Fencing Off: Wresting Urban Planning Autonomy through Institutional Constraints

How do municipal officials secure autonomy in a political system marked by steep hierarchy and frequent top-down interventions? We examine how urban planning technocrats and municipal leaders in China design institutions to protect planning decisions against interference from their bureaucratic superiors. We find that municipal officials sometimes sought to protect their flagship projects and avoid blame for corrupt plan modifications by carving out bounded institutional autonomy. They were able to carve out institutional autonomy by deliberately constraining their own discretion through “fencing off:” the selective outsourcing of strategically important planning decisions to (pseudo-)legislative bodies. By transferring authority to institutions stacked with sympathetic intermediaries, planners gain leverage to resist unwanted orders from above, expanding their autonomy to pursue the multi-dimensional objectives of urban planning. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative case study of Shenzhen, supplemented by two shadow cases from elsewhere in China, this study contributes to the scholarship on urban politics and governance by showing how technocratic autonomy can emerge from self-imposed institutional constraints, while advancing a coalitional approach to theorizing Chinese urban planning.