David E. Booher

Consensus Building and Complex Adaptive Systems

Abstract Consensus building and other forms of collaborative planning are increasingly used for dealing with social and political fragmentation, shared power, and conflicting values. The authors contend that to evaluate this emergent set of practices, a new framework is required modeled on a view of self-organizing, complex adaptive systems rather than on a mechanical Newtonian world. Consensus building processes are not only about producing agreements and plans but also about experimentation, learning, change, and building shared meaning. This article, based on our empirical research and practice in a wide range of consensus building cases, proposes that consensus building processes be evaluated in the light of principles of complexity science and communicative rationality, which are both congruent with professional practice. It offers principles for evaluation and a set of process and outcome criteria.

Reframing public participation: strategies for the 21st century

This article makes the case that legally required participation methods in the US not only do not meet most basic goals for public participation, but they are also counterproductive, causing anger and mistrust. Both theory and practice are dominated by ambivalence about the idea of participation itself. Both struggle with dilemmas that make the problems seem insoluble, such as the conflict between the individual and collective interest or between the ideal of democracy and the reality that many voices are never heard. Cases are used to draw on an emerging set of practices of collaborative public engagement from around the world to demonstrate how alternative methods can better meet public participation goals and how they make moot most of the dilemmas of more conventional practice. Research shows that collaborative participation can solve complex, contentious problems such as budget decision making and create an improved climate for future action when bitter disputes divide a community. Authentic dialogue, networks and institutional capacity are the key elements. The authors propose that participation should be understood as a multi‐way set of interactions among citizens and other players who together produce outcomes. Next steps involve developing an alternative practice framework, creating forums and arenas, adapting agency decision processes, and providing training and financial support.

Network Power in Collaborative Planning

This article makes a case that collaborative planning is becoming more important because it can result in network power. Collaborative policy processes are increasingly in use as ways of achieving results in an era distinguished by rapid change, social and political fragmentation, rapid high volume information flow, global interdependence, and conflicting values. Network power can be thought of as a flow of power in which participants all share. It comes into being most effectively when three conditions govern the relationship of agents in a collaborative network: diversity, interdependence, and authentic dialogue (DIAD). Like a complex adaptive system, the DIAD network as a whole is more capable of learning and adaptation in the face of fragmentation and rapid change than a set of disconnected agents. Planners have many roles in such networks, and planning education needs to incorporate new subject matter to better prepare planners for these roles.

Indicators for Sustainable Communities: A Strategy Building on Complexity Theory and Distributed Intelligence

Indicators and performance measures have become an important element in policy initiatives relating to sustainability and to the re-invention of government. This article reviews the research and practice of indicator development and use, summarizing several key lessons from this review. One of the key lessons is that to be useful, indicators must be developed with the participation of those who will use and learn from them. The article then proposes a strategy for community indicators based upon the conception that cities are like living organisms functioning as complex adaptive systems. Three types of indicators are needed. System performance indicators are required to provide information to the public about the overall health of a community or region. Policy and program measures are required to provide policy-makers with feedback about how specific programs and policies are working. Rapid feedback indicators are required to assist individuals and businesses to make more sustainable decisions on a day-to-day basis. There is no simple formula for how to develop a system of indicators. Each community and region should develop a system based upon their own circumstances and needs.

Governance for resilience: CALFED as a complex adaptive network for resource management.

A study of Californias water planning and management process, known as CALFED, offers insights into governance strategies that can deal with adaptive management of environmental resources in ways that conventional bureaucratic procedures cannot. CALFED created an informal policy-making system, engaging multiple agencies and stakeholders. The research is built on data from 5 years of field work that included interviews with participants, review of documents, and observation of meetings. We argue that CALFED can be seen as a self-organizing complex adaptive network (CAN) in which interactions were generally guided by collaborative heuristics. The case demonstrates several innovative governance practices, including new practices and norms for interactions among the agents, a distributed structure of information and decision making, a nonlinear planning method, self-organizing system behavior, and adaptation. An example of a resulting policy innovation, a method to provide real-time environmental use of water while protecting a reliable supply of water for agricultural and urban interests, is described. We outline how ideas about complex adaptive network governance differ from ideas about traditional governance. These differences result in ongoing tension and turbulence as they do for other self-organizing governance processes that operate in a context of traditional governance.

Informality as a Planning Strategy

Abstract In 1994 an unusual, if not unique, collaborative effort emerged to manage the highly contested and interconnected system of waters, levees, and habitat in the San Francisco Bay Estuary and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. This CALFED Bay-Delta Program (CALFED) engaged 25 federal and state agencies and representatives of 35 major stakeholder groups and local agencies in a joint search for solutions to Bay Delta problems. It changed how water was managed and produced new practices that persisted until at least 2005. CALFEDs collaborative approach is by nature informal, and it coexists uneasily with the norms and structure of formal government. This story illustrates how formal and informal systems are interdependent, yet in tension, across planning, participation, and decision making. Because planners often operate in the interface between the formal and the informal, the story offers lessons that can be applied at many levels of government and for many planning tasks.

