Special Sessions

Detailed descriptions of all Special Sessions, including their thematic focus and scope, can be found below. Authors interested in submitting to a Special Session are encouraged to review the session descriptions carefully before selecting their preferred session during submission.

There are two ways to submit your contribution:

• Special Session: If your contribution matches one of the Special Sessions, select the relevant session during the submission process (you will be asked to do so right after entering your abstract text).
• General Pool: If none of the Special Sessions fit your contribution, simply submit to the General Pool. Your abstract does not need to match any Special Session to be considered.

All contributions relevant to the broad field of Planning, Law, and Property Rights (PLPR) are welcome and will be considered for inclusion in the conference programme.

For detailed instructions on the submission process, please refer to the guidelines provided here.

• Track A: Climate, Biodiversity and Environmental Governance

  Special Session A1. Governing land for climate adaptation

  Chairs: B. Ayça Ataç-Studt (TU Dortmund University), Peter Davids (TU Dortmund University), Malachy Buck (London South Bank University)

  Adapting to climate change requires land. Many adaptation and mitigation measures, such as nature-based solutions and flood defenses, depend on access to private land or changes in existing land uses. Their implementation raises fundamental questions about how land can be used and managed, and under what conditions. These questions lie at the intersection of planning, law, and property rights. This special session explores how these three fields interact while addressing climate challenges:
  (1) Effective climate adaptation depends on balancing strong protection of property rights with planning objectives. Challenges include accessing land and organizing multifunctional land uses. For example, flood defenses such as levees or retention basins often require access to private land, which may require planners to purchase land, negotiate easements, or compensate landowners for temporary access while respecting their rights. Conversely, decisions to not defend land and property against climatic risk can have significant implications for property rights.
  (2) The relationship between planning and law helps identify effective legal pathways for implementing adaptation and mitigation measures. Legal rules can support adaptation through zoning plans, building codes, and land-use policies. Planning may restrict development in high-risk flood zones or incorporate green infrastructure, but such measures require clear governance structures.
  (3) Climate adaptation requires a better understanding of law and property rights, which determine how land can be used, managed, and protected. Key issues include loss of ownership rights, compensation mechanisms, and regulations protecting landowners from adaptation impacts. Relocation of communities, for example, depends on clear property rights rules, fair compensation, and legal safeguards that encourage cooperation and prevent disputes.
  We encourage interdisciplinary contributions addressing extreme weather events, flooding, coastal erosion, heatwaves and droughts through planning, law, and property rights. We welcome theoretical, empirical, and methodological work that advances our understanding and informs actionable climate strategies

  
  
  

  Special Session A2. Biodiversity and Land Development

  Chair: Eliška Vejchodská (Charles University)

  Global biodiversity commitments, including those under the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, set ambitious objectives for halting biodiversity loss and restoring ecosystems. Achieving these objectives requires their translation into concrete policies, planning instruments and regulatory mechanisms that shape how land is used, developed and protected. Regional frameworks, such as the EU Nature Restoration Regulation, further specify these ambitions, while leaving important questions of policy design and implementation to be resolved.
  A central challenge is how to secure sufficient space for nature in contexts where land is subject to development pressures, competing uses and property rights.
  The session will explore how biodiversity objectives interact with land development, planning, law and property rights in practice. Attention will be paid to biodiversity offsets and other mechanisms addressing ecological losses associated with development, including questions of land availability, the spatial distribution of costs and benefits, regulatory design, implementation gaps, conflicts between policy objectives, and the roles of public authorities, developers and landowners.
  The session welcomes contributions that provide critical insights into these tensions, constraints and implementation dynamics.

