Governing Greater Sydney: The democratic promise and contention of local governments’ metropolitan integration

Abstract

Metropolitan planning in Australia is argued to suffer from a ‘governance deficit’, alongside various calls for planning reform. The Greater Sydney Commission (renamed the Greater Cities Commission in 2022) was established in 2015 as a state-appointed planning commission to preside over new strategic and statutory planning powers; local governments’ metropolitan integration is one tenet of the reform's ambition for a more cohesive system. While the grounds for reform are often argued on effective terms, there is a clear need to explore the ways it may suffer from a ‘democratic deficit’ or be democratically defensible. This study explores the shifting planning powers, accountabilities, and forms of interest representation at the local level of the political system, in Australia's most concerted contemporary metropolitan reform attempt. Points for practitioners: The reformed planning process promoted new forms of substantive exchange and coordination from the local government sector informing local, district, and metropolitan planning processes. Interest representation outside of local governments’ required plans is largely voluntary; Western City District councils demonstrated considerably more inter-council collaboration as well as collaboration with the Commission than the Central City District. New forms of inter-local exchange and coordination may help address ‘fragmented’ localism. The reform has improved prior democratic qualities of local strategic planning and improved policy accountabilities between councillors, the community, and planners in a loose compliance framework. The state's governance of housing growth targets and land use was said to contradict what had been negotiated between councils and the Commission, alongside local governments’ increasingly narrow land-use and development approval powers and policy churn of its governance. Practitioners can use the meta-governance framework to consider the democratic ‘performance’ or defensibility of the Greater Sydney Commission's governance system and improve this or similar metropolitan governance reform settings.