Strategies for Megaregion Governance

Problem: Metropolitan areas in the United States are increasingly growing together into megaregions with many linkages and interdependencies in their economies, infrastructure, and natural resources, but they are not linked well in terms of governance. Hundreds of jurisdictions, federal and state sectoral agencies, and regulatory bodies make independent and conflicting decisions with no entity focusing on the regions overall welfare. Purpose: The purpose of this article is to investigate potential governance strategies for such megaregions. Collaborative and networked processes can do many of the needed tasks for regional governance, as they fill gaps where government fails to operate, cross jurisdictional and functional boundaries, engage public and private sector actors on common tasks, and focus on the collective welfare of a region. Our goal is to identify strategies that allow such processes to have some success in planning and managing resources, adapting to unique conditions, and mobilizing key players in joint action. Methods: We rely on our in-depth research in California on two major water planning cases, CALFED and the Sacramento Water Forum, and on two cases of regional civic voluntary organizations known as collaborative regional initiatives. We use two interrelated analytical perspectives, complexity theory and network analysis, to develop our findings. Results and conclusions: These successful cases shared the following features: diverse, interdependent players; collaborative dialogue; joint knowledge development; creation of networks and social and political capital; and boundary spanning. They were largely self-organizing, building capacity and altering norms and practices to focus on questions beyond the parochial interests of players. They created new and often long- term working relationships and a collective ability to respond constructively to changes and stresses on the system. Takeaway for practice: Planners’ roles in megaregion governance include designing processes; creating, supporting, and managing networks; creating arenas for strategy formation; and nourishing strategic understanding and a vigorous public realm. Some can be visionaries, others advocates, providers of technical assistance, or skilled facilitators. The biggest challenge will be to design institutional settings where planners can do these tasks. Research support: This work was supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the University of California Water Resources Center.

A Turning Point for Planning Theory?: Overcoming Dividing Discourses

After communicative planning theory emerged in the 1980s, challenging assumptions and prevailing theories of planning, debates ensued among planning theorists that led to apparently opposing groups with little space for mutual learning. The most difficult obstacle is that critiques of communicative planning theory framed several dichotomies making different perspectives appear incompatible. This article seeks to advance the dialogue of planning theory perspectives by acknowledging the key tensions embedded in this framing, but arguing that they can be viewed as reflecting contradictions to be embraced as an opportunity for a more robust planning theory. Drawing on Manuel Castells’ theory of communication power, the article explores four of these contradictions and shows how in each case embracing the contradictions as aspects of our complex world can lead to insights and a richer planning theory. The article concludes with suggestions for improved dialogue among theorists and identifies research that can advance our understanding of communication power.

Civic Engagement, Spatial Planning and Democracy as a Way of Life Civic Engagement and the Quality of Urban Places Enhancing Effective and Democratic Governance through Empowered Participation: Some Critical Reflections One Humble Journey towards Planning for a More Sustainable Hong Kong: A Need to Institutionalise Civic Engagement Civic Engagement and Urban Reform in Brazil Setting the Scene

Lately, a new piece of public policy vocabulary has turned up on planners’ horizons: civic engagement. For many older planners, this seems like just another term in a bundle of similar ones relating to involving and engaging the public, citizens, in planning processes in some way—public involvement, advocacy planning, citizen participation, collaborative planning, inclusive partnerships. Is the promotion of the idea of civic engagement just another piece of political rhetoric, which, after some adjustments to formal procedures, relapses into “business as usual”? Or is it something more? Is it a reflection of a wider movement in politics and society towards creating a different kind of polity, with a different way of going about the business of politics and policy making? Does the momentum behind the idea of “civic engagement” reflect a renewed effort to transform democratic life from the kind of elite, techno-democracy so much promoted in Europe and North America in the mid twentieth century towards ideas of more participatory forms of democracy which have continually challenged this elite model? And if so, what is the hope that a more participative model can address the challenges of promoting more liveable and sustainable urban places, for the many and not just the few? This Interface explores the potential of the idea of civic engagement in this context. There is already literature about a variety of different kinds of techniques for “doing” planning work in more participatory ways, in which citizens, not planners or politicians, take the driving seat in developing policy ideas and project briefs. The Interface of a previous number of this Journal (9(1), Forester, 2008) provides a rich illustration of one of these, the “planning for real” approach. In this Interface, we hope to encourage practising planners and researchers to explore the relationship between the practices of “involving citizens”, the evolution of the wider polities in which such practices are situated, and the formation of a “public realm” which is not only liveable and sustainable but also which cultivates qualities which foster vibrant, critical and creative political community. This all sounds very fine and idealistic, cynics will say. But look at the practice of “public participation.” Back in the idealism of the later 1960s, this was widely advocated as a way to transform urban politics. But it got taken up instead as a managerial strategy for “regularising” urban conflicts, and turned into procedural requirements which, as David Booher notes in his piece, squeezed the transformative energy out of the social movement. Or did it? Certainly that was the experience in many places. But if we look