Summary of "Reframing public participation: strategies for the 21st century."

The following is a summary of Innes, J. and Booher, D. Reframing public participation: strategies for the 21st century. Planning theory & practice. V. 5 (4). 2004.

Innes and Booher present the problems with the legally required methods of public participation in the US, in particular public hearings, review and comment procedures.

They identify 5 purposes for public participation:

  • "for decision makers to find out what the public’s preferences are so these can play a part in their decisions."
  • "to improve decisions by incorporating citizens’ local knowledge into the calculus."
  • for "advancing fairness and justice."
  • "getting legitimacy for public decisions."
  • "the law requires it."

Specific problems with the hearing and public comment processes are:

  • It is too late in the planning process, "the citizen role is to react."
  • The commenting in not representative, because of
    • volume of extreme viewpoints.
    • bias towards well-funded interest groups.
  • The commenting is only one-way, from commenter to board members.
  • The framing is of a battle.

Innes and Booher say we need collaborative participation that is inclusive of stakeholders and has dialogue as a central focus. They give examples of successful collaborative participation, which they use to point out the following benefits:

  • "collaborative dialogues could often work out a rule satisfactory to all" (EPA)
  • "joint fact finding is conducted in which the parties can question data and present their own. Citizens and stakeholders have information that can improve the quality of decisions."
  • "Budgeting is increasingly a focus for collaborative dialogues. Dialogues enable [citizens] to see what the trade-offs are and work through the choices." (Eugene, OR; Sacramento, CA; Davis, CA)
  • "Collaborative participation has defused racial tensions and built social capital." (Cincinnati, OH)

They also describe some more transformative changes possible from collaborative participation:

  • citizens "can work through issues and create shared meanings as well as the possibility of joint action."
  • "Collaborative processes also build networks" that create "a new form of power as players develop shared heuristics and as information flows through the network and results in new forms of distributed, self-organizing action."
  • "collaborative, networked processes contribute to building what Healey and others have called institutional capacity, which is a combination of social, intellectual and political capital." (emphasis added)

Innes and Booher on legitimacy:

"The authors believe that practice will increasingly be defined by the collaborative model because it better serves the purposes of participation. These methods allow decision makers to learn more accurately about preferences because participants are more representative and have more opportunity to provide thoughtful, informed input than in the standard required methods. They can incorporate citizen knowledge into the collaboratively arrived at recommendations because citizens can place their knowledge in the larger context of what the experts and planners know and vice versa. The collaborative approach is more likely to advance fairness and justice goals if process designers and collaborative groups make sure that the dialogue is inclusive and that weaker stakeholders are given assistance to assure their effective representation. The authors believe this method has more legitimacy than the legally-required methods because it does so much better on these purposes."

They describe obsticals to adoption of collaborative participation:

  • open meetings laws
  • Robert’s Rules of Order, which forces votes, divisions and partisanship instead of the seeking of common ground and building social capital (Susskind, 1999)
  • the hubris of elected officials who fear loss of their authority
  • the limited time citizens can give to collaboration
  • the disadvantaged groups who lack the resources to participate
  • the lack of collaborative skills among planners and citizens
  • the lack of opportunity for genuine dialogue among competing stakeholders
  • the costs of staffing collaborative efforts
  • the well-entrenched institutions of public decision making which many will resist changing.

Some values of citizens and planners? :

"Citizens need to make a difference and planners need to believe their work is professionally responsible. Both need to feel that participation is fair, representative, well informed and transparent."

Travis' paper notes

Innes and Booher call for a shift in the framing and organization of public input into government processes toward a collaborative model of governance that includes citizens, organized interests, business, non-profits, planners, and public administrators where "participation should be seen as a multi-way interaction in which citizens and other players work and talk in formal and informal ways to influence action in the public arena before it is virtually a foregone conclusion" (429). The paper presents no new empirical data, but it makes a strong argument for this shift.

The authors identify a number of goals for public participation:

  1. decision makers identify public sentiment
  2. improve decisions through incorporation of local knowledge -- "planners and administrators can be out of touch with communities and local knowledge, but citizens can be out of touch with political and economic realities and long term considerations for a community or resource" (421)
  3. advancing fairness and justice
  4. legitimacy for public decisions
  5. build civil society
  6. adaptive polity for addressing wicked problems
  7. required by law

However, they contend that current methods of public participation merely satisfy the most technical of these goals, namely, fulfillment of the legal requirement; public hearings, review, comments, committees, boards of directors -- all these are broken in practice. These procedures are executed in a manner that results in a number of negative consequences (perhaps even above and beyond simply not having these forums at all). For example, open public meeting requirements prevent officials from "engaging in timely and detailed deliberation around complex issues of collaborative dialog" (424), as meetings are required to be advertised so far ahead of time, among other reasons. The structure of input is constrained to 2-3 minute blocks of time per citizen to give their spiel; there is no dialog, no question answering. The same amount of time is given to those with carefully thought out position and those who simply ramble. This structure also serves to antagonize participants and pit citizens against one another, as citizens are forced to employ a discourse of polarization to get their point across (on pg 424, the reader is referred to Thompson 1997 and Campbell & Marshall 2000 on these accounts). Such a structure discourages busy and thoughtful people, resulting in a typical crowd comprised of extremists, interest groups, and "board watchers". Planners and public officials, on the other hand, question this public input; board members often explicitly don't pay attention given the circumstances, reinforcing the citizen as reactive rather than a collaborator

