The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes

The Deliberative Practitioner by John Forrester assembles a series of essays and builds upon a wide ranging experiential base, domestically and internationally, that together portray a possibility model for how policy planners and policy analysts may think and act so as to increase the likelihood of achieving extraordinairy results in the face of everyday difference and conflict, most especially when engaging wicked public problems in swampy environments. That possibility model is grounded in concrete experience rather than a set of prior abstractions and begins with the reflective and deliberative challenge of critical listening. Indeed, one may say that cultivating capacity for critical listening is a necessary foundation for all that follows. Forrester's method is rigorously interpretive and employs practitioners' stories to convey a textured sense of possibility. Forrester's mode of analysis does not aim to convey its lessons through codifying a set of propostions but rather aims to foster a deep understanding of the potential and the power of one's practical reasoning capacity to constructively engage with the particularities of the situation at hand to deliveratively help create public value. Like Donald Schon in The Reflective Practitioner, Forester is concerned to show how insightful practice can lead to stronger and more penetrating theory. Yet while Schon's emphasis is more psychologically focused upon the reflective practitioner, Forrester's emphasis is more sociological upon participative, interactive, and deliberative processes, perhaps most especially in political contexts that account for the realities of power differentials. Like Schon's systems designer in Beyond the Stable State and Alberto Guerreiro Ramos' para-economic systems designer in The New Science of Organizations, Forrester conceives of the astute planner or policy analyst as one who learns the role flexibility of acting as a convenor or facilitator, a bridge builder, systems negotiator, and mediator rather than merely as surrogate for a patron or as a deceptive pygmalion who relies upon his or her perceived expertise to shape a setting and then subtly or overtly tell people how to live in it. Forrester's possibility model considers not only intellectual and imaginative dimensions of systems design but gives full attention to emotive collaborative challenges that frequently arise when participants distrust or may even detest one another. The theorizing contained in the text is grounded in and held in continuous tension with a wide breadth of practical experience with participative planning proccesses as conveyed by the context-rich stories drawn from the real life experience of exemplary planners and policy analysts. The point of the author's stories is not to describe typical planning behavior but rather to inspire planners and policy analysts with a series of what is deliberatively possible through encouraging and intelligently engaging participatory p

Once I started reading this book I could not put it aside for long. Perhaps this is because so many of the insights that the author offers on what practioners of deliberative planning and rural development actually do resonates so much with the work I am involved with in Indonesia and the Philippines. Unlike many other books I have read on planning and development, this book relates stories of planners' real world experiences. It appears that most of the skills practitioners use to deal with the diversity of interests in the face of conflict are rarely taught in universities or textbooks. One wonders where practitioners learn what they do best.While a solid professional background is necessary, planners must also use improvisation to deal with deliberative processes which involve many stakeholders. What I enjoyed most about this book, unlike many others, is that it contrasts rationality with emotional sensitivity, calculation with improvisation, all of which are necessary for good practice.The author aslo addresses an often overlooked aspect of deliberative processes in the design professions, that is, how to balance pragmatism in contexts where there has been a history of injustice towards particular groups. The book makes use of extensive practical experiences of real-life planners and attempts to draw theory from that praxis. These experiences are just as fascinating to read as the authors' insights into theory. It's like being immersed into a deliberative dialogue.

As Forester explains in his Introduction makes, the title of his book is an intentional reference to Don Schön's path breaking The Reflective Practitioner. To use a trite cliché, that his book begins where Schön's book left off. There is, on the one hand, a remarkable similarity between the way Schön frames the situation the planner faces on the one hand, and Forester's description of the planner's world and his concept of deliberation on the other. The difference is in Forester's upfront, no-illusion understanding of the conflict-ridden nature of the world of planners and policy makers. Where Schön's reflection-in-action can, perhaps somewhat unfairly, be read as an improvement of the received view of professional knowledge as the sage expert who solves complex problems for clients in need, Forester has no illusions anymore about the moral and instrumental bankruptcy of the expert model. This becomes nowhere as clear as when we look at the examples each author uses. Where Schön uses one-on-one encounters between a psychotherapist and his supervisee, or an architect and his student, Forester examples include a bitter, entrenched fight over urban development in the Oslo harbour, a black home buyer counsellor in the overtly racist environment of a low income white settlement house, or housing improvement among poor campesinos in rural Venezuela. Between Schön's and Forester's book lie almost twenty years of massive social, economic and political change, and, in its wake, almost twenty years of disenchantment, if not disillusion, with the role of politicians, administrators, and experts in the public domain. The world that Forester's planners or today's administrators inhabit is the fragmented, pluralistic, adversarial world that has eroded the steering capacity of central governments and that transferred policymaking power to a fragmented field of social and political actors. It is a world that has become so complex and tightly coupled, that the only thing that seems certain to policy makers is that their actions will generate massive unforeseen effects. A world in which the "privileged" knowledge of experts time and again dramatically fails to foresee or solve social and technical problems, and in which, consequently, citizens no longer take the authority of experts for granted. A world, moreover, in which debates about policy solutions are often less about the effectiveness of solutions as about the nature of the problem or the identity of the parties involved. As Forester makes clear, any theory of planning or policymaking or public administration that aspires to even a modicum of social or political relevance, has somehow to come to terms with this world. Listen to the way Forester, subtly commenting upon Schön, sets the stage for his book: "As planners work in between interdependent and conflicting parties in the face of inequalities of power and political voice, they have to be not only personally reflective but politically deliberative too."

John Forester's latest book entitled "The Deliberative Practitioner encouraging Participatory Planning Process", (MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1999) develops the key ideas of his earlier writings on participatory planning processes by examining the challenges and difficulties of planning in the midst of contested power relationships.Forester perceives planning as the effort to build consensus towards commonly perceived goals. Since the context of the planning is always fraught with differences, conflicts and inequalities, a planning process necessarily shapes opinion, creates value, transforms not just material conditions but human relationships.The emphasis on democracy and participation is central to Foresters search for effective planning practices. Keenly sensitive to a world 'riddled with racial violence and discrimination with vast differences in levels of political organization and mobilization', Forester highlights the significance of public deliberations that give space to plural voices and strengthen democratic practices. Adversarial situations are not predetermining. They can be negotiated towards collaborative action. Deliberative planning is seen as a process of learning together to craft strategies towards greater community good. Forester's concern with planning focuses on the issues of rationality, emotional sensitivity and moral vision. Forester defines rationality as an interactive and argumentative process of marshalling evidence and giving reasons. By ethics, Forester understands not a system of fixed codes and predetermined standards, but the continuous allocation and recognition of value inherent in every pragmatic choice assessable by its quality of action and consequences. Emotional sensitivity is seen as a source of knowledge and recognition. "Deliberative practitioner" highlights these issues in a 'live' way by using 'stories' as a narrative method because stories deepen our understanding of planning as a human interaction. Stories bring into play our dual roles of actor and critic, crucial to planning. By capturing situations in their complexity, Forester sensitizes our perceptions to the significance of many non-formal processes and the elements of unpredictability and surprise in planning cautioning against a 'rush to interpretation' and simplistic cure-alls. Forester's book makes significant contributions to the discussion on participatory planning. The stories he selects indicate how planners can through their technical inquiry, explicit value inquiry, and learning about social identities succeed in a pragmatic synthesis of rationality, ethical judgements and emotional sensitivities. Forester's book has special relevance to developing contexts, fraught with unevenness, caught between their indigenous cultures and the new cultures that the culture of external development aid brings with it. Development projects in such contexts, under the pressure of measurable, time-bound performance indica