Can the market be tamed? A thought experiment on the value(s) of planning

Abstract

In many contexts across the globe, the scope and remit of planning is being limited. Much of the academic literature identifies this tendency as arising from a tension between planning as a state-regulatory activity and the tenets of neoliberalism – particularly free market competition. In this essay, we seek to explore the degree to which this perceived incompatibility between planning and the neoliberal order is genuinely real by running a thought experiment. We hope to show that thinking about the development process in this way points to alternative ways of imagining the scope and remit of planning – and how the normative principles at the core of the activity might be reconciled, or even extended, within the context of a neoliberal polity.