Equity, Diversity and Interdependence

Reconnecting Governance and People through Authentic Dialogue

Michael Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138619586
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351158909
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

If civil society is being encouraged to more fully embrace inclusiveness and respect for diversity, then so must the multiplicity of service support organizations with which it interacts. This is the key proposition behind this seminal contribution to public policy. While legislation can ensure minimum standards of behaviour and outcomes, meaningful organizational progression beyond legal imperatives requires authentic dialogue, based on principles of equity, diversity and interdependence. These are essential components for deeper societal transformation. Using the divided society of Northern Ireland as a case study, and its rural governance arena in particular, this book provides an authoritative empirical analysis of, and prescriptive agenda for, collaborative conversations. The insights provided by this book go far beyond this region and have a profound relevance for other societies struggling to emerge from conflict, racism and social separation.

Part One:
Setting the Context

Chapter 1
Discourse, Planning and Place

Introduction: the dark side of difference

As regions are increasingly shaped by the global flow of knowledge and resources, the notion of ‘place dis-embeddedness’ has held important attractions for planning theorists. The restless search to steer advanced capitalist states through this uncertainty has focused particular attention on new forms of flexible governance for reconciling multiple and conflicting interests and on a concern for knowledge in working through policy outcomes. ‘Collaborative planning’ identifies decision-making structures, styles and routines as critical components in plan formulation and exhorts planners to guarantee stakeholders access to policy arenas concerned with the quality of places (Healey, 1996). The normative task is mediation and filtration through the sets of conflicting interests to produce some form of consensual agreement about the use and development of land. This concern for discursive analysis, with its roots in Habermasian communicative action, has emerged as the dominant paradigm in planning theory (Tewdwr-Jones and Allmendinger, 1998). Moreover, its reach has been felt in planning practice through renewed interest in public participation, multi-sectoral area based partnerships and visioning processes within rural and urban communities.

This book deals with the potential of collaborative discourse through authentic dialogue where planners and, more generally, public policy managers must contend with “the dark side of difference” (Sandercock, 2000, p.14). The claims, experiences and entitlements of place bounded ethnic or religious communities are often not reducible to the sorts of neo-liberal management processes assumed by collaborative planning. Deeply divided and fabricated communities, formed as “sites of resistance” (Parker, 2001, p.195), are defined by their distance from, not proximity to, official discourses about planning, regeneration policy or area-based regeneration structures.

Accordingly, the chapter begins by briefly reviewing the contribution of collaborative planning to understanding divided societies. We suggest that authentic dialogue could help redefine the role of planning in dealing with both diverse and interdependent environments. The discussion then highlights a suite of professional responses to issues of race, ethnicity and poverty. We demonstrate that Equity, Diversity and Interdependence (EDI) offer a framework to advance the notion of discourse in divided societies where ‘place’ conditions the nature of the relationship between competing interests.

Collaborative planning and EDI

In his work, Habermas (1987) identifies the importance of ‘life worlds’ where personal experiences and the routine of daily life have the power to shape both market and political systems. The imposition of technical-rational discourses in our life worlds has crowded out moral and emotional concerns and the way in which people value and prioritise their every day experiences. Communicative theorists argue that different modes of reasoning and systems of meaning have equivalent status in debate and that the task for planners is to develop strategies for collective action through interaction and dialogue (Healey, 1997, p.53). Here, language is vital and in planning the priority is to establish a process of interactive collective reasoning or discourse which, in turn, involves a degree of collaboration, trust and reciprocity (Habermas, 1984). “In the end, what we take to be true and right will lie in the power of the better argument articulated in specific socio-cultural contexts” (Healey, 1997, p.54).

The institutional approach recognises that human actions and discourses are played out within the context of broader economic, labour market and political structures. But, unlike Marxist analysis, it suggests that individuals are not passive receptors of the working out of these systems but are reflexive agents with the choices and capacity to modify and even transform the structuring forces that influence their life worlds. Institutional theorists emphasise the importance of social relations and interaction with others in making sense of communities and places and this process of creating and maintaining relational bonds has clear connections with scholarly and empirical interest in social capital, not least within a Northern Ireland context.

For Taylor (1998) social capital lies at the heart of local power circuits whose sophistication will dictate the radicalisation of community politics and the effectiveness of neighbourhood partnerships. Putnam defines social capital as the “features of social organisation, such as trust, norms and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating co-ordinated actions” (Putnam, 1993, p.167). Communities that have high levels of trust, networks and organisational capital are better informed, better led and more content than those which do not. “Moreover, when individuals belong to cross-cutting groups with diverse goals and members, their attitudes will tend to moderate as a result of group interaction and cross pressures” (Putnam, 1993, p.90). But the way in which social capital is assembled and reproduced is path-dependent and history can reinforce social pathologies, patterns and institutions, even if they are inefficient. Thus, for example, the development of social capital in Northern Ireland is intimately wedded to expressions of national identity and to asymmetrical efforts to survive, protect and grow. In highly segregated areas this process of institution building, maintaining community capacity and defining rigid territorial boundaries has constrained the possibilities for the trust which is vital for wider strategic engagement. This experience resonates with the wider observation by Putnam that “dense but segregated horizontal networks sustain co-operation within each group, but networks of civic engagement that cut across social cleavages nourish wider co-operation” (Putnam, 1993, p. 175).

