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Andy Yuille

Lancaster University, Lancaster Environment Centre, Post-Doc

Lancaster University, Sociology, Faculty Member

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My research focuses on experiments in democracy and the interfaces between different knowledges, in particular relating to environmental issues. My interests are interdisciplinary and impact-oriented, building on my strong track record beyond academia influencing environmental, economic and planning policy. I combine 15 years’ experience of working with NGOs and influencing public decision-making with an academic approach informed by Science and Technology Studies and the idea of public sociology.
Phone: 07951612056

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Daniel D. Hutto

University of Wollongong

Noel B. Salazar

KU Leuven

The University of Texas at Austin

B. Harun Küçük

University of Pennsylvania

Lancaster University

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

Kansas State University

University of Cologne

Shaun Gallagher

University of Memphis

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

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Papers by Andy Yuille

Neighbourhood planning in England: A decade of institutional learning. Progress in planning

Progress in Planning

CarbonFreePorts: Freeports as opportunities not threats for place based decarbonisation of transport

DecarboN8 International Conference 2021: ‘Real Zero’ in a hurry: place-based decarbonisation for transport., Sep 16, 2021

Impacts of neighbourhood planning in England

Levelling up and neighbourhood planning

Written evidence submitted by Professor David Tyfield and Dr Andy Yuille (Lancaster University) and Professor Matthew Cotton and Dr Nicholas Gray (Teesside University), all in personal capacity, to the Environmental Audit Committee: Inquiry on carbon border adjustment mechanism

Impcts of Neighbourhood Planning in England

Introduction to the Special Issue “Bringing Governance Back Home: Lessons for Local Government Regarding Rapid Climate Action”

Sustainability, Apr 28, 2022

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more

Can the marooned flagship of local democracy in English planning be refloated? The case of neighbourhood planning

Town Planning Review: Volume ahead-of-print

Written evidence submitted by Professor David Tyfield and Dr Andy Yuille (Lancaster University) and Professor Matthew Cotton and Dr Nicholas Gray (Teesside University), all in personal capacity, to the Environmental Audit Committee: Inquiry on carbon border adjustment mechanism

Neighbourhood planning:Unlocking the potential of community engagement in a reformed planning system

CPRE Brownfield land register toolkit

Where Next for Neighbourhood Plans? Can they withstand the external pressures?

An analysis of (1) the effectiveness of neighbourhood plans in influencing planning appeal decisi... more An analysis of (1) the effectiveness of neighbourhood plans in influencing planning appeal decisions (2) the impact that changes in the revised National Planning Policy Framework are likely to have on neighbourhood plans and (3) the vulnerability of neighbourhood plans in the face of the new, higher-level spatial planning initiatives on behalf of the National Association of Local Councils (England)

Knowing and caring : performing legitimacy in neighbourhood planning

Neighbourhood Planning is a form of small-scale, community-led land-use planning, introduced to E... more Neighbourhood Planning is a form of small-scale, community-led land-use planning, introduced to England by the Localism Act 2011. It constitutes a radical shift for UK planning and a striking example of the participatory and localist turns in governance, allowing ‘laypeople’ to write their own statutory planning policies. Its promoters portray it as a straightforward transfer of power from state to community which prioritises local experiential knowledge and care for place. However, drawing on theoretical and methodological resources from Science and Technology Studies and four years of ethnographic fieldwork at two sites in the North West of England, my research suggests a more complex picture. I show how the practices of Neighbourhood Planning reproduce the category of the expert and the expert-agency coupling by producing a new subset of lay-experts. However, they occupy a precarious position, being reliant on established expertise to stabilise their expert identity, but also sub...

