Suchergebnisse

Communicative planning theory (CPT), which emerged in the 1980s and 90s, unsettled assumptions about what planning is, how it works, and how it ought to be done. It also challenged ideas about what theory should be for and what form it should take. CPT refers to the work of a cluster of scholars in planning and related fields who conducted fine-grained, interpretive research on planners and planning processes, using concepts from social theorists as tools to make sense of what they observed and to develop normative perspectives on practice. They focused in considerable part on communication, interaction and dialogue, and drew new theorists into planning thought, including most notably Habermas, Foucault, and Dewey. They wrote stories of practice along with reflections on them. While CP theorists each took a different angle, they became a community of sorts, sharing drafts of manuscripts, discussing ideas on panels and in personal correspondence, building their work on one another's ideas. As CP theorists proliferated, their work drew increasing attention in the planning academy. This came to a head in response to an article in the Journal of Planning Education and Research (Innes 1995), which asserted that CPT could become the dominant paradigm in planning theory. A storm of criticism broke out, surprisingly not primarily from the rational model theorists whose work they had challenged, but from the political economists and neo-Marxists, whose work had also been an important part of planning thought since the 1960's. Panels and conferences were set up to "debate" CPT and proceedings were published in journals. Writing articles critical of CPT became almost a cottage industry. Many of critics' claims, however, were grounded in oversimplifications and misunderstandings of CP research and ideas. CP theorists continued to focus on their own work rather than responding to what amounted to attacks. The few who offered limited responses seemed unable to change the critics' views. Today planning theory seems to have become a set of dividing discourses. People talk past one another. Blame, criticism, and incivility often crowd out scholarly dialogue and inquiry (e.g. Bengs 2005). Theorists are divided into camps, speaking in different languages to different ends. Students are often confused and frustrated, craving a way to make sense of the differences. While the brouhaha may have started as a war over turf and over which views will be dominant, the result today is that we as theorists have little ability to learn from our differences. The situation is neither conducive to constructive conversation, nor to building richer and more robust theory. The most difficult obstacle to such conversation is that the critiques have framed a set of dichotomies among perspectives, making them appear incompatible. Purpose and outline of the paper This paper takes on the project of helping the field move toward a common discourse through which we can explore and learn from our differences. We will not try to merge the perspectives—rather we will identify some of the tensions among them as evidenced by these dichotomies and use these as fuel for new ways of see our common enterprise. Along with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (Bernstein 1976), we contend contradictions are normal and that we must not only accept, but also embrace them if we are to learn and move forward. Our situation is similar to that of physicists trying to resolve the contradictions between quantum theory and general relativity, where research shows mysteries and paradoxes. This situation offers an opportunity for learning and new discoveries which could transform our understanding of the universe (Overbye 2013). We have to learn to live with dualities in our constantly changing world. In this paper we will offer one way to do this using the lens of Castells' theory of communication power (Castells 2009). We start with brief summaries of the critiques and of Castells' theory. We then examine four contradictions that emerge from the critiques: community knowledge versus science; communication power versus state power; collaboration versus conflict; and process versus outcome. Finally we offer thoughts on how planning theory can move beyond dividing discourses to richer theory.

