Community engagement, power, and planning ethics

PART I: ORGANIZERS - planners' ethics, public participation, and pragmatism

PART II: INTERMEDIARIES - power, conflict, and informality

PART III: CLIENTS - empowerment and willingness to participate

As with my first three-part blog series on tax incentives, this one can also be thought of as divided roughly into rationale, process, and impact among its three parts. Three points from the previous two blogs in the series are worth reiterating: first is the distinction between procedural and substantive goals for public participation – the latter can be further split into legitimacy for the organizers/planners, quality of communication between organizers and participants, and empowerment of participants; second is the limit of public formal planning functions in redistributing power – a substantive goal of participation; third is the socially constructed nature of knowledge, argumentative conception of rationality, and role of advocacy planning. For participation and related democratic institutions to be meaningful, there need to be substantial developmental outcomes, extra-state spaces for engagement, and emphasis on or appreciation for deliberative/dialectic processes involving the marginalized. This blog deals with these through the lens of willingness to participate.

More specifically, I talked about how planners can introduce distortions through their interjection in the community, but the level and pattern of engagement also the information planners have to work with. The problem with ensuring adequate representation is as old as the concept of public participation itself. A while back, our studio team was tasked with updating the comprehensive plan for a rapidly growing and ethnically divided jurisdiction. The stakeholders we interacted with, valuable as their insights are, are not representative of the whole community, and I was left with the uneasy feeling this mutual feedback of information void would undermine existing efforts that we failed to account for. And I wondered if our involvement further reinforced the unintentional exclusion of certain groups and gave rise to new spaces of contestation that we should be but never would be aware of.

This leads to the question: who participates? Many studies have looked into the predictors (check out this excellent article in the Journal of Planning American Association which also delves into the causes of non-participation). Clearly, people are more motivated to engage on decisions that impact them or issues that they care about. This implies that the presentation of the core problem or conflict also matters for participation in addition to the factors that have been identified to matter after the question has already been posed.

Recently I got to collaborate on a research project based on a survey conducted of residents’ risk perception, trust, knowledge, etc. regarding a wide range of policy issues, but particularly local environmental threats to public health. One question asked whether residents would be willing to spend time on an online forum hosted by their local government agencies to provide their input on environmental concerns. I was curious as to how willingness to participate is related to support for different types of policies or programs. Turns out that people who would opine tend to prefer system-level solutions like new regulations to individual-level solutions like new fines, and the difference is statistically significant. This suggests some type of link between proposals and participatory responses that is moderated by individual demographics, values, and world views.

Of course, this is just one example of the insights generated by a survey of this kind, but we can still ask: what are the implications for planners seeking to improve voice and representation in correspondence with the three points highlighted at the start of this post? First, a varied menu of policy options should accompany all iterations of solicitation of public input, so that the stakes of participation are clear, in addition to emphasizing the human development benefits of participatory action in itself. Second, multiple spaces for public input should be provided that vary in the amount of “control” or degree of moderation by planners or officials. Third, raising awareness for agent-system interactions should be a goal throughout the process, so that both planners and participants stay mindful of the reciprocal nature of most problems and the interconnectedness of factors.

Going back to the ethics of communication, planners must make an effort to understand resistance to participation that goes beyond lack of time, money, energy, and interest. Whether willingness translates to action is another matter altogether, but just willingness on its own is worth paying attention to because it could indicate deficiencies in the messaging -- i.e., in how a problem, plan, or proposal is presented and propagated throughout the planning process. In a way, this is a comforting thought -- that improving the means also improve the ends, that co-production of knowledge continually evolves with conversations.

Community engagement, power, and planning ethics

PART I: ORGANIZERS - planners' ethics, public participation, and pragmatism

PART II: INTERMEDIARIES - power, conflict, and informality

PART III: CLIENTS - empowerment and willingness to participate

I’ll start this one with my reaction to American Planning Association’s webinar on 2023.12.08 on conflict management in public meetings (the link will be added here once uploaded). The most useful thing I got out of it is the importance of understanding the core identities of stakeholders. What it failed to address is manipulation and abuse of power. While there was mention of “silent conflict” in which problems remain unspoken, it did not go into adequate depth into reasons silence besides just general shyness and reluctance to speak. Overall, there is a conflation of disruptive forces within a meeting due to various causes, which minimizes the role of planners to that of a mere facilitator whose job is to quelch the disruptions (though some of these certainly could use many of the strategies recommended) and keep the peace, when they can do so much more to challenge and change the status quo and enable more effective, reform-driven participation.

The toughest tasks in community development are usually tough because they involve deep-rooted grievances and stark inequities. There could be many intertwined incurrences of harm throughout history, but we will focus here on deliberate miscommunication in the present-day planning process and its use by planners in maintaining control and serving the prevailing interests. Last week’s blog cited S. Arnstein’s seminal (1969) work on characterizing the meaningfulness of public participation by the degree to which power gets redistributed. When participation is set up only to placate and persuade rather than discuss and deliberate, it does little to resolve the underlying tensions. Without adequate redistribution of power, the powerful party could dominate or refuse negotiation, causing conflicts to deepen and emotions like anger, distrust, and frustration to fester.

Since information is power, one of the most powerful ways to prevent power transfer is to withhold information from the party to which power is to be transferred until negotiation outcomes are no longer relevant to the final decisions, and that can take the form of silence in a public meeting. J. Forester (1982) discussed different levels of information management that planners might influence/leverage to either reinforce the power status quo or shift the existing distribution, despite having no direct influence on the structure itself. They can help level the information playing field – the constant self-reflection on biases and prejudices, as mandated by the American Institute of Certified Planners' Code of Ethics mentioned in the previous blog, enabling them to minimize their contribution to harmful distortions caused by misinformation or asymmetrical control of information by the dominant interest groups.