Performing legitimacy in neighbourhood planning: Conflicting identities and hybrid governance

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2020

Neighbourhood planning in the UK is a striking example of the international turn to localism and ... more Neighbourhood planning in the UK is a striking example of the international turn to localism and public participation, the statutory weight afforded to it setting it apart from many other initiatives. Its promoters portray it as a straightforward transfer of power from state to community. However, its legitimacy relies upon complex, hybrid forms of representative, participatory and epistemological authority. A growing literature is interrogating the relations between neighbourhood planning groups – the collectives utilising these new powers – and the neighbourhoods for which they speak. This paper brings empirical evidence forward to build on such work by exploring how the identities of neighbourhood planning groups are constituted. Three different and sometimes conflicting relational identities are characterised. Each identity is associated with particular material relations, types of knowledge and ways of representing the neighbourhood, and consequently produces different forms of...

Book review: Localism and Neighbourhood Planning: Power to the People?

Planning Theory, 2018

theory – gains in importance. Moreover, in The Netherlands, state bureaucracies increasingly atte... more theory – gains in importance. Moreover, in The Netherlands, state bureaucracies increasingly attempt to strengthen society and societal actions, even from an economic viewpoint of efficiency, effectiveness or plainly in search for budget cuts. Under these circumstances, superpowers may slowly begin to support the radical democratic resonance as Coles desires. As such, I would consider visionary pragmatism an addition to theories of change, well thought through and strongly related to practical implementation. Hopefully, scholar-activists around the globe will help Romand Coles on his journey to a radical and ecological democracy.

UK Government Policy and the Transition to a Circular Nutrient Economy

Sustainability, 2022

The “circular economy” is an increasingly influential concept linking economic and environmental ... more The “circular economy” is an increasingly influential concept linking economic and environmental policy to enable sustainable use of resources. A crucial although often overlooked element of this concept is a circular nutrient economy, which is an economy that achieves the minimization of nutrient losses during the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food and other products, as well as the comprehensive recovery of nutrients from organic residuals at each of these stages for reuse in agricultural production. There are multiple interconnecting barriers to transitioning from the current linear economic system to a more circular one, requiring strongly directional government policy. This paper uses interpretive policy analysis to review six UK government strategies to assess their strengths and weaknesses in embracing nutrient circularisation. Our analysis highlights the acute underrepresentation of the circular nutrient economy concept in these strategies as well ...

Contradictory cares in community-led planning

Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies, 2021

The affective, practical and political dimensions of care are conventionally marginalised in spat... more The affective, practical and political dimensions of care are conventionally marginalised in spatial planning in the UK, in which technical evidence and certified expert judgements are privileged. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the planning system to influence how the places where they live will change. But to make the kind of arguments that are influential, their care for place must be silenced. Then in 2011, the Localism Act introduced neighbourhood planning to the UK, enabling community groups to write their own statutory planning policies. This initiative explicitly valorized care and affective connection with place, and associated care with knowledge of place (rather than opposing it to objective evidence). Through long-term ethnographic studies of two neighbourhood planning groups I trace the contours of care in this innovative space. I show how the groups’ legitimacy relies on their enactment of three distinct identities and associated sources of authority. Each id...

Taking deliberative research online: Lessons from four case studies

Qualitative Research

Researchers using deliberative techniques tend to favour in-person processes. However, the COVID-... more Researchers using deliberative techniques tend to favour in-person processes. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has added urgency to the question of whether meaningful deliberative research is possible in an online setting. This paper considers the reasons for taking deliberation online, including bringing people together more easily; convening international events; and reducing the environmental impact of research. It reports on four case studies: a set of stakeholder workshops considering greenhouse gas removal technologies, convened online in 2019, and online research workshops investigating local climate strategies; as well as two in-person processes which moved online due to COVID-19: Climate Assembly UK, a Citizens’ Assembly on climate change, and the Lancaster Citizens’ Jury on Climate Change. It sets out learnings from these processes, concluding that deliberation online is substantively different from in-person meetings, but can meet the requirements of deliberative research, ...

