1 This is a revised personal version of the article published in European Planning Studies. Please cite as: Beunen & Van Dijk 2009. Laws, people and land use: A sociological perspective on the spatial effects of laws. European Planning Studies 17 (12):1979-1815. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09654310903322314 Understanding the working of laws in spatial planning Raoul Beunen and Terry van Dijk Raoul Beunen is Assistant Professor at Wageningen University. P.O. Box 47, 6700 AA Wageningen, the Netherlands raoul.beunen@wur.nl | Terry van Dijk is Associated Professor Spatial Planning at the Groningen University, the Netherlands ABSTRACT Public policy is often implemented through formal laws. In contrast to the typically optimistic ex-ante analyses of the impact of a set of laws, in retrospect it may be hard to determine what the laws concretely produced. Particularly complicated to measure are the unintended and indirect effects on actors or values that were not the prime focus of the law. Despite the literature on these matters in other fields of research, among planners the theory of law implementation receives relatively little attention. This attitude may stem from the means-ends rationality that has been common to planning for so many years. This paper makes a plea for focusing on the interaction between people and laws so as to understand the outcomes. We do this by drawing insights from sociological perspectives on laws.. Keywords: law, sociology, governance, legal discourse, planning INTRODUCTION Laws, being systems of rules established in order to guide individuals or organisations, entail the acts, by-laws, ordinances, codes and decrees with which we formalise agreements on the organisation of society. For a planner, laws influence what changes can actually be achieved in the social and physical reality we address. They set limits to the extent to which actors can influence other actors’ properties (constitutions, public administration laws, real estate legislation) and provide the proper policy instruments with which to intervene, in other words the “possibilities which are legally available to public bodies for the steering of certain processes in order to achieve certain desired effects” (Needham, 1982: 3). Almost every developed country in the world applies laws that pertain to land use and in particular the changes in land use. The UK Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 or the Dutch Wet op de Ruimtelijke Ordening, for instance, contain procedures and guidelines for making formal laws on the local level that restrict the way land is used. There are also many environmental laws that affect land use and spatial organisation, like nature conservation laws or water quality laws. And there are laws, not specifically aimed to guide spatial developments, that do nonetheless affect the physical world around us (lease acts, mortgage legislation). Each application of a law, or policy instrument in general, is a measure: “a measure is the use of a particular instrument at a particular time in order to promote one or more objectives”(Ibid). It is through these measures that laws can take effect on concrete instances. Of all the types of laws that can be discerned, for us the most important classification is that of prescriptive and descriptive law. With prescriptive we refer to laws that are formulated to modify (prescribe) the way people tend to interact in the status quo, with descriptive to laws that are formulated to codify (describe) the prevailing and desired