Writing in a Northern Ireland context, Porter (1998) has argued that exclusive, zero-sum politics provides little space for mutual recognition, respect or dialogue. Like Putnam it is in the sphere of civil society that Porter sees the best hope for the future:

If citizenship is about participation and not just about representation and if politics is creative and not merely proactive, then occupying the public space that civil society makes available is the best antidote to citizenship alienation from the bureaucratic state and growing political apathy. (Porter, 1998, p.202)

Civil society, notwithstanding its multiple meanings, is where voluntary organisations, community groups and individuals make claims, assert rights and enjoy entitlements independently of politics. It provides an alternative arena for deliberating issues of social justice, separately from political organisations and autonomous from state control. In short, Porter argues that the search for political stability requires inclusive public places open to disparate voices in society:

It is by arguing with and listening to one another, by proposing and counter-proposing, agreeing and disagreeing, evaluating and judging together, that we may hope to reach decisions about our collective life which we can all be committed to. (Porter, 1998, p.211)

Healey has proposed a methodology for implementing and evaluating the potential of such an agenda empirically. Her Institutional Audit, unpacks the circumstances, settings and routines through which various stakeholders have a say in policy making and offers a framework to explore further the political subtleties embedded in resource allocation decisions. This involves asking a range of inter-linked questions:

• Who has a stake in the qualities of places; how far are these stakeholders actively represented in current governance arrangements?
• In what arenas does discussion currently take place? Who gets access to these? Do they interrelate issues from the point of view of everyday life and the business world? Or do they compartmentalise them for the convenience of policy suppliers?
• Through what routines and in what styles does discussion take place? Do they make room for diverse ways of knowing and ways of valuing representation among stakeholders or do dominant styles dominate?
• Through what policy discourses are problems identified, claims for policy attention prioritised, and information and new ideas filtered? Do these recognise the diversity among stakeholders?
• How is agreement reached, how are such agreements expressed in terms of commitments and how is agreement monitored? Is it easy for those who are critical to implementation of the agreement to escape from the commitments? (Healey, 1996, pp.213–4)

The point here is that the connection between discursive planning, social capital and Equity, Diversity and Interdependence has important theoretical and empirical appeal. Booher and Innes (2002) argue that the informational age, the break-down of traditional economic power in primary industries and the loosening of the class structure has emphasised what they term ‘Network Power’ which “emerges from communication and collaboration among individuals, public and private agencies, and businesses in a society. Network power emerges as diverse participants in a network focus on a common task and develop shared meanings and common heuristics that guide their action” (Booher and Innes, 2002, p.225). Success will be guaranteed, they suggest, when Diversity, Interdependence and Authentic Dialogue (DIAD) are present as shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Diversity, Interdependence and Authentic Dialogue Network Dynamics

Source: Booher and Innes, 2002, p.227.

We contend that this provides the substantive theoretical or conceptual lenses with which to explore EDI in the context of societal divisions. Booher and Innes frame it this way:

Interdependence among the participants is the source of energy as it brings agents together and holds them in this system. Authentic dialogue is the genetic code, providing structure within which agents can process their diversity and interdependence… Diversity is the hallmark of the informational age. The wide range of life experiences, interests, values, knowledge and resources in society is a challenge for planning and the efforts to produce agreements and collective action. (Booher and Innes, 2002, p.227)

For planning to be mobilised as a dialogical process it needs a new methodology in which information “influences by becoming embedded in understandings, practices and institutions, rather than being used as evidence” (Innes, 1998, p.52). This concept of information and research provides the basis of the methodological perspective adopted here. However, the central criticism of communicative planning is its approach to power relations. Thus the DIAD model makes little reference to how diversity and interdependence relate to inequity within society and the sets of interests that are encouraged to discourse with one another. Yiftachel, for instance, makes the point that collaborative planning focuses on a ‘critical commentary about planning’ rather than a ‘societal critique of planning’. The emphasis should not concentrate on the conduct of planners and their practices but rather on the broader power structures and “legitimisation dynamics within which public agencies often act” (Yiftachel, 2001, p.253). Similarly, Tewdr-Jones and Allmendinger (1998) point out that different interests have different access to information and can mobilise and interpret knowledge in vastly differing ways, especially within the planning system. It is our view that equity must be intimately connected to diversity and interdependence in order to build the sort of radical agenda required to address deepening social, ethnic and spatial tensions in divided societies.

