Editorial

Learning From the Process Versus Outcomes Debates

Essays about planning often end where they should have begun. Years ago critical analyses ended a bit breathlessly with the discovery that planning was political. We'd have done better then to assess just how planning was political, and to explore more explicitly and critically what differences that could make for improving the field. A bit more recently the focus has shifted at times to “power” and too often we've ended there rather than assessing specific forms and modes of power and really exploring the implications for better or worse, and more or less just planning.

Too often our critical studies show us doers and done-to, the dealmakers and the excluded, and yet they end earnestly with ambiguous calls for more democracy without showing us what “more democracy” really might mean. At best, these analyses teach us about the contingencies of planning institutions and practices, about opportunities and possibilities in the world to serve human need, to reduce needless suffering, or to contribute to human flourishing and self-determination. At worst, these analyses provide not action-orienting reconstructive critiques but instead more descriptive, if heartfelt, normative complaints invoking the rhetoric nevertheless of critical analysis.

In this editorial I hope to show that we can do better than be satisfied with either one of two tempting recent lines of analysis—even as both hope to be usefully critical of prevailing planning practices: either, first, the view that we can understand good planning as good process, or second, the view that we can understand good planning as the specification of “substantive outcomes”. If we examine and move beyond these common (but, as I will argue, flawed) positions, we can learn a good deal about not only planning, but power and conflict as well.

Let me start with the bad news. Nothing that the planning literature discusses, I submit, comes anywhere close to ensuring or guaranteeing “good results”. Good processes cannot guarantee good results (though they can help better the odds of achieving them), and, likewise, neither can planners' compelling ideas of “substantive outcomes” guarantee good results either (though having a clear sense of destinations might surely improve the odds of coming into the right station). Neither can wise, or even autocratic, leadership or ample expertise or vigorous social movements guarantee results. The gesture toward guarantees moves us away from politics, perhaps toward philosophy or religion or science, but hardly toward the living contingencies of planning in a political world of conflicting interests and values, power and inequality.

The skeptic who worries that “participation” might mean talk, talk, talk with little being decided and less being implemented has reasonable concerns. We've all seen supposedly “participatory” meetings that were sheer chaos, producing not results but noise and further distrust in any such processes, all the more when planners defend these as somehow “democratic”. We have seen supposedly “mediated” negotiations which were instead merely moderated debates—so that arguments escalated, relationships frayed further, stakeholders learned little—as conveners went through formal motions of conducting “public hearings”, for example, that applied a patina of “public participation” to decisions often already decided. In a world of skewed power relationships and inequalities of resources, facile appeals to “participation” ring as hollow as defenses of “equal opportunity” in races where some carry far heavier burdens than others. Equal participation in these circumstances reproduces initial injustices and legitimizes rather than challenges status quo power relations. Defending this as “good process” strikes many of us as morally repugnant, willfully blind politically, and ethically shallow to say the least. Yet how promising, defenders of more politically sensitive processes wonder, are the alternatives?

The skeptic who worries about the appeal to “substantive outcomes” as a driving force behind planning results also has reasonable concerns—for the reds and the greens and the blacks and the browns and the indigenous and the preservationists and the developers (to say nothing of the vegetarians) all have their favored and passionately defended and articulated candidates for desired real “outcomes”. We have all seen well-dressed technocrats and distinguished, tweedy experts, no doubt with the very best of intentions, make recommendations for the “substantive outcomes” that their research reports and “sophisticated” analyses justify, but we have all also seen these technocrats and experts disagree vociferously with one another. We have all seen the pathologies of adversarial science—“our experts versus theirs”—as universities, year in and year out, produce the latest generations of ever more sophisticated experts in their graduates and on their faculties. So we know, too, how the quest for certainty, the dream of technocracy, in politically contested arenas dies a slow death. We see that appeals to “substantive outcomes” each privilege a unique mix of goals of justice and beauty and growth and environmental protection and egalitarianism and more—so we might reasonably wonder how to treat their differences. Can the appeal to “substantive outcomes” ironically suppress attention to conflicts among desired outcomes—along with suppressing attention to the multiple “processes” for recognizing and working with, challenging and transforming such deeply political conflicts?

“But, surely,” says the outcome advocate, “how can we plan without a sense of destination, without an analysis of justice and inequality and poverty and relative advantages of differential policy options? Surely we can learn from the experience of major cities, even those on other continents, who seem to have really achieved relatively more justice and public welfare than we have at home?”

