Including participation requirements into planning law: experiences from the Netherlands

This paper analyses how ambitions to enhance participation in spatial planning decisions were translated into the new Environment and Planning Act in the Netherlands that took effect in 2024. The study analysed the various ambitions for enhancing participation and compared the participation requirements before and after the legal reform. The study showed that participation requirements hardly changed. Despite ambitions to enhance participation through new legislation, new rules do not regulate the content of the participation process beyond the requirement that were into force before the new act took effect. The study shows the limitations of codifying open concepts like participation in law: when it is not completely clear what and how should be realised, it will be impossible to define clear rules to structure specific practices. In turn, ambiguous rules can result in the reproduction of social inequalities by means of planning processes.