Thus, for Soja, it is space that represents the crucial category for understanding the connections between all sorts of multiple oppressions and the possibility to mobilise around agendas framed by place. The social production of space is “an important strategic milieu for a new coalition politics of class, race, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, locality, community, environment, region and other sites and sources of cultural identity and the assertion of difference” (Soja, 1999, p. 75). Sites of resistance have emerged where economic and racial inequality have interlocked to produce fractal places characterised by spatial concentrations of hopelessness and alienation (Parker, 2001; Soja, 2000). Heikkila (2001) argues that this conception of space represents the key challenge to land use planners:

Space matters because it mediates the experiences of people in places, and further, it shapes the structure of the opportunity set available to them. When this transpires to create a stagnant population pool of poverty cut off from the mainstream, the poverty deepens and becomes more profound in character and more potent in its ability to sustain itself over time. (Heikkila, 2001, p.266)

Similarly, Qadeer (1997) has argued that the multi-nationalism of the global economy is further diversifying built forms and functions. This calls for a distinct response within the policy, procedural and value base of the planning profession:

A fundamental effect of multiculturalism is to call for pluralistic planning approaches and to question unitary conceptions of public interest and the ideology of master plans. (Qadeer, 1990, p.482)

Healey (1999) has specifically recognised the potential of multi-cultural encounters to be submerged by the dominance of the more powerful status group, the powerlessness of weaker groups or the endless fracture that often characterises ethnic disputes. On a more positive note she observes that:

governance practices that seek to sustain the diversity of relational webs in a locality may create processes and arenas with the potential to generate multifaceted learning, build intellectual and social capital and through developing shared systems of meanings create a new ‘relational world’, with a new layer of cultural formation to add to the store already available in a locality”. (Healey, 1999, p.116)

Nevertheless the text of the discourse is often violent and hegemonic. We show later in our empirical analysis of rural Northern Ireland that the discursive relational webs are themselves embedded in exclusive ethnic ideology, beliefs and organisations. What is needed is a deeper understanding of the way in which space is regulated by ethnicity and of how the combination of ethnicity and religion conditions the possibility for meaningful dialogue. Considerations of diversity, interdependence and equity are crucial to that understanding.

Discourses on diversity

Thomas argues that a professional ideology about the technical content of planning, the needs of primary industries and property, and powerful lobby groups, especially in middle class areas, has left little room for the discussion of race in a British context. “However, in the 1970s and 1980s the needs of black and ethnic minority residents forced them into greater contact with the planning system; in addition, politicians and community activists in some areas became more aware of the existence and significance of planning” (Thomas, 2000, p.77). A number of global, issue based, professional and more localised or regional factors have driven a shift in consciousness and practice within planning and its attempts to wrestle with racialised places.

Thus Fenster (1996) has explored the use of planning powers and processes to control Arab land rights and entitlements. She argues that discrimination could arise when ethnic groups are treated differently from the majority or when minorities are treated similarly in different situations. The former denies citizenship rights whilst the latter denies the uniqueness of ethnic groups (Fenster, 1996, p.415). Yiftachel (2000) proposes that planners have a choice of three roles when confronted with these sorts of dilemmas: in an assimilation model planners attempt to dissolve difference based on the primacy of citizenship rights; a pluralist model recognises distinctive ethnic identities and responds diversely to the circumstances and needs of different ethnic groups; and thirdly, a discriminatory stance enables the planner to manipulate space to subjugate minority or powerless interests (Fenster is careful to locate Israeli planning history in this context). But these alternatives are not confined to highly politicised or territorial conflicts. For example, the UK government Home Office response to race riots in the northern British cities of Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2000 can be read, albeit loosely, within an assimilationist model. Here, bipolar politics and identities were the targets for a renewed initiative on community cohesion with a fairly selective rendition of British citizenship underlying that policy drive:

A civic identity, which serves to unite people and can express common goals and aspirations of the whole community, can have a powerful effect in shaping attitudes and behaviour. Shared values are essential to give people a common sense of belonging regardless of their race, cultural traditions or faiths. (Home Office, 2001, p.12)

In South Africa, the project of residential integration has transformed the policy, if not the urban landscape of the new nation. Turok (1994) has traced the transition from apartheid to democracy and, in particular, the effort invested in strategic planning to deal comprehensively with poor township infrastructure, to diversify buffer zones previously used for isolating black areas, and to construct appropriate forums for including community interests in the planning process. However, Christopher (1998) points out that changes to the Group Areas Act have been slow to emerge because of the weak economic position of the majority black population and because the minority white population has remained in cities as a significant poli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• The Authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• PART ONE: SETTING THE CONTEXT
• PART TWO: BASELINING EQUITY, DIVERSITY AND INTERDEPENDENCE IN RURAL NORTHERN IRELAND
• PART THREE: THE WAY FORWARD
• Glossary
• References
• Index