  
  
  

  Special Session A3. Securing land for biodiversity: How land is made available and governed for nature conservation

  Chairs: Johannes Tobias Habermann (Bosch & Partner GmbH), Bernadeta Baroková (Charles University)

  Biodiversity offsets form a central instrument in global conservation debates: they aim to counterbalance the negative impacts of development projects in order to achieve a “no net loss” of biodiversity, with nature-positive approaches striving for “net gain”. The effectiveness of offsets hinges not only on their ecological design but also on the policy arrangements that enable implementation.
  Crucially, offsetting requires land: land must be identified, made available, secured, managed and, in many cases, maintained over the long term. This creates a challenge in contexts where land is increasingly scarce and subject to competing societal demands. Equally, biodiversity offsets also entail social dimensions. These may encompass the nature or cultural values held by local communities or result in adverse impacts, such as restricted access to land.
  Biodiversity offsetting therefore raises questions that go beyond ecological effectiveness. How do legal frameworks shape the conditions for securing land for biodiversity? How do regulation, markets or property rights influence access to land for biodiversity in contexts of competing land uses? How do emerging approaches such as nature-positive planning and nature credits reshape strategies through which land is made available for biodiversity? And how are social dimensions included in the governance of biodiversity offsets?
  We invite contributions that explore how land is secured and governed for biodiversity at the intersection of planning, law and property. Contributions may address biodiversity offsets or other approaches to nature conservation, such as net gain, nature-positive planning and nature credits, as well as local planning and implementation practices. We also welcome perspectives on the social dimensions of securing land for biodiversity, including values, perceptions and traditional knowledge.

  
  
  

  Special Session A4. Nature-based solutions: Understanding the interest and agency of (private) landowners

  Chairs: Lenka Slavikova (UJEP), Thomas Hartmann (TU Dortmund University), Sally Priest (Middlesex University)

  Nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly promoted as a way to strengthen climate resilience, yet their implementation still faces major technical, institutional and governance barriers. One particularly important challenge is land availability. Compared with conventional structural measures, NBS often require more space, while much of the potentially suitable land is privately owned. As a result, implementation has so far concentrated disproportionately on public land.
  Private landowners may hesitate to adopt NBS because of financial costs, uncertain returns, interference with existing land uses, legal complexity, or doubts about long-term effectiveness. Public authorities may likewise be reluctant to promote or require such measures where policy instruments, compensation mechanisms or evidence of direct benefits remain limited.
  At the same time, some landowners are willing to cooperate or even implement NBS independently. These stewardship-oriented, early-adopting or “philanthropic landowners” contribute privately owned land to the provision of wider public goods such as climate resilience, biodiversity and water retention. Better understanding their motivations, agency and decision-making may therefore provide an important pathway towards accelerating NBS uptake on private land.
  This special session invites conceptual and empirical contributions examining such landowners across different European contexts. Key questions include:
  What motivates private landowners to adopt or support NBS?
  How do they perceive trade-offs between current land uses and long-term ecological benefits?
  What roles do community, peer networks, recognition and reputation play?
  Which financial, institutional or policy mechanisms can identify, support and encourage potential early adopters?
  The session aims to advance the conceptualisation of philanthropic landowners and bring together comparative case-study evidence on how their engagement could enable faster and more widespread implementation of small-scale NBS on private land as part of climate adaptation.

  
  
  

• Track B: Property Rights, Ownership and Land Tenure

  Special Session B1. Improved Registration and Visualization of 3D Ownership Rights in the Digital Age

  Chair: Jesper Mayntz Paasch (University of Gävle)

