Developing Resilience through Collaborative Planning : A Case Study of Ferbane

Abstract

The reshaping of the Irish economy over recent decades has threatened the resilience of small Irish towns previously dependent on resource extraction. This thesis focuses on one such town, Ferbane in Co. Offaly, made vulnerable when the winding-down of peat-fired electricity generation was announced in the late 1990s. In seeking to address such issues of rural decline, a model of collaborative planning called Integrated Area Planning (IAP) was developed and applied in Ferbane over the period 2001-2019. IAP had a deliberatively normative agenda, proposing that collaborative planning has the potential to prepare communities for innovation and ultimately for transformation. This thesis seeks to apply a resilience lens to the Integrated Area Planning framework, asking whether the process of IAP assisted in developing community resilience in Ferbane. Following a literature review, this question is operationalised by considering four key characteristics attributed to a resilient town. These are as follows: the town has implemented a development plan; the community has strong leadership; it displays a high degree of social capital; and it has the capacity to develop the local economy. In other words, the town possesses transformative capacity that allows it to invent new structure, enabling it to thrive in an unpredictable and changeable environment. Data presented ranges over the period 2001-2019 from qualitative, quantitative and documentary sources and was collected in parallel with the IAP, giving a rare longitudinal insight into this process. The thesis concludes that collaborative planning can stimulate pathways towards achieving transformative resilience. However, resilience cannot be achieved without a sympathetic policy and political environment. While the concept of resilience-building through collaborative planning was accepted in principle by elected representatives and state agencies in this case, it cannot be said to have succeeded in significantly changing planning systems and practices, such that many structural and institutional barriers remain.