What would an NPPF look like from an Ecological Justice framing?
Taking on an Ecological Justice approach to the NPPF requires a foundational shift to the role and motivations around planning and the relationship with land in the UK.
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The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) sets out the Government's economic, environmental and social planning policies for England. The policies set out in this framework apply to the preparation of local and neighbourhood plans and to decisions on planning applications.
Currently, at its core, the NPPF holds a presumption in favour of sustainable development, which means that the driver behind planning in the UK is the new development of land, maximising and extracting value.
What is understood to be a ‘need’, how needs are met, and how policy is to be spatialised is contextualised within this motivation. The supply of homes, an overwhelming focus of the NPPF, are referred to in the context of choice and competitiveness in the market for land, not on the distribution of pre-existing infrastructure that is sufficient to meet demand (there are up to 1 million empty homes in the UK). Here, land serves a narrow purpose and is related to through its quality and potential of ‘performance’ in the market, regardless of real need.
The ambitions of national policy are restricted by ‘subjects to viability’, which means the delivery of affordable homes, social rent homes, net zero, biodiversity, climate change adaptation etc can be foregone if profitability is impacted as a result.
The NPPF’s vague and undefined use of terminology around strategy means that attempts to address the injustices around housing need; the unjust spatialised nature of service provision; the inaccessibility of our built environments, as well as broader issues relating to environmental degradation and climate change can all be loosely interpreted and misused to ensure continued profit driven extraction of land.
An Ecological Justice framing challenges these two basic premises - that a presumption in favour of development should even exist, as well as an invitation to relate to land as kin rather than as an asset and market to be exploited and developed.
Ecological Justice is the recognition that health and justice are tightly intertwined with the environments we live in and land we live on.
The spatialisation of injustice demands that we take policy and decision making tools such as the NPPF seriously in their roles in enabling and building harmful and extractive systems.
At its core, our definition of Ecological Justice is rooted in Kinship, relationality and mutuality, starting with land as kin not as a lifeless resource to be exploited.
The epistemology behind this approach requires a change in the role of land in planning, land cannot be referred to simply by its competitiveness on the market, or its performance and use, rather its being and the conditions that enable meaningful relationships with it.
From this, the NPPF would necessarily shift away from new development and continued economic systems of extraction, in which decision making is determined by profit, and instead seek to address existing imbalances and inadequate distribution within the existing built environment without the need to build new. In doing so, the understanding of net-zero, biodiversity, climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as housing shortages would shift to reflect reality rather than a market based worldview of need, demand and delivery within land use planning in the UK.
Within Ecological Justice-as-a-framework is an understanding that all systems are spatialised, materialised and embodied within us and our environments. An NPPF that takes that into account would explicitly name how as a piece of policy it is a key determinant of health and spatial inequality, as well as seek to use the built environment as a pathway to ensuring greater health and justice.
This looks like policy that is explicit about the context that it is working in, upholding or challenging, that names the true drivers, challenges and needs within the context, and that works more coherently to reflect the relationships that are manifest within our built environment.
These relationships are broad and expansive, however some examples are our relationship to food production and access, movement, home, education and health etc.
This approach is a process rather than an outcome and can be practised through engaging critically with the language and definitions that we use and the political and economic contexts that decisions are made in.
For example, contextualising housing needs and using this piece of policy to focus on retrofitting and renovating vacant housing stock rather than building new homes, and budgeting for the processes of redistribution of services, infrastructure and homes. It can also be practised in decision making processes that centre lived experience expertise that is deeply rooted and connected to place over time.
Shifting the approach and relationship to land, knowledge and the expertise base of these planning decisions ensures a greater coherence of people and place, seeding ecological justice.
written by
Hannah Yu-Pearson
Programme Organiser: Ecological Justice
Hannah has a background in urbanism and city level climate action. She is now exploring new approaches to environmental and health justice, using food and tea as medicine, incorporating the principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Hannah has been working with Centric Lab since 2022 and has contributed to a range of work and projects, such as:
The Indigenous Health Justice programme