Participatory Planning and Means-Ends Rationality: A Translation Problem1

 1. Thanks to Patsy Healey for talking to me about an earlier draft of this paper, and to the three anonymous referees for their helpful comments. The paper develops a point that emerged from my PhD research, for which Jean Hillier and Rick Iedema were the supervisors.

Abstract

One of the defining characteristics of the “communicative turn” in planning is the rejection of technocratic instrumental (means-ends) rationality as the principal source of legitimacy for planning procedures. Procedural quality is now seen as grounded equally in the tenets of participatory democracy: inclusiveness, reciprocity, good communication, empowerment, mutual learning. Such ideals have become widely accepted (even if they are not always well implemented in practice). However, this trend seems to have had little effect on the products of strategic planning processes—plans—which, in the public sector, seem mostly to present recommendations as the logical (instrumentally rational) response to conditions.

This article discusses the step from “collaborative” process to “logical” product as a problem of translation, drawing on actor-network theory and social linguistics to activate this concept. The discussion is informed by two case studies from Australia. Though the translation problem was dealt with in a very different way in each case, the (perceived) need to produce a conventional plan negatively affected both processes' adherence to participatory ideals. In conclusion, the paper asks whether the conservativeness of the plan as a genre might have conservative effects on the practices of public planning agencies, and whether alternative modes and/or translation processes might be found to mitigate these effects.

Keywords:

• Participation
• plans
• texts
• genre
• rationality
• discourse analysis

Notes

 1. Thanks to Patsy Healey for talking to me about an earlier draft of this paper, and to the three anonymous referees for their helpful comments. The paper develops a point that emerged from my PhD research, for which Jean Hillier and Rick Iedema were the supervisors.

 2. In his more recent work, Iedema extends the notion of resemiotisation from “monoglossic” to “heteroglossic” translation (2003; Iedema & Scheeres, 2003): while some texts (such as plans) capture, unify and naturalise meanings, others (such as campaign reports) might be seen as inviting more voices into the “conversation”. The tension between monoglossic and heteroglossic resemiotisation is a key challenge for participatory planning (MacCallum, 2007), but beyond the scope of this paper.

 3. In Australia plans are generally considered either statutory (carrying the force of law and therefore requiring gazettal) or strategic (providing a broader framework for government action particularly with respect to land use and management, and requiring only adoption by the implementing agency). Adoption by council or parliament gives them added force, particularly where a plan conflicts with those of other departments.

 4. This work has been described in various aspects, in particular with respect to how plans construe planning (Tett & Wolf 1991); their audiences (Healey, 1996); places and environments (Murdoch & Marsden, 1995); actors and relationships within the planning process (Tait, 2002). This article, unlike those cited above, focuses on the meanings construed by a plan's structure, rather than its wording.

 5. Sometimes, as in many literary genres, the construed worlds are clearly fictional. However, I do not hold with the position that all realities are mere discursive constructions. For this reason I join Norman Fairclough (e.g. 2003) in preferring the word “construe” to “construct”.

 6. In the transcribed fragments, pauses are represented by detached colons (:). Each such detached colon represents approximately one second's pause.

 7. See Diane Hopkins (2004) on how traditional, positivist forms of rationality also influenced the much-vaunted participatory planning process for Western Australia's most recent major metropolitan strategic plan, Dialogue with the City.

 8. For this reason, case study documents quoted in the article are neither named nor listed in the references. Also for this reason, they cannot be quoted at any length and analysis of the documents themselves is therefore necessarily focused on structure rather than fine detail.

 9. It should be noted that what is presented here glosses a lot of detail and, thus, presents a “fuzzy” and incomplete picture of events. The planning agencies involved have, since the events described in this paper, made various kinds of progress with respect to the issues, and the stories here should not be interpreted as failure on their part.

10. The wording and detail of the agenda/table of contents list is simplified here, removing small variations associated with specific values.

11. In Beta's case it is unlikely that a more “collaborative” planning exercise would have been possible, in part because of the parallel process and institutional power of the port plan (potentially representing a “better alternative to a negotiated agreement” (see, for instance, Innes, 2004) for the port manager), but also because of the different ways in which the consultant and some committee members viewed the contract (gathering and analysing evidence; translating decisions already made into an institutionally appropriate form).