  The increasing complexity of urban development, characterised by high-density construction, underground infrastructure, mixed-use developments, and multi-level property arrangements, has intensified the need for effective land management for the registration of three-dimensional (3D) ownership rights and associated rights, restrictions and responsibilities (RRRs). While technological advances have enabled the modelling and visualisation of complex spatial property units, significant legal challenges remain regarding the accurate registration and visualisation of RRRs within 3D space.
  This session explores the legal dimensions of 3D property registration and examines how land administration systems can provide legal certainty for ownership and other real property interests extending above and below the Earth’s surface. Attention will be given to the identification and registration of volumetric property units, the legal delineation of boundaries in three dimensions, and the relationship between physical structures and legal objects. The session will investigate how ownership rights, easements, usufructs and other RRRs can be represented in a national cadastral and land registration systems.
  A central focus will be the registration and visualisation of RRRs among multiple parties sharing interconnected structures and spaces. Questions of maintenance obligations, liability, access rights, utility corridors, common property arrangements, and dispute resolution mechanisms are particularly critical in complex multi-level developments where ownership and use interests overlap.
  Drawing on international experiences and comparative legal perspectives, the session aims to identify common challenges and best practices for the development of 3D cadastral and land registration systems support secure, transparent, and sustainable management of property rights in increasingly three-dimensional built environments.

  
  
  

  Special Session B2. Commons within and beyond the legal basis of the private property regimes

  Chairs: Tianzhu Liu, Deniz Ay, Pambana Bassett, Leandra Choffat, Samuel Agyekum, Adrien Guisan, and Jean-David Gerber (University of Bern)

  Commons are often recognized as collectively governed resources, yet their relationships with contemporary legal, property, and planning institutions remain insufficiently explored. How do commons institutions as self-organized forms of collective governance emerge and operate across different property and tenure regimes? How do these practices and processes interact with formal planning institutions?
  This special session aims to bring together contributions examining commons - as resources and socio-ecological relations - organised through collective self-governance across different property regimes and institutional arrangements. Commons does not necessarily imply an underlying common property regime; instead, commons may be organized around resources held as private or public property, or a combination. Understanding the differentiated bundle of property rights over access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and alienation is essential for developing a comprehensive understanding of commons’ governance and what enables, constrains, or is reworked by the commons.
  Since Ostrom’s seminal work on rural common-pool resources, more recent commons research has extended to urban contexts and built environments, examining housing, green spaces, food, and infrastructure. These studies highlight the (re)production of commons and commoning initiatives as collective and political processes that can challenge enclosure, commodification, and unequal resource access. However, much of this research focuses on “Western” contexts dominated by strong private property regimes, making other forms of tenure less visible. Limited attention has been paid to how commons institutions take shape across different institutional frameworks, and how other arrangements (e.g., customary systems, state, and cooperative ownership) facilitate or constrain their organization. The role of planning in these processes also requires further examination, including where systems are plural or overlapping.
  The session invites contributions addressing interconnected questions:
  · How do commons institutions and commoning initiatives take shape and challenge resource governance shaped by private property regimes and planning regulations?
  · How do different property rights arrangements and planning institutions shape the organization of commons? And, conversely, how do commons rework the legal basis of property regimes?
  · How does planning interact with these property right regimes to enable or constrain collective resource governance?

  
  
  

  Special Session B3. Condominium Property & Government

  Chair: Douglas Harris (University of British Columbia)

  Condominium and related forms of multi-owned property are proliferating rapidly. In cities around the globe, they are becoming the norm for those who hold what is understood to be the ownership interest in their homes. Condominium creates an architecture for property, enabling the subdivision of land into independently owned units and creating a structure of local government, empowering the group of owners to create and enforce rules to govern uses of the private and common property and with fiscal capacity to provide services and amenities. The owners also bear individual and collective responsibility to ensure that their governing association fulfills its responsibilities. Condominium and related forms of multi-owned property are creatures of statute; their basic structures are similar in jurisdictions around the world, but their rule-making and rule-enforcing capabilities and their fiscal capacity varies. The papers in this special session explore the nature and character of condominium government. Located in jurisdictions with differing condominium regimes, the papers consider the parameters of this collective, private governing power that accompanies ownership. Employing diverse methodologies, the papers consider the impacts of these regimes on those who live within – owners and tenants – and the relation between condominium and other levels of government.

