The long march to collaborative democracy and open source planning – public participation in English local governance

Note, June 2015: Four years and a general election later it seems worth putting this paper into the public domain. The book project it was part of nev er materialised, so it has been gathering metaphorical dust on my hard drive ever since. The Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition was less than a year old when I wrote the paper, and mu ch has since been written about its localism and planning ‘reforms’. However, this analysis of how we arrived at ‘the Big Society’ in 2010 is still of interest, I believe, even if the ‘Big Society’ itse lf became seen as a ‘toxic brand’ and was rather ra pidly dropped. The ideas live on in current policy and it is important to know that they are part of a long trajectory. I haven’t updated the text –it’s stil l in the present tense about the ‘new’ government o f 2010.