Discourses of objection: towards an understanding of third-party rights in planning

Public participation is central to the practice, legitimacy, and dominant normative principles of spatial planning. It has a strong presence in the discourse of communicative governance, which suggests that participatory rights should be strengthened as part of a systematic institutional design. Interest in the concept of rights within planning has been gathering pace, but is still undeveloped. In terms of third-party rights, attention has been focused on citizens as rights claimants and their use of rights to promote self-interest, rather than the values that should be protected by such rights or the balance of rights between different stakeholders. This paper explores some of the theoretical issues related to third-party rights in planning, using the existing literature on planning disputes to contextualise current debate. It examines a case study of third-party appellants in the Republic of Ireland and identifies five distinct 'discourses of objection'. These discourses highlight the complex factors that stimulate third-party rights-claims and illustrate how they can be related to issues such as citizenship, the public interest, and property rights. The paper concludes with a number of general observations on the nature of rights in planning and the implications this has for the broader paradigm of communicative governance.