“No doubt that's true, but just as surely,” says the process advocate, “we can't expect to develop legitimate plans—not benignly autocratic but democratically legitimated plans—if we have paternalistically left out, dismissed or systematically disregarded people of color or immigrants, the old or the young or non-heterosexual stakeholders who may well be experts in their own problems and circumstances, interests and identities. Surely, processes have integrity and even an instrumentality of their own: inclusion, not exclusion, has significant value in its own right. Surely too,” insist the process advocates, “outcome specifications can't be static as history changes: through well-designed and managed processes stakeholders can learn, adapt, even invent new options and go on then to create new, unforeseen outcomes together.”

“Together?” wonder the outcome's advocates, “Together? How in a world of such power and inequality can the lion and the lamb participate together and create anything but an ever new menu of lamb chops?” They might well continue, “Instead of perpetuating such naïve views of “consensus” and learning together, planners would do well to remember Henry Kissinger's political insight: the only problem with the lion and the lamb lying down together is that every morning you need a new lamb!”

“Of course,” respond the process defenders, “no process blind to power disparities can be a good process. Only if process design—a badly neglected area of planning scholarship in fact—can anticipate and practically counteract a wide and subtle range of such power disparities, economic and political, cultural and social and more, can planning processes be legitimate, critically inquiring, inventive, and plausibly ‘democratic’ at all. But,” they go on to say, “we hardly have the monopoly on naïveté! Just how naïve is it to think that by not participating in planning processes ‘together,’ you outcomes advocates will do any more, practically and substantively, than talk, talk, talk (even if you call it protest, protest, protest) while those in power go on their merry way? Are you after all just interested in talking about those substantive outcomes or do you care about actually achieving them?”

“You have a problem with protesting, with advocating for the rights of the disenfranchised, advocating for the rights to the city?”

“Of course not—unless that's all you want to do, just talk about justice and rights without turning that into political pressure and focusing that political pressure to achieve real, substantive gains. If your talk about justice and rights stays so disengaged from institutional processes that might realign relations of power, of resources and recognition, then who is naïvely just talking? Do you have a problem with actually negotiating to achieve real gains?”

“Of course not—unless the move to negotiate gets us so involved ‘together’ that we have to start compromising our real goals, the substance of the outcomes that really matter—if we'd be less able to organize, so that we're less able to defend diverse and disenfranchised communities' rights to the city and historical claims for justice.”

“So,” the process advocate might now see, “we're talking about different bets we have about how to make a difference, even as we agree that we're always working and living in historical settings of class and racial and gendered inequalities, in settings of past and present violence, joblessness, poor housing and more.”

“That's just one part of it. You see social movement demands as potentially feel-good gestures disconnected from decision making. We see your appeal to consensus building as denying the deep differences that have literally defined so much political history: are people of color to ‘leave their differences at the door’? You say ‘negotiate’ and we hear ‘compromise our values’. You talk about ‘mutual gains’ agreements, and we can't see why in the world those with poor housing and drinking water and all too few jobs should agree to more gains for the ‘haves’ at all!”

“Well, at least now we're both talking about how to achieve outcomes that matter, not just the what of what you want or the how of how we think excluded groups or stakeholders might really benefit. We're agreed, it seems, that in the political world of planning and public policy, politics involves not just distributions of resources, who gets what, but evolving relations of power that shape community members' senses of themselves and others, past events and future possibilities. We might even agree that conflict is essential to any democratic politics, that resolving conflict once and for all or building a harmonious consensus across deep differences may be a deeply misguided, apolitical idea.”

“But as long as you're going to talk about negotiations—or mediated negotiations, and who the hell are these ethically critical mediators going to be, anyway?—without recognizing the ways that neo-liberal pressures today threaten to roll back rights, to further commodify land and health and more, who with even one eye open shouldn't be suspicious?”

