Participatory Rural Planning

Exploring Evidence from Ireland

Michael Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317083764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Local & Regional Planning Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Participatory Rural Planning presents the argument that citizen participation in planning affairs transcends a rights-based legitimacy and an all too frequent perception of being mere consultation. Rather, it is part of a social learning process that can enhance the prospects for successful implementation, provide opportunity for reflection and create a mutuality of respect between different stakeholders in the planning arena. Accordingly, Michael Murray signposts what can work well and what should work differently in regard to participatory planning by taking rural Ireland as the empirical laboratory and exploring the Irish experience at different spatial scales from the village, through to the locality, the sub regional and the regional levels.

PART I
Theoretical and Policy Contexts

Chapter 1
Planning and Citizen Participation

Introduction

Public consultation, as a core element of participation in planning, is now second nature, but a key question is the extent to which it is merely tokenism, or a genuine attempt by government to involve citizens and stakeholder organisations in shaping policy. In Ireland, for example, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, John Gormley TD, and the Minister of State at the Department of Finance, Martin Mansergh TD, published draft guidelines on The Planning System and Flood Risk Management in September 2008. Their joint Foreword stated: ‘these guidelines are being published initially in draft form, with a view to their finalisation in statutory form following consideration of the comments and submissions made during the public consultation. We would urge all interested parties to avail of this opportunity to contribute to policy formulation and make any comment that they consider relevant’ (Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government/Office of Public Works, 2008). A final document was jointly issued in November 2009 along with technical appendices, but nothing is mentioned in these publications about the consultation process, the submissions received, and the responses by the departments to those submissions.

In November 2008 the Minister for the Environment in Northern Ireland, Sammy Wilson MP, MLA, announced the commencement of a consultation period through to March 2009 on a draft Planning Policy Statement titled Sustainable Development in the Countryside. Comments were invited on the content of the document and in its preamble, the Department of the Environment indicated that ‘all comments received will be carefully considered’ and that ‘the Executive Subcommittee charged with overseeing the review of rural planning policy will then appraise the outcome of the consultation process and consider whether amendments to the document are required’ (Department of the Environment, Planning and Environmental Policy Group, 2008). A series of Information Days were then set in place during January and February 2009, but at the time of finalising this book in April 2010, the completion of the Planning Policy Statement remains as work-in-progress.

These illustrations of public consultation in the process of planning policy formulation point to issues of transparency in one instance, and seemingly stalled delivery in the other. They also demonstrate a very common way by which government, its officials and citizens interact. Consultation watermarks policy formulation and indeed it is now inconceivable that any significant initiative would be rolled out without broadcast prior engagement beyond the corridors of power. Citizen input is openly encouraged, facilitated and represented as a creative moment in garnering fresh ideas and stakeholder support and indeed this is to be welcomed as evidence, albeit partial, of a mature democracy at work. But arguably behind the scenes, the levers of cautious control are at work in steering policy agendas towards a particular view of the public interest. The phrase ‘write the rules and win’ (Stewart, 2007) comes to mind and in the field of spatial planning this perspective has profound resonance. Within this arena the personnel extend across politicians and their planning officials, developers and planning consultants, and civil society with its issue based networks (that can include academics), thus making for competing evidences, contested choices and, at times, very difficult decisions. Consultation can give legitimacy and buy time to avoid the making of difficult decisions and, as demonstrated later in this book, draft policies issued in consultation format can also be implemented as planning policy with immediate effect, strange as that may seem. This chapter is located within that context of policy debate, interest advocacy and government decision-making.

The chapter commences with a broad overview of the changing theoretical context for planning and identifies the emergence of citizen participation as an antidote to its deeply embedded traditions of technocratic activity. This is followed by a deeper discussion around the practice of participation in the public policy arena, more generally, and planning, in particular. It draws on the contemporary experience in the UK where ideas of citizen participation, responsibility and self-reliance have increasingly been canvassed as a necessary devolution of power from ‘big government’ to the public. The key argument here is that the style of citizen engagement introduced at the beginning this chapter is a necessary but insufficient approach to planning and, in this vein, the scope for more meaningful interaction is highlighted by mentioning a number of techniques that planners can deploy. Finally, a range of analytical criteria that emerge from the wider academic literature are set out in order to help inform the critique of aspects of participatory rural planning practice in Ireland that unfolds in Part II of the book.

Changing perspectives on planning theory

The history of town and country planning over the past 60 years has been marked by two main tendencies, as indicated by Healey et al. (1982). On the one hand, there has been a tendency to centralism, to de-politicising decision-making and increasing the role and power of technical experts. This is an essentially managerial tendency with an emphasis on implementation. On the other hand, there have been demands for more participation in decision-making, a call for more accountability on the part of local politicians and officials, and increasing criticism of technical expertise. In effect, these are demands for increasing politicisation of decision-making. These two tendencies, which are very much at odds with one another, have been labeled as the top-down and bottom-up approaches to planning (Lovan et al., 2004; Murray et al., 2009).