Since 1995, the James Irvine Foundation has invested more than $11 million to support the growth and development of Collaborative Regional Initiatives (CRIs) throughout the state—nonprofit organizations that engage key players from business, environmental, and a variety of other advocacy groups with players from local governments and public agencies to create improvements in their regions. CRIs work on issues ranging across transportation, land use, housing, and economic development. They work in a variety of ways from developing legislation to media campaigns to practical work on particular projects. All are directed at building civic capacity and filling in gaps where government does not or cannot act. Some CRIs have been in place for years; others are more recently formed. They represent experiments in regional governance. Recently, the Irvine Foundation tapped a team of Berkeley faculty to perform an assessment of the CRIs so the foundation can target its resources in order to make them effective and sustainable over time and assist them in producing valuable outcomes for their regions. City planning professor Judith Innes, who led the complex evaluation, teamed with city planning professors AnnaLee Saxenian, Karen Christensen, Karen Chapple and political science professor Judith Gruber to focus on the projects and programs that a sample of CRIs engage in, asking which are most successful and why. In particular, the researchers examined how variables like leadership, resources, diversity of participation, processes of dialogue and collaboration, and the ways problems have been framed contribute to the degree of success in each program. The work is designed to assist the CRIs with strategies to select and build the successes of their programs and to help them overcome obstacles and identify opportunities for effective work. Together the researchers published case studies of four major CRIs -- the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities, Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, the San Diego Dialogue and the Sierra Business Council -- as well as an analysis of regional workforce development collaboratives in California. The Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities was formed to change the patterns and practices of land use in the San Francisco Bay Area to achieve a more compact, transit-friendly form of growth. The diverse group has worked toward this goal by creating a regional Compact or vision outlining the actions needed for a sustainable Bay Area, a Smart Growth Strategy/Regional Livability Footprint used to influence the regional population projections, and a regional indicators report. The group's one action project has been to bring investment into disadvantaged neighborhoods through their Community Capital Investment Initiative. The idea is that disadvantaged neighborhoods offer an untapped business opportunity if investors and developers can be assisted by knowledgeable community players; at the same time, such investments can be designed to provide community benefit. However, business's need for speed and secrecy in making investments and the community's need for transparency and thorough dialogue have created conflict. Both business and community players are learning to work together and are committed to making the effort productive and sustainable, but it remains a work in progress. Overall the Alliance's main outcomes, in addition to some building projects, have been to advance a regional discourse about smart growth and to help regional civic leaders representing the three E's (environment, economy and equity) to understand how each other's interests can be jointly met. According to Professor Innes, the primary reason the Bay Area Alliance has not achieved more lies in its choice of a large scale and complex problem—changing the region's institutions and land use patterns and ultimately making it sustainable. "This is what planners call a 'wicked' problem—where parameters are poorly defined, features are contradictory and changing, there are many players with differing goals and there exists no simple generic solution," she says. "The scope and complexity of BAASC's mission makes achieving their ambitions difficult."

This book addresses the question of what it takes to develop social indicators that genuinely influence important public decisions. It looks historically at the processes of creating and using three important social indicators in the United States: unemployment rates, standard budgets, and crime rates.

Many critiques of consensus building have been uninformed about the nature of this practice or the theory on which it was built, though there is extensive literature on both. It is grounded in the theory and practice of interest-based negotiation and mediation. It is not grounded in Habermas' concept of communicative rationality, though theorists have found useful illumination in his ideas. Claims are often made about pathologies of consensus building based on cases where the conditions for authentic dialogue recognized by both practitioners and theoreticians were not met. Documentation of cases shows that when these conditions are met, many desirable outcomes occur. The article examines the various critiques, including the claims that external power differentials are deterministic, that lowest common denominator solutions are the outcomes, that valuable tensions are lost in the process, and that agreements are fleeting at best. It shows how and why each of these is not borne out by experience. Consensus building is time consuming and requires skill and training. It is only appropriate in situations of uncertainty and controversy where all stakeholders have incentives to come to the table and mutual reciprocity in their interests.

The social indicators movement has been a disappointment to its originators. By the late 1970s, at least in the US, the great hopes for social indicators to become a major influence on public policy had been tempered. The outpouring of literature using the term 'social indicators' dwindled. Policy scientists turned their attention to other topics or found new labels for their interests. The Social Science Research Council closed its Social Indicators Research Center in Washington, DC and stopped publishing its newsletter. And in the US no annual social report seemed likely to be institutionalized. Many observers decided the social indicators movement was a failure.

