The democratic legitimacy of public participation in planning: Contrasting optimistic, critical, and agnostic understandings

Abstract

How does public participation in planning and environmental governance engender democratic legitimacy? Drawing a distinction between the optimistic and critical participation literature, I argue that both these strands of research have tended to neglect the public’s perspective on this question. This oversight has, in effect, produced strongly normative and essentialist understandings of democratic legitimacy that treat legitimicy as intrinsic to either process or substance of participatory governance. Proceeding from an anti-essentialist understanding of democratic legitimacy, which primarily relies on contemporary social perceptions and expectations of democratic institutions, I outline a normatively agnostic framework for exploring how legitimacy is engendered through participation. Using this framework to investigate citizen experiences of participation processes in Sweden, I highlight how democratic legitimacy can gainfully be understood as a multidimensional, provisional, and contingent quality that individual citizen participants “confer” and “retract” in a plurality of ways. Based on this, I conclude by suggesting that sustained research engagement with the public’s expectations and experiences of participatory governance can reveal critical insights into the potentials and challenges for realizing democratic planning outcomes.

Towards a National Harmonized Framework for Urban Plans and Strategies in Romania

“…The involvement of the larger community in the decision making process has a clear added value for local public administrations responsible with the development of the cities they are administrating [41,42]. Participation leads to better ownership and support, realism, coherence, and understanding of important issues.…”

The democratization of planning would be helped by a democratization of theory

“…It is interesting because I feel it renders visible how one of the key sources of disagreement in planning theory and practice essentially concerns competing views on the nature of democracy, where conflicting meanings ascribed to the concept enable, at times, diametrically opposing understandings of what planning substantially is and should be. It is a source of conflict that also underscores the overarching argument I made in the paper: the importance of examining, including and amplifying more voices around what actually constitutes democracy—what I referred to as the urgent need for a “democratization of democratic theory” (Zakhour, 2020b: 367).…”

“…In her comment to my paper (Zakhour, 2020b), Nurit Alfasi takes issues with a tendency in planning discourse to view public participation in planning as a vehicle for democratization. Her concern proceeds from a twofold argument: first, that there are considerable obstacles towards achieving genuine and meaningful participation in planning.…”

Why public participation isn’t a tool for democratizing planning. A comment

“…The trigger for this comment is Zakhour’s (2020) paper published in Planning Theory earlier this year. Zakhour searches for ways to grant democratic legitimacy through practicing public participation in planning.…”

“…Arnstein’s (1969) sole mistake was her use of the word “ladder,” which sometimes blurred the detailed description of most rungs as anything but participation. Zakhour (2020: 353) assesses this understanding saying that the ladder “bluntly conveyed the idea that activities which do not entail actual delegation of power to citizens only serve as ‘manipulation’ of public trust.”…”