The top-down approach can trace its roots in the rise of intellectual technology, not least in terms of systems analysis, in the 1960s. Previously planning was theorised in terms of questions about the phenomenon, for example, how did cities work, or what were the dominant uses of rural areas? Thus Taylor (1998) denotes the components of planning during the post-war era as comprising: physical planning (not social or economic), urban design (groups of buildings, spaces and aesthetic character) and blueprint planning (the future form of towns and villages, including new towns). The concerns of this substantive approach are well captured by Keeble (1952) in his definition that:

Town and country planning might be described as the art and science of ordering the use of land and the character and siting of buildings and communication routes so as to secure the maximum practicable degree of economy, convenience and beauty. (Keeble, 1952, p. 1)

Whatever the benefits, and there were many, of this substantive approach to theory, it tended to flounder when brought to bear as the medium for introducing and managing change in the increasingly complex regional and local socio-economic conditions that marked the early 1960s. The major criticism was that it offered little by way of thinking about how planning should be approached, and it was virtually swept away by the introduction of Procedural Planning Theory, whose core message was that what was needed was a theory of planning itself, before its application to, or in, any substantive area. The theory, born out of systems analysis and related fields such as linear programming, appropriated the term Procedural because it reduced the subject area to a number of seemingly unproblematic linked steps which could be listed as goal setting, survey/data gathering, forecasting, strategy preparation, evaluation and implementation, with a cybernetic ‘heart’ that emphasised constant monitoring of the system to regulate change. Popular texts in planning schools at that time included McLoughlin’s (1969) Urban and Regional Planning: A Systems Approach and Chadwick’s (1971) A Systems View of Planning. As observed by Taylor (1998) this new form of plan making and development proposal assessment marked a very different approach to what previously held sway:

It suggested the need for a new kind of planner altogether, one who was trained in analyzing and understanding how cities and regions functioned spatially in economic and social terms – a planner, that is trained in economic geography or the social sciences rather than architecture or surveying. (p. 63)

This proceduralist approach appealed enormously to policy makers more generally as a clear cut technical process that laid bare the essence of topics and relegated the ‘judgement calls’ and ‘gut instincts’ of politicians to the sidelines. It quickly became a toolkit of virtually universal applicability in the public sector, with its contentless and contextless overtones so described by Dror (1963):

Planning is the process of preparing a set of decisions for actions in the future, directed at achieving goals by preferable means. (Dror, 1963, cited in Faludi, 1973, p. 330)

The general embrace, afforded across the spectrum of policy sectors, allowed it to assume what is now commonly referred to as paradigmatic status after Kuhn (1970). While the term is now in general coinage, its full ramifications in the Kuhnian sense are still, perhaps, not fully appreciated in that Kuhn looked upon a paradigm as an interdisciplinary matrix of theory, shared beliefs and values, and a common repertoire of problem solutions that bind a scientific or technical community together.

However, the clinical, technocratic planning world of the 1960s, when Procedural Planning Theory enjoyed general, if not fully understood acceptance, was short lived and the subsequent history of planning theory is one characterised by a splintering of this once all pervasive approach. The 1970s and 1980s saw attacks from left wing Critical Theory and the New Right, to name but a few, but while these took their toll on the overall structure of Procedural Planning Theory, they tended to have a shallow impact, not least because of inherent faults in their own analysis, for example, around the hegemony of market-led development. Much more effective was the ‘slow burn’ of Humanist Theory as promoted, for example, by Friedmann (1973) with its emphasis on the societal ramifications of planning and the relationship between experts and communities. The rise of bottom-up planning is based, surprisingly in the context of the longstanding mission of planning as an agent of social reform, on the central importance of communication (written, verbal, street protests etc.) between planners and those for whom the plan is intended. This communicative or participatory planning has been underpinned by the phenomenal growth of the associational sector. As argued by Scimecca (1995), the starting point of people being limited by social institutions creates the corresponding goal of seeking change in the status quo. The humanist perspective searches for points of effective intervention in the structures that shape human lives.

The whole edifice and ideology of traditional governance has been challenged to accommodate this ‘new’ societal construct. Thus in terms of land use planning, for example, theorists such as Healey (1989, 1992) and Forester (1989) have been at the forefront of the changed circumstances which are now so prevalent as to deserve the accolade of the ‘new planning paradigm’. The spirit of this approach was admirably encapsulated in an early statement by Healey (1989):

Environmental planning involves the relation of knowledge to action in the management of environmental change … This would recognize the diversity of legitimate interests in environmental change and the role of discussion and negotiation as the media through which knowledge is translated into action, so … what is proposed is a form of planning as debate. (Healey, 1989, p. 7)