Deliberate miscommunication can take so many forms in a public meeting, but the webinar did not offer concrete ways to manage this type of quieter disruptions. Understating the damage of manipulative tactics could inadvertently lead to demonizing emotional responses to such manipulation by affected persons. There are situations where outrage is warranted, but if planners’ role is only to keep the meeting going according to the agenda, it’s no wonder that many have lost faith in the ability of planners to catalyze positive reforms. Of course, I’m speaking as a fellow critical theorist and not as a practicing planner.

Basically, scholars have come to challenge the notion that government planning functions are formal and legitimate while disruptive grassroot efforts are informal and even criminal. They argue that this bifurcated construct has been used to obfuscate the extent to which the former has frequently broken the rules and did things informally to accomplish their objectives and advance their interests. This observation led to clearer views of (public sector) planning’s limitations in advancing progressive goals. According to F. Miraftab (2004), planners may “invite” participation into controlled spaces where things more or less operated on their terms, but this resistance to losing control is a major deterrent to transfer of power to marginalized or unorganized groups. On the other hand, armed with sufficient information, the grassroots, instead of participating in these invited spaces, could “invent” their own spaces where they have some control over the narratives, and where dominant interests have greater difficulty reaching and exerting their agendas.

In the context of community development planning which requires the combined efforts of many different actors all with different priorities and levels of formal and de facto authority (see Reece et al., 2023 and the papers it discussed), the formal-informal interface becomes like quantum foam--increasingly difficult to map and predict. But if we want to see positive changes, we have to embrace letting go of the safe and known, be realistic about the inadequacies of our planning systems, and make room for transformative disruptions.

Community engagement, power, and planning ethics

PART I: ORGANIZERS - planners' ethics, public participation, and pragmatism

PART II: INTERMEDIARIES - communication and power in community development

PART III: CLIENTS - empowerment and willingness to participate

Planners seek to serve the public interest from the middle of political thornbushes that constantly tug on their moral and ethical principles in multiple directions. This uncomfortable mix of the ideal and the real in a planner’s work necessitates an orientating compass, so the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) in 2005 adopted its Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct to 1) outline the aspirational principles 2) specify rules for governing behaviors and practices and 3) define enforcement procedures. The second and third are fairly straightforward in the sense that they are like other rules we devise to minimize damage and debilitating conflicts. What’s complicated are the unenforceable principles. How on earth do planners maintain their integrity and ensure progressivity as fallible human beings working with incomplete information to bridge the gaps between stakeholders?

Let’s look at an integral module of a planner’s work: community engagement and public participation. Obviously, this takes myriad forms, which we can categorize by a number of useful parameters such as the stage in the planning process, goals and objectives, capacity of organizers, format and structure, targeted stakeholders, etc. But what I find most interesting is the intent of organizers (blog 3 of 3 in this series will explore the intent of participants) and the related goals or objectives and format or structure. Organizers can claim a set of objectives, but later use the information gathered for other purposes. The rationale for involving the public is commonly characterized as procedural vs. substantive. The former is just participation for participation’s sake. Substantive goals, on the other hand, entail outcomes, and hence value judgement behind their measurements.

One paper that every planning student reads is Arnstein’s (1969) A Ladder of Citizen Participation, because it provides a useful framework for cataloguing intent by the degree to which power gets redistributed through the participatory process. The lowest rung is “manipulation” in which citizens are led to believe that their input matters when in fact they are only there to be taught and persuaded, and the organizers simply exploit participants’ lack of knowledge about what to look out for with a particular proposal. It’s worse than no power redistribution because it actually disempowers people, in sharp contrast with the top rung “citizen control” where power is with the people. And there are those rungs in between, which we planners describe as various levels of “meaningful” engagement. Now all these types can be considered substantive, only for the lower rungs, the goal is less about human development and more about legitimizing certain actions/decisions.

What does all this have to do with those ethics? Well, the first aspirational principle of “serving the public interest” demands that planners “respect the experience, knowledge, and history of all people” and “develop skills that enable better communication” which suggests the importance of listening with intent and disseminating accurate information. Theories of communicative planning, developed from communicative/argumentative rationality (in contrast with the type of technocratic expertise that comes to mind), provide a guiding framework for tying together communication, power, and ethics. Instead of focusing on the individual, we shift our attention to the interactions among individuals and focus on evaluating only the interactions. So then, deliberate miscommunication of any information in any manner would be unethical, particularly by the powerful.

And this is related to the second principle on acting with “integrity.” But how is it possible to maintain integrity when faced with all the clashing values and manipulative tactics that aim to further private interests —unless maybe if good intentions and practices axiomatically led to good outcomes, which we know to be false as much as we want it to be true. Communicative planning, however, offers a way out of this quandary. By focusing on the integrity of the communications between individuals rather than individuals, we recognize the redistribution of power through equalization of knowledge. Poor communication, intentional or not, never leads to good outcomes except by luck and providence, and so is irrational by definition. As an example, I was recently told of a story where planners failed to disclose potential conflicts of interest, causing massive breakdown in trust and requiring years of reparation.

Decentering the agent allows planners to maintain their ideals and interrogate issues with a critical eye while being pragmatic about the politics. Communication pipelines and frames, which gird individual stakeholder values, interests, thoughts, emotions, and memories, are fortunately one of the few things within planners’ control. A critical pragmatism approach to “deliberative practice” would enable planners “facing complex multi-party ‘problems’ characterized by distrust, anger, strategic behavior, poor information, and inequalities of power” to see new possibilities and effect positive changes (Forester, 2012), thereby opening a path to reconciling the contradictions/dilemmas posed at the onset of this piece.