The Private Supply of and Public Demand for Planning: Compliance with Planning Conditions in the Absence of Direct Statutory Enforcement Measures

摘要

Faithful compliance with planning conditions imposed by a planning authority is a key link in the development control process, as this means that the public's demand for good planning is actually satisfied. However, while there has been a growing emphasis on the performance of the planning authorities, academic inquiry into the actual compliance with planning conditions has been rare. As a contribution to the research literature on planning conditions in a common law regime, this article goes beyond the pioneering endeavour of Lai et al. (2005) by providing a possible theoretical framework and a case study in terms of a supply-demand analogy that articulates the wider literature on the enforcement of regulations driven by utilitarian considerations. The case study of the behaviour of the planning authority and developers in Hong Kong in respect of the compliance with planning conditions revealed that developers generally behaved well. As the applicable planning law does not provide for any sanction against non-compliance, this observation may be explained in terms of the power of the land market in enforcing itself, which is partly explained by the serious consequence of title defect. However, we may speculate that there was more to mere punishment or economic incentive in our findings. The problem of complying with public regulations can be seen from an economic point of view similar to the prevention of 'shirking' (Williamson, 1975, 1985) by any team member or a community, which can be seen as free riding, and hence, is analogous to, if not an example of, a public goods issue. The 'shirking' problem is usually contained by some monitoring process inherent in the team’s psychosocial dynamic or institutional measures, such as planning enforcement in the planning discipline, and is backed by sanctions. To ridicule the principal-agent theorists who always find instances of 'shirking' in teamwork, economist Steven Cheung fondly referred to the example of barge pullers in China hiring people to whip them so that they worked hard enough to drag their barges upstream. The enforcer was actually the agent, while the persons who were apparently being slave-driven or 'monitored' were, in fact, the principal. In this light, perhaps it is the developers who, like the barge pullers, are the principals in the planning game because they submit themselves to being whipped by the planners. To examine this possibility, there is a need to investigate the relationship and interaction among various stakeholders (Lai and Lorne, 2006a, 2006b), which would be the domain of communicative planning.