Planning beyond growth: a case study of wellbeing-oriented planning in Wales

Despite an increasing academic interest in post-growth planning, empirical examples of its practical implementation remain scarce. Still, there are real-world cases from which lessons can already be learned. One of these is Wales, which is working on establishing a wellbeing economy. Although not officially labelled ‘post-growth’, this wellbeing agenda undoubtedly shares many characteristics with such an approach. This study aims to explore how the Welsh wellbeing agenda can be understood from a post-growth perspective and to what extent it has led to institutional changes in new planning directions. The study applies a combination of a qualitative content analysis of relevant planning documents and semi-structured interviews with planning officials in Wales. As a result, the study identifies several signs of institutional change, primarily at a regulative level, but also tendencies in the normative and cultural-cognitive domains. Finally, the study concludes that the Welsh planning system has taken steps in a post-growth direction, but its full realization is hindered by a range of factors, namely: an insufficient toolkit of growth-independent planning strategies, an overall lack of resources in local government, and the fact that pro-growth and post-growth are two continuously competing institutional logics.