  
  
  

  Special Session B4. Planning Spaces Governed through Living ‘Customary’ Laws

  Chairs: Philipa Akuoko Birago (TU Dortmund University), Samuel Agyekum (University of Bern)

  Recent scholarship on cities of the Global South increasingly calls for situated knowledge and the decolonisation of planning policies and practices. This is particularly relevant as urban planning continues to be shaped by aspirations for modern, planned urban environments modelled on Western experiences of urban development. These aspirations, however, overlook the diverse ways in which urban spaces are produced, accessed, and governed through everyday practices and living ‘customary’ laws. What remains ignored through planning discourse continues to be the misunderstood, marginalised livelihood practices sidelined through ‘hegemonic mainstream’ planning policies and practices. Rather than simply representing disorder or informality, these practices constitute alternative forms of governance through which communities negotiate access to land, public space, livelihoods, social relations, and resources. The resulting tensions between formal planning frameworks and living ‘customary’ laws can produce contested spaces, selective forms of inclusion and exclusion, and persistent gaps between planning intentions and everyday urban realities. This panel seeks to examine how planning operates in contexts where formal policies encounter plural, locally grounded, and continually evolving systems of ‘customary’ governance. We invite contributions examining how planning policies, everyday practices, and living laws interact, revealing the possibilities and limitations of contemporary planning. We particularly welcome papers that engage with situated knowledge and customary laws to rethink planning theory and its capacity to accommodate diverse urban spaces, including ecological, aesthetic, ethnic, and lifestyle differences.
  1. How do living laws and everyday practices shape the production, use, and governance of urban spaces?
  2. How can situated and decolonial approaches contribute to planning practices that better reflect locally grounded forms of knowledge and governance?
  3. How do situated knowledge and living laws and practices compel us to rethink the inadequacy of the institution of planning in the provision of forms of diversity?

  
  
  

  Special Session B5. Challenging the urban-agricultural divide of land ownership debates: comparing, intersecting and inspiring land policies

  Chairs: Felicitas Sommer (LMU Munich), Thomas Hartmann (TU Dortmund University)

  Affordable housing and access to farmland are usually treated as isolated challenges. Yet both topiocs, within current agricultural and urban debates, share conflicts arising from land's competing dimensions as inheritance, investment asset, territorial power and common good. This session explores urban-rural land ownership intersections through four themes: (1) comparing rural-urban land policies – institutions, instruments, stakeholders and values; (2) analysing shared regulatory limitations; (3) translating instruments between urban planning and agricultural land markets; (4) strengthening evidence-based policy by revealing mutual dependencies and unintended cross-domain effects.
  These aspects surface across themes such as rent or tenure control, land ownership transparency, land transaction and conversion, and ownership concepts or typologies.
  (1) Rent and tenure control: rent and tenure rights and control rest on the assumption that land users deserve legal protection and financial support. Comparative analysis has produced useful typologies of farmland tenure control and housing rent control. Yet policy and research rarely address both together. (2) Land transactions and conversions: Once agricultural land converts to building land, it leaves the farmland market and enters the planner's radar. Yet, when subsidies, inheritance, transfer and tax policies shape agricultural land ownership structures they influence the processes of building land conversion too. 'Pre-development' processes – land banking, valuation, transfer policies, community land trusts – therefore mediate the agricultural-urban boundary and bridge environmental and housing debates.
  (3) Land ownership transparency: Research on urban and rural ownership reveals both: land consolidation within opaque corporate entanglements and dysfunctional dispersion of land ownership. By connecting transparency research from agricultural as well as housing scholarship common trends and actors can be identified.
  (4) Ownership concepts or typologies: in general, land market regulation and land policies in general can be categorized in many different ways: By the rythm (one time or recurring), the target (owner, tenant, property, context), the direction (transformative, conservative), the aspired value (tenure security, ownership, segregation, consolidation, fragmentation). Where do property concepts align or diverge, why and how does it affect land right debates and policy decisions?

