The public good and the power of promises in planning

History suggests good reasons to question the power of claims to the public good in planning. However, any attempt to tackle the conjunction of major crises societies face needs to grapple with the challenges of resurrecting a workable conception of it in the face of apparently diminished faith in collective agency. In this chapter, I reconsider the forms of power at work in articulations of the public good by exploring how they act as more or less persuasive and reliable promises about the future. The chapter argues that any attempt to renew the public good should consider the overlooked role of ‘promissory power’ in planning. Using an example of Donald Trump’s golf course developments in Scotland to exemplify the uses and abuses of promises to uphold the public good, I argue promissory power has been ceded to developers under neoliberal planning regimes and question how it can be reclaimed.