The above quotation is the very essence of reasonableness. Its rootedness in humanist theory suggests, for example, that if individuals are given reliable information upon which to make judgements, are provided with the circumstances within which judgements can be made, and are given opportunities to implement their decisions, then the majority would espouse humane values and noble causes (after Scimecca, 1995). However, this position neglects the real politic of power relations and, in particular, the nature of the interactions between central government and local communities. Stakeholder groups may secure new levels of understanding and even reach consensus, but encounter difficulties in translating this shared capital into action (Margerum, 1999). Thus, bluntly put, it assumes an equality or at least a structured continuity of relationship between the two that has seldom existed in practice. There are broader power structures and ‘legitimisation dynamics within which public agencies often act’ (Yiftachel, 2001, p. 253). As observed by Tewdwr-Jones and Allmendinger (1998) different interests have different access to information and can mobilise and interpret knowledge in vastly differing ways, especially within and between place bounded communities. Perhaps sadly, attempts by planners to involve citizens within planning processes can occur mainly to satisfy legislative requirements and therefore run the risk of being trivialised as simply as an obligatory step among the many routines of planning practice (Julian et al., 1997).

However, the process of paradigm change is uneven. While the Procedural Planning Theory approach has come under severe criticism in terms of its indifference to local communities, the asymmetrical impacts of resource allocation, the overblown reputation of experts, and the extremely difficult issue of describing, let alone providing boundaries to the ‘fuzziness’ of societal systems, it retains a strong hold on the methodology of planning in the public sector. This is a crucially important point. For all the incisiveness of alternative approaches to planning and their critique of conventional Procedural Planning Theory, they have not developed alternative credible methodologies. Indeed as observed by Taylor (1998) even communicative planning theory with its emphasis on processes of deliberation and communication can be regarded as nothing more than further refinement of the rational process view of planning that had emerged in the 1960s. It is appropriate therefore that the following two sections in this chapter should look more closely at the role of participatory processes in public policy more generally and within planning in particular.

Citizen participation in the public policy arena

The imperative of stakeholder consultation is now at the heart of contemporary public policy formation. Central government departments, devolved administrations, public agencies and local authorities are all on this treadmill of inviting comment on the content of draft policy papers. The aim is to enhance public policy responsiveness to service constituencies through a variety of citizen involvement mechanisms. There is almost a universality of application as evidenced by the publication in 2001 of the OECD handbook Citizens as Partners that seeks to give best advice on information, consultation and public engagement practices (Gramberger, 2001).

The alleged benefits of consultation include helping to plan services better to give users what they want and expect; helping with the prioritisation of services and making better use of limited resources; helping set performance standards relevant to users’ needs and associated monitoring; fostering a working partnership with users so that there is understanding of the problems being faced and how they can help; providing a speedy alert to problems so that there is a chance to put things right before they escalate; and symbolising a commitment to be open and accountable. Policy areas such as health, education and urban regeneration have looked to community participation as a way to enhance decision-making and management (Carpenter and Brownill, 2008). It is now commonplace for guidelines to specify the period of weeks that is desirable for a consultation engagement, to outline methodologies for large group interactions, to caution against the risks of consultation burn-out, and to offer suggestions on how to reach the most excluded or vulnerable people and groups in society. Information technology is advanced as being an appropriate conduit for providing details of existing consultations, notification about forthcoming consultations and the results of completed consultations. A call has even been made for the electronic publication of a comprehensive consultation register to which all UK government departments and agencies would be required to submit details of their consultations in a compatible format (Consultation Institute, 2003).

The UK Government, following the arrival into power of New Labour in 1997, has published a raft of advice materials on the need for consultation and has also given advice on methods to be adopted. Thus, for example, in 1998 the Cabinet Office issued An Introductory Guide: How to Consult Your Users. This was followed in 1999 by Involving Users: Improving the Delivery of Local Public Services and in November 2000 by A Code of Practice on Written Consultation. Ever-stronger statements of support, in the decade on from those early initiatives, continue to be issued by Government regarding citizen participation in the governance arrangements of the state. October 2006 saw the publication of The Local Government White Paper (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2006) with Forewords by the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and Secretary of State, Ruth Kelly. Each emphasised the need to give local people and local communities more influence and power to improve their lives through better information, deeper involvement in running services and more opportunity to call local agencies to account if services are failing to meet their needs. A greater diversity in British society – ethnically, racially and culturally – has put the spotlight on ‘stronger local leadership, greater resident participation in decisions and an enhanced role for community groups in helping local areas promote community cohesion’ (p. 12).

The Publication of a second White Paper in July 2008 titled Communities in Control: Real People, Real Power (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2008) claims to take that previous set of declarations further forward with Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, setting the tone of that public policy discourse:

Now with this White Paper we want to move to the next stage in that process – enhancing the power of communities and helping people up and down the country to set and meet their own priorities. In this way we strengthen local democracy by increasing participation. This is not about making people sit in meetings on wet Tuesday nights, it is about helping citizens to get involved when they want to on their own terms – paving the way for a new style of active politics that n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I Theoretical and Policy Contexts
• Part II Participatory Planning in Action
• Part III Prospects for Participatory Planning
• References
• Index