Judith E. Innes

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.

Planning Theory's Emerging Paradigm: Communicative Action and Interactive Practice

The long-bemoaned gap between theory and practice in planning is closing as a new type of planning theorist is beginning to dominate the field. These theorists make the gap complaint moot because they take practice as the raw material of their inquiry. In this they differ from their predecessors, who did primarily armchair theorizing and systematic thinking about planning. These new theorists pursue the questions and puzzles that arise in their study of practice, rather than those which emerge from thinking about how planning could or should be. These new

Information in Communicative Planning

Abstract What planners do most is talk and interact; it is through communicative practice that they influence public action. This paper contends that communicative planning requires a new concept of information and how it influences action—namely, a concept of communicative rationality, supplementing instrumental rationality. Drawing on the authors research on the role of information in policy processes, and on Habermass views of communicative action and rationality, the paper makes three main points. First, information in communicative practice influences by becoming embedded in understandings, practices and institutions, rather than by being used as evidence. Second, the process by which the information is produced and agreed on is crucial and must include substantial debate among key players and a social process to develop shared meaning for the information. Third, many types of information count, other than “objective” information. A concluding note urges planning researchers and educators to put mo...

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.

Deliberative Policy Analysis: Collaborative policymaking: governance through dialogue

The Sacramento Water Forum, a group of contentious stakeholders from environmental organizations, business, local government and agriculture, spent five years in an intensive consensus-building process. In 1999 they agreed on a strategy and procedures for managing the limited water supply in northern Californias semi-desert. Leaders in the region were sufficiently impressed to set up a similar collaborative policy dialogue around the equally volatile issues of transportation and land use in this fast-growing region. When environmental groups decided to sue the regional transportation agency for not protecting the regions air quality, the business community was ready to pull out of this nascent policy dialogue. They were stopped by a leading businessman and elected official who had been involved in the Water Forum and influenced by this way of working. He told the other business leaders in an eloquent speech, ‘We have no choice. We have to stay at the table. There is no alternative.’ They accused him of being ‘one of them’, suggesting he had crossed over to the environmentalist side. This businessman told them they were wrong, saying ‘The Water Forum process transformed me. I now understand that collaboration is the only way to solve problems. I do it now in everything I do, including running my business and dealing with my suppliers, employees and customers.’ The business community stayed with the process and consensus building around transportation got underway . The Water Forum is not unique. A collaborative group known as CALFED, including nineteen state and federal agencies with jurisdiction over California water and dozens of competing stakeholder groups, has been at work since 1995 to resolve issues over the management of Californias limited and irregular water supply.

Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making: Applying Complexity Thinking to Evaluation

Collaborative policy making has become increasingly significant in environmental management, but it is often evaluated by whether or not agreement is reached and implemented. The most important outcomes of such policy dialogues are often invisible or undervalued when seen through the lens of a traditional, modernist paradigm of government and accountability. These dialogues represent a new paradigm of governance that can be best understood in the light of a complex adaptive system model of society. From this perspective collaborative policy making is a way of making a system more flexible, adaptive and intelligent. The authors document such outcomes in three cases of water policy making in California, including the San Francisco Estuary Project, the CALFED Bay-Delta Program and the Sacramento Area Water Forum. The outcomes include social and political capital, agreed-on information, the end of stalemates, high-quality agreements, learning and change, innovation and new practices involving networks and flexibility.

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.

Group Processes and the Social Construction of Growth Management: Florida, Vermont, and New Jersey

Abstract Consensual groups are playing a growing role in planning. This article looks at the group processes that have played key roles in state growth management programs in Florida, Vermont, and New Jersey. The groups have been involved in problem framing, policy development, policy oversight and review, negotiations among competing interests, and developing procedures for accomplishing complex new tasks. The group processes have succeeded in developing shared meaning, coordinating among agencies and levels of government, and often in reaching consensus among players. But they have been only partially successful, at this stage. The next challenge is to redesign planning and decision making institutions to incorporate group processes in a way that makes effective use of what they accomplish.

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.