From Citizen Control to Co-Production

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Sherry Arnstein’s classic “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” still shapes our understanding of citizen participation within and beyond planning. However, Arnstein’s citizen control offers communities only partial authority. Rather, community control does not fundamentally alter the political and economic power differences between stakeholders that limit community influence over outcomes. In response, we describe a co-production participation model for inclusive participation to help communities confront the political and economic power relationships that limit their influential participation. Residents directly and influentially engage in a dynamic and iterative problem-solving process throughout problem formation and implementation. Co-production recognizes that truly inclusive community development requires adaptive and enduring processes to address the political and economic power inequalities that shape local decision making. In this way, co-production offers an evolving participation model, rather than a specific outcome or process, to continually refine strategies toward more equitable processes. To illustrate this argument, we describe a community-based initiative in California’s Coachella Valley. We trace the initiative’s evolution toward a co-production model of community engagement, shifting the initiative’s strategies and goals toward greater community power. This evidence shows how a co-productive model can more effectively tackle political and economic power imbalances through adaptive, flexible, and long-term participatory processes.

Takeaway for practice: Co-production models can offer new ways for planning practitioners to advance more inclusive community participation, with greater resident power sharing. Fundamentally, planners and local practitioners must extend participation beyond engagement and inclusion, using adaptive, long-term participation models, with capacity building and resource sharing, to build and sustain community power. This sustained approach challenges traditional government decision-making models, requiring power holders to shift greater power, resources, and influence toward communities. Power holders must hold spaces of power for communities while simultaneously building resident ability to effectively gain, retain, and exert local control.

Keywords:

• citizen participation
• community development
• community power
• co-production

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Research Support

We have received grant funding to support our research partnership from Lift To Rise.

DISCLOSURE

We receive funding from and have a research partnership with the organization discussed in this paper.

Notes

Notes

1 Margerum (2011) defines deliberative processes as “allowing everyone to fully explore and debate the issues” (p. 7).

2 Collaboration is “an approach to solving complex problems in which a diverse group of autonomous stakeholders deliberates to build consensus and develop networks for translating consensus into results” (Margerum, 2011, p. 6).

3 Neoliberalization is “the ongoing project to install market logics and competitive discipline as hegemonic assumptions in urban politics and policy-making” (Purcell, 2009, p. 140).

4 These include demographic and socioeconomic data from the U.S. Census and American Community Survey; California Department of Education data and Coachella Valley school district student-level data; Coachella Valley Community Health Survey and county agency health data; U.S. Department of Agriculture data on food access and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients; and housing subsidy data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. For the full needs assessment, visit lifttorise.org/data.

5 The Coachella Valley only produced 38 units yearly between 2015 and 2018 (County of Riverside Economic Development Agency, 2018).

6 Housing stability concerns resident access to safe, affordable, and dependable housing. Residents cited housing stability barriers, including higher summertime energy costs; inadequate affordable housing supply, much of which exists in low-quality, sometimes unpermitted mobile home parks where residents face financial exploitation; hazardous living conditions; poor maintenance; and high overcrowding rates. Overcrowding is measured by the U.S. Census: 14% of Coachella Valley Latinx households live in overcrowded conditions, compared with 1.2% of White households (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jovanna Rosen

JOVANNA ROSEN ([email protected]) is a research assistant professor in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California.

Gary Painter

GARY PAINTER ([email protected]) is a professor in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. He also serves as the director of the Sol Price Center for Social Innovation and the Homelessness Policy Research Institute.