  
  
  

• Track C: Spatial Justice, Housing and Social Equity

  Special Session C1. The Legal Dimension of Spatial Justice

  Chair: Maciej Nowak (West Pomeranian University in Szczecin)

  The issue of spatial justice has been the subject of extensive discussion. In this context, the geographical and planning perspectives have been given particular attention. Nevertheless, numerous authors, in their analyses of spatial justice, refer to its legal dimension. The aim of the session will be to determine how spatial planning law and its instruments can shape spatial justice in the city. This requires an interdisciplinary approach. The objectives of spatial justice and the dimensions identified in the academic literature are primarily non-legal in nature (starting with the fundamental principle of the equal distribution of benefits and burdens). Legal instruments (including both legal regulations at the national/state level and regulations adopted at the municipal level) do not always effectively ensure the achievement of these objectives. The session participants will present case studies and their own reflections on situations in which the objectives of spatial justice are, or cannot be fully, achieved through law.As part of the session, participants may present case studies concerning cities from around the world. However, presenters will be expected to state very precisely which objectives of spatial justice they address (preferably indicating the specific propositions in the literature from which these objectives are derived) and which specific legal regulations/legal instruments they analyse in the given context. In this regard, particular attention may be given to the analysis of spatial plans at the municipal level. Each presentation should conclude with an assessment of whether and how the law contributes to achieving the objectives of spatial justice. On this basis, the session coordinator will provide a synthetic summary, presenting possible conclusions and directions for further research.

  
  
  

  Special Session C2. Common Ground or Private Profit? How Landownership and Land Values Shape Housing Inequality

  Chairs: Katharina Künzel (TU Dortmund University), Rebecca Cavicchia (Nordregio), Gabriela Debrunner (University of Lausanne)

  Land and land value dynamics are central to understanding housing inequality, operating both as a major cost driver and a powerful distributional mechanism (Arundel, 2017; Ryan-Collins et al., 2017). Yet, public debates often reduce housing inequality as a somewhat simple supply shortage, focusing on construction targets or rent levels while largely ignoring the land market and landownership structure. In reality, landownership and land values substantially condition who can afford housing, who can access it, and where new homes are built. As land is inherently finite, rising land values enrich existing property owners while driving up rents and purchase prices for non-owners (Muellbauer, 2023). This becomes especially critical as urban densification or green transition policies, including nature-based solutions and energy retrofits, intensify competition for scarce urban land, widening the divide between those who profit from rising values and those who can no longer afford to stay.
  This special session explores how landownership structures, different types of landowners and land value dynamics produce and reinforce housing inequality across three core outcome dimensions:
  - Affordability: Rising land prices drive up housing costs much faster than household incomes grow. As a result, affordability problems, particularly in high-demand housing markets are largely driven by high land costs rather than construction costs alone.
  - Accessibility: Landownership and property wealth decide who can access housing across different age groups, social classes, and tenure types. Younger and lower-income households increasingly struggle to buy homes and face high rents, whilst existing property owners gain substantial wealth.
  - Availability: Landowners decide if, when, and where housing gets built. When private or institutional owners hold back land or focus primarily on high-yield projects, affordable housing is often missing where it is needed most.
  Beyond identifying the land and property mechanisms behind these problems, the session discusses practical and conceptual solutions to housing inequality, particularly referring to the 3A housing framework. We welcome conceptual, empirical and comparative contributions that investigate and question the relationship between landownership and housing outcomes (affordability, accessibility, availability). We especially look forward to studies examining how alternative property models and public land strategies can help create a more equitable housing system.

