Heterodox Planning in the Age of the Polycrisis

Heterodox Planning in the Age of the Polycrisis

The literature on the new state capitalism documents the global rise of interventionist forms of public planning. Related transformations provide the foundation for a renewed debate on economic planning, which increasingly focuses on whether new digital technologies makes new forms of democratic planning feasible, and whether the ecological crisis makes them necessary. While the rise of transnational right-wing extremism suggests that the return of planning could take more authoritarian forms, other post-neoliberal planning approaches are experimenting with participatory models.

The Heterodox Planning (HP) project aims to examine such latter experiments in economic planning that diverge from conventional approaches. Here, economic planning is defined as the active and intentional shaping of markets within market economies. Heterodox planning projects seek to develop more participatory, socially inclusive, and sustainable forms of planning. The capacities, obstacles, and contradictions of such heterodox planning approaches are of great interest to a normatively grounded social science, particularly in these times of overlapping crises.

The empirical and theoretical focus of HP can be explained as follows: while the new debate on economic planning centers largely on theories of post-capitalist planning, little empirical and theoretical work has been done on the debate’s original premise that "planning is already endemic in capitalism." HP addresses this point by focusing on planning processes within market economies. Building on my previous work, the project shifts attention from hegemonic planning practices to heterodox forms, studying two cases of heterodox planning: community wealth building and platform cooperatives. In both case studies HP studies the actors of planning, what they are planning, how deliberation and parametric mediation are integrated, how central mediation and local autonomy are combined, and what their strategies for transformation are. The main methods are participant observation, semi-structured interviews and document analysis.