From 1997 to 2004, The James Irvine Foundation (Irvine) invested more than $20 million in grants to support Collaborative Regional Initiatives (CRIs), partnerships that engaged Californians from public, private, and nonprofit sectors in most of the state's major regions. These CRIs all emerged from collaborative processes involving diverse stakeholders. They varied in their origins, focus, and outcomes —- each emerged from its region's unique challenges, and each addressed these in different ways. Across the group, they dealt with at least three of four major types of issues: (1) natural resource protection, (2) workforce and economic development, (3) regional infrastructure development, and (4) civic engagement. The overarching goals of Irvine's CRI program were to enhance economic vitality, increase social equity, and protect the natural environment of California regions over the long term through strategic, collaborative action by business, community, and government leadership. The effort was part of Irvine's Sustainable Communities program, the purpose of which was to help California accommodate growth in a way that benefited the economy, the environment, and all levels of its diverse population. In 2003, Irvine restructured its strategic approach to grantmaking and no longer has a separate Sustainable Communities program. However, some of its goals are now a part of Irvine's California Perspectives program, which seeks to inform public understanding, engage Californians, and improve decision-making on significant issues of long-term consequence to the state. The theory of change behind the CRI program was that collaborative efforts, which engage participants from multiple sectors, are more likely to produce workable solutions to California's challenges than a business-as-usual approach. To move toward sustainable regions, participants must start from the premise that all three E's (environment, equity, and economy) are fundamentally entwined and must be addressed jointly. Many of the sustainability challenges can only be understood and addressed in regional contexts and not simply through sectoral agencies or interests and local jurisdictions. Moreover, successful change requires informed and engaged citizens who understand what is at stake, what the choices are, and how to contribute to better decisions. Irvine therefore supported organizations that crossed sectoral and jurisdictional boundaries, addressed complex regional issues related to sustainability, and worked with and mobilized diverse participants to improve regional performance. In addition, Irvine and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation created the California Center for Regional Leadership (CCRL), to help build knowledge and networks among the CRIs. CCRL held annual Civic Entrepreneur Summits, where leaders from the CRIs met and learned from experts and from one another. The assessment team's research began with a survey and review of the goals, structure, and activities of 17 CRIs. The team soon concluded that in order to understand what had happened, why, and how, it would need to conduct in-depth case studies of selected CRIs. The team chose the oldest, most complex, and best developed of the CRIs with the greatest diversity of activities: Sierra Business Council (SBC), Joint Venture: Silicon Valley (JV:SV), San Diego Dialogue (SDD), and Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities (BAASC). These CRIs differed in their approaches and purposes and offered a range of strategies and outcomes to compare. They had all been in place long enough to have had accomplishments and produced changes in their regions. The assessment team looked at each of these CRIs as a whole rather than focusing solely on activities funded by Irvine. Irvine funding served as seed, project, and general support money, but all CRIs supplemented it with other grants and funding sources. This assessment was originally designed to compare successes and failures of projects completed by the CRIs. Accordingly, the team began with hypotheses about the resources needed for success, the mix of stakeholders, processes and information, and how the origins of a CRI and its framing of the issues were factors. After a year of interviews and analysis, the team realized, however, that contexts and strategies for each CRI were so different, projects so diverse, and the degree of success for any one project so ambiguous that this analytic strategy was not going to be fruitful. The team prepared an in-depth report on each of the four cases, laying out its strategies and organization, activities, successes, and failures, and the way each adapted to its region's strengths and needs. Each offered a different model for regional collaboration, and each offered different insights about what CRIs can accomplish, what works well, and what can go wrong. The purpose of this paper is to describe the themes and lessons from a comparison of these cases and to highlight what is important and new about these experiments in regional action and governance.

Since 1995, the James Irvine Foundation has invested more than $11 million to support the growth and development of Collaborative Regional Initiatives (CRIs) throughout the state -- nonprofit organizations that engage key players from business, environmental, and a variety of other advocacy groups with players from local governments and public agencies to create improvements in their regions. CRIs work on issues ranging across transportation, land use, housing, and economic development. They work in a variety of ways from developing legislation to media campaigns to practical work on particular projects. All are directed at building civic capacity and filling in gaps where government does not or cannot act. Some CRIs have been in place for years; others are more recently formed. They represent experiments in regional governance. Recently, the Irvine Foundation tapped a team of Berkeley faculty to perform an assessment of the CRIs so the foundation can target its resources in order to make them effective and sustainable over time and assist them in producing valuable outcomes for their regions. City planning professor Judith Innes, who led the complex evaluation, teamed with city planning professors AnnaLee Saxenian, Karen Christensen, Karen Chapple and political science professor Judith Gruber to focus on the projects and programs that a sample of CRIs engage in, asking which are most successful and why. In particular, the researchers examined how variables like leadership, resources, diversity of participation, processes of dialogue and collaboration, and the ways problems have been framed contribute to the degree of success in each program. The work is designed to assist the CRIs with strategies to select and build the successes of their programs and to help them overcome obstacles and identify opportunities for effective work. Together the researchers published case studies of four major CRIs -- the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities, Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, the San Diego Dialogue and the Sierra Business Council -- as well as an analysis of regional workforce development collaboratives in California. Since 1970, the Sierra Nevada has undergone significant economic and social change as the population of this vast 18-county region has more than doubled, traditional industries in timber and natural extraction have declined and a major tourist industry has evolved. These changes have led to political conflict between long-time residents concerned about property rights and economic development and the new arrivals who tend to be more concerned about the environment. Enter the Sierra Business Council, a Collaborative Regional Initiative (CRI) established in 1994 to address these conflicts and help assure the sustainability of the Sierra. The council developed the novel strategy of helping the business community understand how environmental quality is an essential component to the potential success of the economy. "Their fundamental theory of change at the outset was basically to transform businesspeople into environmentalists so they would take different positions in the political debates over the Sierra's future," says city planning professor Judith Innes in a new report on CRIs in California. "The Sierra Business Council overall has been a highly successful organization," she says, "gaining high marks from participants in most of their activities and being able to demonstrate outcomes from their many initiatives." Among the council's notable achievements have been the development of the Sierra Nevada Wealth Index, which provides and explains indicators on each of the types of capital -- natural, social and financial -- in the Sierra. It has been so widely used that demand has grown for parallel indexes for smaller regions. The council was also instrumental in creating the Sierra Nevada Conservancy recently signed into law by the governor.