Mapping the landscape of climate engineering

One contribution of 15 to a Theme Issue 'Climate engineering: exploring nuances and consequences ... more

Implementing Rapid Climate Action: Learning from the ‘Practical Wisdom’ of Local Decision-Makers

Sustainability

A global goal to limit dangerous climate change has been agreed through the 2015 Paris Accords. T... more A global goal to limit dangerous climate change has been agreed through the 2015 Paris Accords. The scientific case for action has been accepted by nearly all governments, at national and local or state level. Yet in all legislatures, there is a gap between the stated climate ambitions and the implementation of the measures necessary to achieve them. This paper examines this gap by analysing the experience of the following three UK cities: Belfast, Edinburgh, and Leeds. Researchers worked with city officials and elected representatives, using interviews and deliberative workshops to develop their shared understandings. The study finds that local actors employ different strategies to respond to the stated climate emergency, based on their innate understanding, or ‘phronetic knowledge’, of what works. It concludes that rapid climate action depends not just on the structures and mechanisms of governance, but at a deeper level, the assumptions, motivations and applied knowledge of decis...

Neighbourhood planning in England: A decade of institutional learning. Progress in planning

Progress in Planning

CarbonFreePorts: Freeports as opportunities not threats for place based decarbonisation of transport

DecarboN8 International Conference 2021: ‘Real Zero’ in a hurry: place-based decarbonisation for transport., Sep 16, 2021

Impacts of neighbourhood planning in England

Levelling up and neighbourhood planning

Written evidence submitted by Professor David Tyfield and Dr Andy Yuille (Lancaster University) and Professor Matthew Cotton and Dr Nicholas Gray (Teesside University), all in personal capacity, to the Environmental Audit Committee: Inquiry on carbon border adjustment mechanism

Impcts of Neighbourhood Planning in England

Introduction to the Special Issue “Bringing Governance Back Home: Lessons for Local Government Regarding Rapid Climate Action”

Sustainability, Apr 28, 2022

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more

Can the marooned flagship of local democracy in English planning be refloated? The case of neighbourhood planning

Town Planning Review: Volume ahead-of-print

Written evidence submitted by Professor David Tyfield and Dr Andy Yuille (Lancaster University) and Professor Matthew Cotton and Dr Nicholas Gray (Teesside University), all in personal capacity, to the Environmental Audit Committee: Inquiry on carbon border adjustment mechanism

Neighbourhood planning:Unlocking the potential of community engagement in a reformed planning system

CPRE Brownfield land register toolkit

Where Next for Neighbourhood Plans? Can they withstand the external pressures?

An analysis of (1) the effectiveness of neighbourhood plans in influencing planning appeal decisi... more An analysis of (1) the effectiveness of neighbourhood plans in influencing planning appeal decisions (2) the impact that changes in the revised National Planning Policy Framework are likely to have on neighbourhood plans and (3) the vulnerability of neighbourhood plans in the face of the new, higher-level spatial planning initiatives on behalf of the National Association of Local Councils (England)

Knowing and caring : performing legitimacy in neighbourhood planning

Neighbourhood Planning is a form of small-scale, community-led land-use planning, introduced to E... more Neighbourhood Planning is a form of small-scale, community-led land-use planning, introduced to England by the Localism Act 2011. It constitutes a radical shift for UK planning and a striking example of the participatory and localist turns in governance, allowing ‘laypeople’ to write their own statutory planning policies. Its promoters portray it as a straightforward transfer of power from state to community which prioritises local experiential knowledge and care for place. However, drawing on theoretical and methodological resources from Science and Technology Studies and four years of ethnographic fieldwork at two sites in the North West of England, my research suggests a more complex picture. I show how the practices of Neighbourhood Planning reproduce the category of the expert and the expert-agency coupling by producing a new subset of lay-experts. However, they occupy a precarious position, being reliant on established expertise to stabilise their expert identity, but also sub...

Performing legitimacy in neighbourhood planning: Conflicting identities and hybrid governance

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2020

Neighbourhood planning in the UK is a striking example of the international turn to localism and ... more Neighbourhood planning in the UK is a striking example of the international turn to localism and public participation, the statutory weight afforded to it setting it apart from many other initiatives. Its promoters portray it as a straightforward transfer of power from state to community. However, its legitimacy relies upon complex, hybrid forms of representative, participatory and epistemological authority. A growing literature is interrogating the relations between neighbourhood planning groups – the collectives utilising these new powers – and the neighbourhoods for which they speak. This paper brings empirical evidence forward to build on such work by exploring how the identities of neighbourhood planning groups are constituted. Three different and sometimes conflicting relational identities are characterised. Each identity is associated with particular material relations, types of knowledge and ways of representing the neighbourhood, and consequently produces different forms of...