“That's certainly right. But good mediators can teach planners a lot—and not just that any group's negotiating power ‘at the table’ depends in part on organizing and developing power away from the table. You, though, jump awfully quickly from any ‘negotiating’ to doing it poorly: from negotiating to betraying your core values instead of defending them practically and skillfully and securing real gains. You're so worried about being co-opted that you reduce negotiating to simple bargaining, and you miss the real politics and possibilities of the process, the learning and reframing that can go on, even the coalition building, even the empowerment and capacity building. Negotiation is always about conflict; if there were no conflict, there'd be nothing to negotiate. But more importantly, negotiating well calls for analysis of both outcomes and process: outcomes much better than the lose-lose results so typical of unassisted, unmediated, negotiations, and processes that are inclusive, expertly informed, creative, even transformative. Just being tough, staking out your ground or taking sides doesn't guarantee good results in negotiation; unassisted negotiations can often produce lousy, lose-lose compromises—and that's why mediation can be so important, to get better outcomes!”

“That might be right, but you'll have to show us how in the world of our political pressures, those whom you call “good mediators” can avoid getting eaten alive. You're putting a lot of weight on a pretty thin reed!”

“That's fair enough. Just calling someone a mediator doesn't make him or her a good mediator. But we're down to a good look at alternatives. If there's a politics in planning, that means neither outcomes nor processes are foregone conclusions. We need to get more specific, more concrete, and really show when our strategies have relative advantages, when planners can and can't make differences in the ways we both wish, and when and how pressures “outside” of planning processes produce real gains, even of course changing what those planning processes can produce.”

“Just don't tell me that participatory processes by themselves will assure better outcomes.”

“No problem, just don't tell me that your idea of substantive outcomes, or any technocrat's for that matter, is going to assure those better outcomes either!”

“OK, let's not go there. Let's try to be more clear about strategies of really achieving better outcomes—just, sustainable, and…”

“Yes, I know: egalitarian, productive, expertly informed, and beautiful too…”

This conversation within planning will continue. Perhaps future editorials in this journal will extend and transform these arguments and the possibilities they suggest, or future articles might do better. My own bets, here, appear in a new book exploring the “practice stories” of an exemplary group of thoughtful, shrewd, politically sensitive and practically skillful mediators (Forester, 2009). Instructive and promising as I take their work to be, I mention it precisely because it is not rocket science: planners in deeply political and contested settings can, I believe, learn a great deal from these practitioners. But we should remember: if we care about outcomes, we can hardly afford to ignore the processes that will produce and sustain them: inevitably political planning processes of power and negotiation, expertise and argument, inclusion and exclusion.

In the essays that follow in this issue, we have intriguing accounts of widely varying but perhaps complementary planning practices. Patsy Healey takes on a reconceptualization of strategic planning. How is it, she asks us, that even as they do not actually shape strategic spatial decision making, they may make other contributions and have diverse other forms of influence? Hoping to connect spatial strategies to situated political judgments, Healey works to bridge theories of socio-spatial change and actual efforts to realize spatial planning changes.

Just that question of analysis and inquiry becomes the central concern of Kevin Krizek, Ann Forsyth, and Carissa Schively's consideration of evidence-based practice. Hardly suggesting either that planning practice can ignore evidence at will or pressing for a privileged form of research or evidence production, this essay maps or considers a diversity of forms of practice and corresponding contributions that evidence may make.

Writing from Catania, Sicily, Laura Saija and Filippo Gravagno suggest how forms of participatory action research might make public contributions in settings pervasively shaped by the Mafia's influence, as exercised and anticipated, as not always explicit but ever-present nevertheless. They write of twists and turns in the road, surprises uncovered, suspicions of many hidden motives, roles of transparency and publicity that reshaped several local planning processes. Neither denying the reach of illegality nor exaggerating any role of participatory research, they ask us nevertheless to consider how public engagement and inquiry can disrupt business as usual, however incrementally.

Writing about cognitive mapping in Jerusalem, Tovi Fenster explores a planning method to explore community members' senses of home and city, comfort and insecurity, public and private and more. Here geography meets phenomenology, senses of space reveal both identity formation and public policy influences as well. How could planners concerned with community development not consider such lines of analysis and inquiry?

Once again, in our Interface section, we listen carefully to the voices of practitioners and theorists alike. Geraint Ellis has assembled a symposium of contributions exploring the issues surrounding wind power, an area exploding recently as environmental concerns take ever more prominence and as impact studies develop in ever-increasing sophistication.

Each of these authors cares about outcomes and processes and transforming the work we do so we may do better planning in the future. As editors, we welcome your comments, criticisms, and suggestions. Let us hear from you.

(My thanks to anonymous process and outcome advocates who reviewed an earlier draft of this editorial and helped improve it substantially.)