  
  
  

  Special Session C3. Retrofit or Rebuild? Governance, Legal and Equity Dilemmas in Seismic Risk Reduction in Global Practice

  Chairs: Sevkiye Sence Turk, Murat Turk, Sezen Tarakci, Numan Kilinc, and Nuray Colak Tatli

  Rapidly urbanizing regions face mounting seismic risks, demanding a decisive shift from reactive disaster response to proactive risk reduction. Demolition and reconstruction through urban renewal—while necessary for the most deficient structures—cannot match the scale of the crisis and carry substantial economic, social, and environmental costs. Where technically viable, retrofitting offers a faster, more cost-effective and lower-carbon path. Yet jurisdictions address this choice in starkly different ways. Mandatory programs with compliance deadlines, tax-incentive schemes, market-led renewal, and post-disaster reconstruction regimes (e.g., in New Zealand, California, Italy, Japan, Türkiye, and Mexico) each yield distinct spatial and policy outcomes.
  This special session invites comparative evidence on how these regimes perform, organized around two core dilemmas.
  • The first is legal and administrative. It involves balancing private property consent thresholds against public safety mandates, allocating liability among owners, engineers, and authorities, and addressing informal or non-compliant stock that stalls approvals and raises transaction costs.
  • The second is socio-economic. It addresses market-driven displacement, gentrification, and spatial inequality. Urban renewal financed through value capture typically succeeds only where land values are high. Consequently, vulnerable lower-value neighborhoods—and informal settlements in particular—are left without adequate support for retrofitting.
  Contributions are welcome from any seismic region, from high-income contexts with established regulatory frameworks to rapidly growing cities where informal construction prevails. Relevant topics include retrofit-versus-reconstruction decision criteria, consent and expropriation regimes, financing and incentive design, combined seismic–energy renovation, and post-intervention equity outcomes.
  We invite researchers, planners, legal scholars, and policy practitioners to share cross-jurisdictional insights and empirical case studies. By bridging structural engineering realities with spatial governance frameworks, this session aims to build integrated policy models for resilient, equitable, and sustainable cities.

  
  
  

• Track D: Planning Governance, Power and Implementation

  Special Session D1. From Planning Ambitions to Spatial Change: Do Planning Policies Get Implemented?

  Chairs: Venugopal Agrawal (University College London), Nurit Alfasi (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

  Planning systems across the world formulate ambitious policies intended to shape long-term patterns of urban and regional development. National and metropolitan plans promote objectives such as compact development and urban regeneration; sustainable mobility and affordable housing; protection of open space, shorelines and forests; and more balanced regional development. Yet despite formal adoption and sustained institutional commitment, many of these policies are only partially realized. Across years or decades, actual outcomes may vary a lot from what the plans intended.
  While this gap between policies and outcomes may not necessarily reflect “failure”, the persistence and heterogeneity of these gaps raises a broader question about the capacity of planning systems to translate policy ambitions into cumulative spatial change. Implementation depends on the interaction between planning institutions and the many actors, rights, resources, incentives, and decision-making arenas through which urban development actually occurs.
  This session invites studies that treat the institutional context that plans interact with, i.e., land ownership, property rights, development incentives, legal constraints, fragmented authority, market conditions, infrastructure provision, and the distribution of implementation responsibilities, which may reinforce planning objectives, reshape them, or prevent them from materializing altogether. Papers may discuss questions like:
  - Why do planning policies and/or development plans produce spatial outcomes that differ systematically from their stated ambitions?
  - Which institutional arrangements enable or constrain the translation of planning policy into cumulative spatial change?
  - How do property rights, land ownership, legal frameworks, market incentives, public investment, and fragmented governance interact in shaping implementation?
  - Why are some components of planning policies implemented while others remain largely aspirational?
  - Why can the similar planning policies produce markedly different implementation outcomes across cities, regions, or institutional contexts?
  Studies may work across a variety of scales – from national policies to metropolitan and local area plans, operating under different institutional, legal, property-rights, governance, and market conditions. We welcome comparative work as well as single-case analyses that make the implementation - institutional context links explicit. Methods may include legal, spatial, quantitative, and qualitative approaches. The session will build comparative analysis across cases, with the aim of developing the outcomes into a special issue.

