Participation Under Pressure: Land Use Planning in Ireland and Serbia

Public participation in planning, though a foundational democratic principle, faces persistent implementation challenges across diverse planning systems. This paper examines participatory planning practice in Ireland and Serbia—two countries representing distinct planning traditions (discretionary and conformance-based, respectively) yet confronting shared structural pressures. Through comparative analysis of four local land use planning instruments (the Development Plan and Local Area Plan in Ireland; the Municipal Spatial Plan and General Regulation Plan in Serbia), the study investigates how institutional design and legislative frameworks shape the depth and quality of participatory practice. Methodologically, the research triangulates statutory regulations, public hearing documentation, and non-statutory participation records across two planning scales (county/municipal and local/sub-municipal). A four-dimensional analytical framework—informing, consultation, collaboration, and monitoring—guides the systematic comparison of participatory mechanisms across the selected cases. Findings reveal that, while both systems remain predominantly at the informing and consultation levels, critical differences emerge in how participation is structured and documented in institutional practice. Ireland’s discretionary system enables multi-channel information dissemination, feedback-oriented consultation, and non-statutory collaborative experimentation beyond legal minimums. Serbia’s conformance-based system confines participation largely to statutory procedures, with objection-based consultation and limited collaborative mechanisms, though distinctive features, such as the public hearing session, provide direct opportunities for deliberation absent in the Irish context. The study contributes to European comparative planning scholarship by demonstrating that participatory depth is shaped less by the formal existence of legal provisions than by the interplay between institutional design, procedural arrangements, transparency, and responsiveness.