Christoph Sorg – Varieties of Democratic Planning – 2nd Nov

Please join us for the following presentation and discussion with Christoph Sorg (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) on ‘Varieties of Democratic Planning: Shaping, Abolishing or Socializing Markets’:

Economic planning is back. Resurgent industrial policy, public companies and sovereign wealth funds, asset managers holding stakes across entire economies, and intellectual monopolies that organise markets from within all suggest that the age of digitalisation and climate collapse is also an age of planning. If planning is returning anyway, the question is no longer whether we plan, but who plans, how, and to what end. Can planning be organised democratically and directed at human needs within planetary boundaries? A fast-growing “new planning debate” asks exactly this, but its models are technically demanding and hard to compare. This presentation offers a map.

It first revisits the socialist calculation debate and distils three criteria for assessing any planning model: coordinating interdependent decisions, doing justice to incommensurable values, and mobilising tacit knowledge. It then develops a typology organised around the relation between planning and markets. A technocratic form of planning that simply corrects market failures is contrasted with three varieties of democratic planning, which shape, abolish or socialise markets. Evaluating each against the three criteria, the article argues that market-socialising planning has become increasingly influential among advocates of planning because it was designed to address the blind spots of both market-shaping and market-abolishing approaches. It combines negotiated prices, socialised investment and the decommodification of labour. Finally, the presentation shows how the varieties, though incompatible as institutional blueprints, can complement one another as strategies of transition.

Time: 3pm – 4:30pm, Monday 2nd November 2026

Location: Seminar Room 4, Chrystal Macmillan Building