After a 5-year study of transportation planning in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have concluded that the contentiousness we observed in the process was due in great part to differences in participants' styles of planning and not solely to disagreements over desired outcomes. Each style involved different assumptions about information, public participation, and what a good plan is like, as well as about the process of planning. Practitioners of each tended to believe deeply in their approach and to regard with suspicion, if not hostility, those practicing different styles. We identified four coexisting styles, which we label technical/bureaucratic, political influence, social movement, and collaborative. Each style tended to be associated with different types of outcomes, though this was not explicit in discussion. The political planners divided resources among players, whereas the collaborative and the social movement planners were associated with strategies designed to benefit the region as a whole.

This is a study of the Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission's (MTC) transportation decision making process after the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act in 1991. This innovative federal legislation promised to make transportation policy at state and regional levels more flexible across modes and more participatory among a wider range of players. MTC was one of the first Metropolitan Planning Organizations off the mark in implementing this legislation, setting up a Bay Area Partnership of all the transportation providers and key regulators in the region to work collaboratively to come up with plans and policies. This innovative effort offered an excellent opportunity for learning about the potential for and obstacles to change in transportation policy making. In particular it offered us the opportunity to look at what seemed a new model of collaborative decision making across agencies and jurisdictions.

Collaborative processes offer possible means to resolve public policy disputes that administrative, regulatory and/or judicial processes have failed to solve, thus breaking the gridlock that results when governmental agencies don't work effectively. The use of collaborative processes and collaborative policy making have produced important results in natural resources management in California, as illustrated by three cases.

The California water policy arena has been a notoriously conflictual environment, in which parties frequently were at odds with one another on multiple fronts simultaneously, fighting one another through the regulatory and resource management agencies, the courts, Congress and the state legislature, and the voters. Today, however, these diverse parties are engaging in collaborative dialogues, focusing on joint problem solving rather than mutual destruction and, more often than not, going to the legislative bodies and voters with one voice in seeking remedies to their problems. These collaborative dialogues have produced robust and lasting outcomes that extend well beyond the resolution of specific disputes. Together, these and other examples demonstrate how such dialogues have profoundly transformed policy making practices, as well as the way in which day-to-day decisions about on-the-ground management and operations are made. When the world is viewed as a complex system, in which learning, feedback, and adaptations take place through highly linked, self-organizing networks -- as opposed to a mechanistic model of inputs and outputs -- it's easier to understand how collaborative dialogue processes function and produce a wide variety of types of results. Evaluation methods based on a mechanistic world view will fail to identify many of the most important results of these processes. If evaluation is approached as it has been done traditionally, focusing first and foremost on whether agreements were obtained and how strong the consensus was, the truly important results of these processes will be missed, including the building of social and political capital, the learning and change, the development of high quality information, new and innovative ideas, new institutions and practices that are adaptive and flexible, and the cascade of changes in attitudes, behaviors, and actions. The challenge now is to approach the evaluation task from a complex systems perspective and to identify and seek to develop a robust understanding of the significance of the first-, second-, and third-order outcomes of these processes in the contexts in which they occur. Process participants themselves may be focused on agreements and not recognize the significance of some of these outcomes until much later. As the authors have discovered, first- and some second-order outcomes, such as the development of social and political capital and high-quality, trusted information, begin to occur during the collaborative dialogue process. Other second- and third-order outcomes most often emerge after the reaching of a formal agreement. And although a process may have finished in a formal sense, it can continue to produce results as the changes in attitudes and practices continue to propagate through the system. In evaluating how well the processes are working, frameworks must be developed that are flexible and allow incorporation of ongoing learning and adaptation as new and different results emerge.