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Since the early 1980s there has been a mounting debate over the future direction of the land use planning system. The government is also determined to tackle the extensive subsidies to the farming industry. This paper argues that the interaction of agricultural policy and land use policy is central to the way in which the planning system is likely to evolve over the next decade. The configuration of land politics will be shaped by these trends. The paper considers two possible scenarios for the 1990s. In the first, extensive deregulation of land use planning and a removal of agricultural subsidies is assumed and the changing balance of power between different groups with an interest in land is examined. In the second scenario, a more realistic picture is put forward, arguing that whatever government is in power in the 1990s it will be tempted to respond with a 'pragmatic' approach to planning.

We use the case of a "whole-system" change program in a national healthcare system to empirically examine the multilevel dynamics underlying organizational adaptation. Our analysis demonstrates how the cognitive distance between agents' causal representations affects opportunities to cooperate in hierarchical systems. Using complexity theory, we identify a scale-invariant causal pathway that can be applied recursively across many organizational levels. At each level, three coupled feedback loops determine how local agents modify their cognitive representations to include uncovered interdependencies and synchronize their adaptive search across organizational boundaries: a "boundary work" loop, a "small wins" loop, and a "parochialism" loop. Our results also point to the scale-dependency of the strength of dissipative processes across levels. These novel results further develop the theory of organizational change and have practical implications for large multilevel organizations, especially regarding the sustainability of improvements.