From government to governance? Politics of planning in the first decade of the Hong Kong special administrative region

Abstract

This paper investigates when and why a civil society will challenge growth-biased plans, made by a top-down mode of planning within the non-democratic setting of an executive government-led and economics-first society. In the controversies surrounding the Government's plans to further the filling in of the beautiful Victoria Harbour to produce land for "development" in the first decade of the post-colonial Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), participatory and multi-stakeholder-centred planning practices emerged when many interested parties were dissatisfied with the official reclamation plan. Using the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance, an anti-reclamation civil society organization managed to take the government to court and successfully stop further harbour reclamation, forcing government officials to heed alternative views on harbourfront planning, and to pay attention to non-government professionals ready to use their skills to serve the growing civil society. However, despite this early success, the progress of the case so far suggests that participation remains tokenistic, producing minimal fundamental institutional changes. Hence, professionals within and outside the government continue to face an interrelated, two-pronged challenge: how to further empower lay citizens as they seek new ways to institutionalize a more participatory mode of planning governance.