Book review: Localism and Neighbourhood Planning: Power to the People?

Planning Theory, 2018

theory – gains in importance. Moreover, in The Netherlands, state bureaucracies increasingly atte... more theory – gains in importance. Moreover, in The Netherlands, state bureaucracies increasingly attempt to strengthen society and societal actions, even from an economic viewpoint of efficiency, effectiveness or plainly in search for budget cuts. Under these circumstances, superpowers may slowly begin to support the radical democratic resonance as Coles desires. As such, I would consider visionary pragmatism an addition to theories of change, well thought through and strongly related to practical implementation. Hopefully, scholar-activists around the globe will help Romand Coles on his journey to a radical and ecological democracy.

UK Government Policy and the Transition to a Circular Nutrient Economy

Sustainability, 2022

The “circular economy” is an increasingly influential concept linking economic and environmental ... more The “circular economy” is an increasingly influential concept linking economic and environmental policy to enable sustainable use of resources. A crucial although often overlooked element of this concept is a circular nutrient economy, which is an economy that achieves the minimization of nutrient losses during the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food and other products, as well as the comprehensive recovery of nutrients from organic residuals at each of these stages for reuse in agricultural production. There are multiple interconnecting barriers to transitioning from the current linear economic system to a more circular one, requiring strongly directional government policy. This paper uses interpretive policy analysis to review six UK government strategies to assess their strengths and weaknesses in embracing nutrient circularisation. Our analysis highlights the acute underrepresentation of the circular nutrient economy concept in these strategies as well ...

Contradictory cares in community-led planning

Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies, 2021

The affective, practical and political dimensions of care are conventionally marginalised in spat... more The affective, practical and political dimensions of care are conventionally marginalised in spatial planning in the UK, in which technical evidence and certified expert judgements are privileged. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the planning system to influence how the places where they live will change. But to make the kind of arguments that are influential, their care for place must be silenced. Then in 2011, the Localism Act introduced neighbourhood planning to the UK, enabling community groups to write their own statutory planning policies. This initiative explicitly valorized care and affective connection with place, and associated care with knowledge of place (rather than opposing it to objective evidence). Through long-term ethnographic studies of two neighbourhood planning groups I trace the contours of care in this innovative space. I show how the groups’ legitimacy relies on their enactment of three distinct identities and associated sources of authority. Each id...

Taking deliberative research online: Lessons from four case studies

Qualitative Research

Researchers using deliberative techniques tend to favour in-person processes. However, the COVID-... more Researchers using deliberative techniques tend to favour in-person processes. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has added urgency to the question of whether meaningful deliberative research is possible in an online setting. This paper considers the reasons for taking deliberation online, including bringing people together more easily; convening international events; and reducing the environmental impact of research. It reports on four case studies: a set of stakeholder workshops considering greenhouse gas removal technologies, convened online in 2019, and online research workshops investigating local climate strategies; as well as two in-person processes which moved online due to COVID-19: Climate Assembly UK, a Citizens’ Assembly on climate change, and the Lancaster Citizens’ Jury on Climate Change. It sets out learnings from these processes, concluding that deliberation online is substantively different from in-person meetings, but can meet the requirements of deliberative research, ...