  
  
  

  Special Session D2. The Spatial Planning Consultocracy? Contractual Governance, Procedural Legitimacy, and the Reconfiguration of Planning Practice

  Chairs: Eilert Berre Ellefsen (NMBU), Hannah Hickman (University of the West of England)

  We invite a broad range of contributions for a special session on the growth and changing role of consultants across planning, law, and property rights.
  Across diverse spatial planning systems, the core of land-use governance is undergoing a profound structural transformation: the systematic externalization and projectification of statutory planning tasks to private consultancies and contracted actors. While historically framed as a response to municipal capacity deficits and the need for innovation, the emergent literature on consultancies questions how outsourcing and contractual governance alter the administrative, procedural, and practical foundations of public planning. In several countries, consultant planners now constitute a major share of practicing professionals. In others, consultancy firms are becoming integrated into public control functions, and legal contract management increasingly makes up public practice. As Belof & Kryczka (2019) have inquired in the context of in Poland: “Is legal procedure becoming the last safeguard in the democratic decision-making process?” This special session invites contributions examining how contract-based governance and private expertise reshape spatial planning across varied legal and administrative traditions - from market-dominant regimes to state-led welfare systems, to cases across the Global South, and post-socialist contexts.
  We seek papers that interrogate how contractual arrangements and public–private entanglements alter the distribution of public authority, regulatory control, and the ethical foundations of planning. The session pays special attention to legitimacy, how consultant involvement shapes public participation, political conflict, and the framing of the "public interest". We are also interested in changes to professional practice, and research examining how new organizational logics and boundary-spanning roles alter the professional ethos of planning.

  
  
  

  Special Session D3. Lobbying in Planning Law: Formal Rules and (In)formal Influence

  Chairs: Piotr Kryczka (University of Wroclaw), Magdalena Belof (Wrocław University of Science and Technology), Rebecca Leshinsky (RMIT University)

  Planning law and practice create a particular consequential arena for lobbying, as it relies on land, a limited resource, whilst allocating development rights, shaping use, land value and development opportunities. These outcomes emerge through formal procedures but may also influence how planning rules and outcomes are made, interpreted, implemented and contested.
  Lobbying in planning has mostly addressed professional lobbying, transparency and accountability, politicisation, influence on municipal planners, and private interests before formal public involvement (Hirvola, 2022; Hirvola & Mäntysalo, 2019; Lähtinen et al., 2019; Mäntysalo & Saglie, 2010). Less attention has been paid to lobbying as a recurring feature of the planning system, and its implications for procedural fairness, natural justice, administrative-law accountability and equality of access.
  This session seeks to critically debate the role of lobbying in comparative planning systems. Drawing on the OECD’s (2024) broad approach, we understand lobbying as organised and intentional efforts by actors representing particular interests to shape planning law and decisions through formal or informal channels. This includes direct engagement with public officials and indirect attempts to influence stakeholders, or wider audiences. It may involve professional lobbyists, developers, and investors, but also grassroots organizations, NGOs and social movements seeking regulatory change through advocacy, counter-expertise, objections, appeals or litigation. The focus is not on participation as such, but on purposive attempts to affect legal or regulatory outcomes.
  We invite theoretical, doctrinal, empirical and comparative contributions examining lobbying across the full spectrum of planning law – from legislation and rule-making, to interpretation, implementation and contestation. International, national, regional and local contributions are welcome and may address the following questions:
  • Who seeks to lobby within planning law, at which stages, and whose interests gain privileged access?
  • How do formal lobbying mechanisms interact with less visible forms of influence, and how are these reconciled with transparency, procedural fairness and decision-making principles?
  • How does lobbying affect legal rules, development rights and spatial outcomes, and effective or counterproductive are lobbying strategies?
  The session will critically examine whose interests gain influence, through which mechanisms, and with what consequences for planning law, decisions and spatial outcomes.