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.