Mapping the landscape of climate engineering

One contribution of 15 to a Theme Issue 'Climate engineering: exploring nuances and consequences ... more

Implementing Rapid Climate Action: Learning from the ‘Practical Wisdom’ of Local Decision-Makers

Sustainability

A global goal to limit dangerous climate change has been agreed through the 2015 Paris Accords. T... more A global goal to limit dangerous climate change has been agreed through the 2015 Paris Accords. The scientific case for action has been accepted by nearly all governments, at national and local or state level. Yet in all legislatures, there is a gap between the stated climate ambitions and the implementation of the measures necessary to achieve them. This paper examines this gap by analysing the experience of the following three UK cities: Belfast, Edinburgh, and Leeds. Researchers worked with city officials and elected representatives, using interviews and deliberative workshops to develop their shared understandings. The study finds that local actors employ different strategies to respond to the stated climate emergency, based on their innate understanding, or ‘phronetic knowledge’, of what works. It concludes that rapid climate action depends not just on the structures and mechanisms of governance, but at a deeper level, the assumptions, motivations and applied knowledge of decis...

Knowing and caring: Performing legitimacy in Neighbourhood Planning

Neighbourhood Planning is a form of small-scale, community-led land-use planning, introduced to E... more Neighbourhood Planning is a form of small-scale, community-led land-use planning, introduced to England by the Localism Act 2011. It constitutes a radical shift for UK planning and a striking example of the participatory and localist turns in governance, allowing ‘laypeople’ to write their own statutory planning policies. Its promoters portray it as a straightforward transfer of power from state to community which prioritises local experiential knowledge and care for place. However, drawing on theoretical and methodological resources from Science and Technology Studies and four years of ethnographic fieldwork at two sites in the North West of England, my research suggests a more complex picture. I show how the practices of Neighbourhood Planning reproduce the category of the expert and the expert-agency coupling by producing a new subset of lay-experts. However, they occupy a precarious position, being reliant on established expertise to stabilise their expert identity, but also subject to displacement by that expertise. They must also perform other identities alongside that of the expert to establish and maintain their legitimacy, and powerful tensions arise between these identities. Successfully enacting this composite of identities enables them to draw on complex, hybrid forms of representative, participatory, and epistemological authority. This constrains their ability to represent the neighbourhood as experienced and forces them to reframe the issues that they want to address, but also enables them to make real differences to the ways in which the neighbourhood will change. Framing the production and evaluation of evidence in terms of ‘matters of concern’ (Latour) and ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa), situated in a narrative context, would enable the diversity of things that matter to these groups to be addressed more directly, and allow better critical consideration of both those knowledge claims labelled as ‘objective’ and those labelled as ‘subjective’.

Peter Somerville Understanding Community - book review pre print

People, Place and Policy, 2018

This second edition of Understanding Community shares the highly accessible, user-friendly format... more This second edition of Understanding Community shares the highly accessible, user-friendly format of the Understanding Welfare series to which it belongs. It is suitable for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, and researchers setting out to explore the tensions and conflicts that communities of various kinds might experience under a capitalist system, across a range of fields of practice. It covers a lot of ground and pulls together a huge body of literature, inevitably skimming the surface to some extent, but providing a full bibliography and extensive use of endnotes to help guide those who want to dig deeper into the many facets exposed in the text. Each chapter begins with an abstract, is clearly broken up with self-explanatory sub-headings, and concludes with a chapter summary, a set of discussion questions and suggested further reading. The language is accessible, jargon is notable by its almost total absence, and on the whole it provides a clear exposition of complex theoretical issues and empirical cases. It is mainly UK-focused, often drawing on in-depth examples from that country to illustrate theoretical points, but it also has international resonance and also draws on cases from the USA and other parts of the world.

Sue Brownill and Quintin Bradley, Localism and neighbourhood planning - book review pre print

Planning Theory, 2018

Neighbourhood Planning 2 is a new form of small-scale, community-led, land use planning in Englan... more Neighbourhood Planning 2 is a new form of small-scale, community-led, land use planning in England, with resonances that reach across the spectrum of decentralisation and participatory initiatives. As a research object, the editors claim that "[i]n no other case study of devolution, across a broad international canvas, do we see so vividly the liberatory and regulatory conflicts that arise from the assemblage of localism, or the tangled relations of power and identity that result" (251). And certainly, in enabling citizens to undertake the roles and positions previously only ever held by certified planning specialists -to become statutory plan-makers -these tensions are brought into sharp relief.