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.