The only way that public hearings can apparently affect change is when it is manifestly evident that there is widespread and adamant sentiment in a single direction; "if the comments go in opposite directions, the board has no way to learn the reasons nor resolve the differences" (424). Methods of compromise and synthesis are non-existent or primitive. The same goes for review & comment procedures, where, although a technical report is published with comments by agencies, interest groups, and citizens, the "comments come from all directions, but there is no dialogue, and the procedures allow no way to resolve differences. The citizen does not know who wrote the responses, much less have the opportunity to confront the individual or have an interchange on the topic" (425). In short, public input is not organized in a collaborative fashion.

Presumably we want to have both effective and legitimate processes. The authors see a shift from the methods legally required in the US to the use of collaborative dialog as the only means to do so. Such a shift can be seen to effect change on the following dimensions: "one-way talk vs. dialogue; elite or self-selected vs. diverse participants; reactive vs. involved at the outset; top-down education vs. mutually shared knowledge; one-shot activities vs. continuous engagement; and use for routine activiites vs. for controversial choices" (430). The second half of the paper is dedicated to the possibilities for collaborative participation.

The authors point out a number of public arenas where collaborative processes have been successful applied, even in achieving consensus, such as collaborative budgeting (see Weeks 2000) and the diffusion of racial tensions & construction of social capital (the case of Cincinnati; Briggs is seen as an authority on social capital through community building).

The authors claim three keys to success of collaborative participation:

  • The "transformative power of dialogue" (428, citing Roberts 2002), where "an inclusive set of citizens can engage in authentic dialogue where all are equally empowered and informed and where they listen and are heard respectfully and when they are working on a task of interest to all, following their own agendas...". Note: these Habermasian (perhaps...) deliberative conditions are extremely difficult to cultivate, as Mutz describes.
  • The ability to "build networks" (i.e. social capital)..."they come to understand each other's perspectives and in most cases build considerable trust"; these networks are even leveraged outside of the collaborative processes (Booher & Connick 1999 cited on this point).
  • The construction of "institutional capacity". This is the collective effect of greater interconnections in a network of participants, of increased social capital; "the civic capacity of a society grows and participants become more knowledgeable and competent, and believe more in their ability to make a difference" (Mandell 1999 and Bogart 2003 cited as examples)

They also acknowledge some limitations. For example, "collaborative participation can be more representative than other methods, but to assure that it is, it may be necessary to help disadvantaged groups organize into groups and select representatives to speak for them. These groups often need technical assistance so they can have equal voice with the more experienced and better funded interest groups." (430). They also acknowledge that only a few will become long-term consistent participants, although a far greater number will likely participate at least once -- and there are existing methods, such as interactive web-based dialogues and citizen panels, that can handle such participation (430; Susskind & Zion 2002 cited here).

Finally, the authors identify the barriers to collaborative participation (431):

  • open meetings laws
  • Robert's Rules of Order ("forces votes, divisions and partisanship instead of seeking of common ground and building social capital" (431; Susskind 1999 cited on this point))
  • hubris of elected officials who fear loss of their authority
  • limited time citizens can give to collaboration
  • disadvantaged groups who lack the resources to participate
  • lack of collaborative skills among planners and citizens
  • lack of opportunity for genuine dialogue among competing stakeholders
  • the costs of staffing collaborative efforts
  • well entrenched institutions of public decision making

They end by noting that while collaborative participation may be expensive (they cite $400 per person of a 4000 person workshop in NYC for WTC site rebuilding), the costs are often greater for not engaging in the process. However, they state that not all situations are appropriate and that "planners must make sure a conflict assessment is done to find the obstacles and determine whether they can be overcome" (431, Susskind 1999 cited on this point). They do not go into what such an assessment might look like (but perhaps Susskind does...).

Misc

  • Innes & Booher make some general claims about literature related to public input (420-1). They say that:
    • The planning literature "seems to assume the problem is just that we are not using the methods correctly"
    • The political science literature doesn't account for practical implementation of deliberation at a practical scale; ignores public hearing and other practices of public agencies (421)
    • The public administration literature "falls somewhere in between"
  • coalitions may form in response to illegitimate public participation procedures (423)
  • The authors contrast collaborative participation with a pluralist model in interesting ways. They point out that there is a tension within our democratic system between the pluralistic and participatory models: in the participatory model, a gov't - public duality is assumed and deemed legitimate, but the participatory mechanisms are broken; the pluralist, behind the scenes interest group collaborations are effective, but not seen as legitimate (422). Later,they state that collaborative dialogs obviate the tensions between collective and individual interests because "the effort to meet individual interests produces a collective interest, unlike the pluralist model, where individual interests are packaged without being integrated. In collaborative participation, interdependencies are uncovered and participants can discover how all may benefit from improving a resource." (430)
  • "one of the biggest issues in participation is information, who controls it and whether it is trustworthy" (426, cites Hanna 2000); the authors point to the importance of joint fact finding in collaborative participation (and cite Ozawa 1991). This seems to hold implications for processes surrounding the collective understanding of UrbanSim results