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.
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