – which shape the relations of the actors into an organisational structure of interaction in relevance to the given urban context. The third theme focuses on the local/global relationship, ‘how local action can act within global context and how global forces adjust to local needs’ (Haddad, 2009).
