Reworking planning in the image of the market

This article investigates the integration of quasi-market mechanisms in intra-governmental decision-making for spatial planning. We provide an in-depth analysis of the institutional work that goes into producing market-emulating behaviours through an examination of the process by which Swedish Negotiated Development Agreements are developed and drafted. We demonstrate that the organisational procedures behind the Negotiated Development Agreements were purposely designed to reconstruct the ‘rules of the game’ for the allocation of public infrastructure funding and actor interaction, introducing elements of scarcity, competition, bidding, and trading into the decision-making process. Our analysis illuminates the on-the-ground institutional work through which core components of neoliberal ideology are embedded into the very structure and operation of intra-state decision-making, thereby generating new forms of hybrid urban governance and destabilising established expectations about what the state is, and the principles according to which it operates.