Towards a Political Economy of Complexity: Land Markets, Value Capture and Occulted Expertise

The paper examines the political economy of complexity in the field of planning and development that is most centrally concerned with the balance of power between private landowning interests, the state and local communities: land value capture. This is the policy area that has evolved to both embed market norms into planning while also paradoxically seeking to challenge the power of private landowners to retain all the value uplift that derives from development decisions. The paper utilises archival material from the 1940s to the present as well as over 50 contemporary research interviews with policy experts. The research examines the political economy of the complexity of land value capture and its embeddedness in the planning system to explore its role in shaping and delimiting the scope for reform of the land and property settlement. Thanks to this complexity, land value capture is dominated by specialist expertise (and specialist advisors) who are not traditional planners, but rather development surveyors, economic modellers and land agents who have occulted knowledge of a notoriously opaque market. The paper will show how this expertise has been embedded in British planning in various ways since the inception of the comprehensive system in the 1940s and has lately formed a focal point for the re-politicisation of land value under the pressures of inequalities under late-neoliberalism. The research therefore examines the ways in which the material and symbolic complexity of the land market and its relationship with planning has been invoked in controversies surrounding the inequalities of the distribution of ownership of land value and attempts by policymakers to address them. In land value capture, therefore, complexity is not a neutral byproduct of administrative necessity, but rather reflects the interplay of power, expertise and hierarchies of knowledge. Core to this is the role of experts in (mis)representing the land market and its activities as ‘brute facts’ that will always defeat best laid policy plans unless they are sufficiently aligned with ‘the market’, rather than political and social constructions that are responsive to changes in policy. In such a framing, market knowledge is superior to planning knowledge, unless the two are in sufficient alignment, or else blur into one another. It is not acknowledged that the complexity inherent in land value capture is an outcome of centuries of complicated land law that privileges and protects the power of private landowners and the specialist advisors that serve them. Indeed, the only truly ‘brute fact’ in this complexity is the material and fixed existence of land. All else is the product of political decisions, social institutions and ideology – and therefore possible to change. The complexity of land value capture, both real and symbolic, is therefore entangled with the power relations that close down or else disrupt political moves to re-articulate the land and property settlement into more equitable forms via the re-regulation of the development land market.