John Forester

The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning

Public policy is made of language. Whether in written or oral form, argument is central to all parts of the policy process. As simple as this insight appears, its implications for policy analysis and planning are profound. Drawing from recent work on language and argumentation and referring to such theorists as Wittgenstein, Habermas, Toulmin, and Foucault, these essays explore the interplay of language, action, and power in both the practice and the theory of policy-making. The contributors, scholars of international renown who range across the theoretical spectrum, emphasize the political nature of the policy planners work and stress the role of persuasive arguments in practical decision making. Recognizing the rhetorical, communicative character of policy and planning deliberations, they show that policy arguments are necessarily selective, both shaping and being shaped by relations of power. These essays reveal the practices of policy analysts and planners in powerful new ways--as matters of practical argumentation in complex, highly political environments. They also make an important contribution to contemporary debates over postempiricism in the social and policy sciences. Contributors. John S. Dryzek, William N. Dunn, Frank Fischer, John Forester, Maarten Hajer, Patsy Healey, Robert Hoppe, Bruce Jennings, Thomas J. Kaplan, Duncan MacRae, Jr., Martin Rein, Donald Schon, J. A. Throgmorton

Planning In the Face of Conflict: Negotiation and Mediation Strategies in local Land Use Regulation

Abstract This article shows how planners can simultaneously play negotiation and mediation roles in local land use conflicts. Extensive interview data suggest how planners perceive those roles and the associated problems and opportunities. Six mediated-negotiation strategies presented indicate the discretion that planning staff often have. The strategies require that planners have not only substantive but emotional and communicative skills. Administratively, the strategies may be systematically adopted without changes in local regulations. Politically, mediated-negotiation strategies need not simply perpetuate power imbalances.

Making Participation Work When Interests Conflict: Moving from Facilitating Dialogue and Moderating Debate to Mediating Negotiations

Abstract This article uses a public management controversy in California to show how planners who work with contentious publics can learn from skillful mediators. Citizen participation often produces more heat than light, since conflict often yields little new understanding or dialogue, and even less negotiated agreement on public action. Yet skillful mediation may move beyond either dialogue or debate to craft mutually beneficial public agreements among contentious stakeholders. Mediated participation techniques can redirect conflict into joint inquiry, explore options rather than escalate demands, and achieve practical ends that will serve diverse interests.

On the theory and practice of critical pragmatism: Deliberative practice and creative negotiations

Critical pragmatism provides a line of analysis and imagination that might contribute both to academic planning theory and to engaged planning practices as well. To do so, it must build upon, and develop more politically, Donald Schön’s seminal work on reflective practice. It must help students of planning think critically about outcomes as well as processes, about institutional and process designs, about power and performance. It must resonate experientially with perceptions of change-oriented practitioners facing complex multi-party “problems” characterized by distrust, anger, strategic behavior, poor information, and inequalities of power. Not least of all, a critical pragmatism must—and can—help students of planning reconstruct possibilities where others might initially perceive or presume impossibilities.

Reflections on the future understanding of planning practice

Abstract This paper discusses the planning academys avoidance of issues of power and value while discussing the authors strategies of research on planning practice as they have developed socially and historically. The analysis of planning, these days, is not in crisis but in denial. Not only do many analyses of planning end where they should begin, with the recurrent discovery that power shapes practice, they also fail to address better and worse approaches to acting in the face of power. Such facile treatments of ‘power’ actually make action in a real world of power relations more difficult, and by failing to assess strategies to empower weaker voices, such analyses effectively and conservatively strengthen established power. Further, many analyses of planning presume that ‘better’ and ‘worse’ are undiscussable matters of personal, subjective opinion. The resulting avoidance of value inquiry and value‐critical argumentation hinders planners in their inevitably evaluative work, confuses respect for diff...

Participatory action research from the inside: Community development practice in East St. Louis

The profile that follows presents an account of politics, race, method, and social change drawn from one key participants experience with an ambitious participatory action research project in East St. Louis.1 The key participant who tells the story is Ken Reardon, an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The profile was produced at Cornell University by Brian Kreiswirth and John Forester as part of a larger project to explore the character of practical and political judgment required of participatory action researchers in a variety of fields. In the spring 1992 semester, John Welsh conducted a series of interviews with PAR practitioners, beginning with Ken Reardon; Kreiswirth transcribed these interviews and did the initial editing of Reardons account. Forester super vised the interviewing, transcribing and editing process and did further editing of the transcriptions so they could be used in the undergraduate and graduate courses.

Learning to Improve Practice: Lessons from Practice Stories and Practitioners' Own Discourse Analyses (or Why Only the Loons Show Up)

Just as students and faculty must read critically and listen critically in the classroom, community planners and organizers must listen critically, reaching well beyond mere “words” when they work with others in contested, complex, ambiguous settings. So it turns out that a critically pitched discourse analysis can and might be done in political and professional practice settings, especially when issues of participation are central, every bit as much as in the halls of the sophisticated academy. This article explores the challenges of practical, critical and insightful discourse analysis as it can occur both in the planning academys classrooms and in participatory community planning practices as well.

Exploring Urban Practice in a Democratising Society: Opportunities, Techniques and Challenges

By close consideration of carefully collected oral history accounts of planners, public administrators, community organisers and leaders, a great deal can be learned about both the challenges of governance and the opportunities that insightful and skilful practitioners can seize. This essay first discusses several of the blind spots that hamper practice-focused research and then draws on a novel research approach to give a series of practical suggestions for those who might wish to gather, produce and analyse vivid and engaged ‘practice stories’ – to reveal the complexities, difficulties and possibilities of South African public serving practices. 1Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University. For helpful comments on this and earlier drafts of the Bernstein Memorial Lecture, the author would like to thank Phil Harrison, Heather Campbell and Vanessa Watson, who bear no responsibility for the essays remaining faults.

Beyond Dialogue to Transformative Learning: How Deliberative Rituals Encourage Political Judgment in Community Planning Processes

This paper explores the ways we learn about value in deliberative settings. In planning and many kinds of participatory processes more generally, such learning occurs not just through arguments, not just through the re-framing of ideas, not just through the critique of expert knowledge, but through transformations of relationships and responsibilities, of networks and competence, of collective memory and memberships.

Reflections on trying to teach planning theory

In what follows, I defend a view of planning theory as practically pitched, politically critical, and student friendly. Although I begin with questions of power and hope, I turn promptly to teaching strategies. I hope at least to make, as one of my Berkeley professors, Neil Smelser, once put it, ‘instructive mistakes’, so that readers of this journal can respond and put things right. William James once wrote that however theory-sceptical we might be about each other’s ‘philosophies’, landlords surely need to care about the philosophies of their prospective tenants. Having signed a rental contract, how would they care for the property at hand? How would they regard their contractual ‘obligations’? By suggesting that close relationship between attitude, imagination and practice, James warned us not to equate facile words, facades, posturing, sales talk or hyperbole with anyone’s actual philosophy. So too with planning theory: we should pay a bit less attention to sales pitches—whether authors are hawking ‘communicative action’ or ‘the dark side of planning’—and look instead at the ideas, rationales, logic and visions animating actual planning practices—or, arguably, at potential practices—as they occur and, crucially, as they might yet occur in real places. But then we have a problem, do we not? What if the majority of cases of local planning practice reflect uninspired instances of bureaucratic business as usual, should planning theory and imagination then simply mirror the rationales of such making-do? I think not, but a conventional accounting view or a traditional social scientific understanding of planning does pull us in this direction. We still know too little about how to study possibility, opportunity and exemplary practice. So what alternatives do we have?