Learning from Arnstein's Ladder

From Citizen Participation to Public Engagement

Mickey Lauria, Carissa Schively Slotterback, Mickey Lauria, Carissa Schively Slotterback

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367258238
• eBook ISBN: 9781000192339
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Sherry Arnstein, writing in 1969 about citizen involvement in planning processes in the United States, described a "ladder of citizen participation" that showed participation ranging from low to high. Arnstein depicted the failings of typical participation processes at the time and characterized aspirations toward engagement that have now been elevated to core values in planning practice. But since that time, the political, economic, and social context has evolved greatly, and planners, organizers, and residents have been involved in planning and community development practice in ways previously unforeseen.

Learning from Arnstein's Ladder draws on contemporary theory, expertise, empirical analysis, and practical applications in what is now more commonly termed public engagement in planning to examine the enduring impacts of Arnstein's work and the pervasive challenges that planners face in advancing meaningful public engagement. This book presents research from throughout the world, including Australia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Portugal, Serbia, and the United States, among others, that utilizes, critiques, revises, and expands upon Arnstein's aspirational vision. It is essential reading for educators and students of planning.

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Introduction

Learning from Arnstein’s Ladder: From Citizen Participation to Public Engagement

Mickey Lauria and Carissa Schively Slotterback

For over 50 years, Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation has offered a simple yet elegant characterization of the problems and prospects for achieving more meaningful participation of communities in the public decisions that affect them. Writing in 1969, at the height of the civil rights movement and implementation of massive urban renewal and social support programs in the US, Arnstein offered a pointed critique of superficial, or worse, manipulative or placating participation efforts. At the same time, her ladder offered inspiration for a new practice of participation that centered people, communities, and power. In doing so, she contributed further momentum to a fundamental shift in the role of the planner from rational technician, to values-driven advocate, mediator, facilitator, organizer, and communicator.

With this volume, we offer a snapshot of contemporary issues and practices in what is now more commonly referred to as public engagement rather than citizen participation. The authors highlighted here draw on Arnstein for inspiration, for the language of power, for evaluative frameworks, and more. They are not alone, as Arnstein’s article has been cited over 19,000 times as of late 2019, according to Google Scholar. Over 1,400 of those citations have occurred between January and November 2019 and addressed topics such public engagement in autism research, planning for smart cities, citizen science, and more. The volume and reach of her work is extraordinary. The chapter authors highlight planning and engagement processes focused on a range of issues and contexts. The chapters draw on the expertise of scholars from around the world, illustrating the extensive reach and impact of Arnstein’s work across the globe. The chapters also address engagement efforts in places as wide-ranging as Australia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Portugal, Serbia, and the United States, highlighting the transferability of Arnstein’s fundamental concepts across institutional structures and cultures. Some of the chapters also offer critical perspectives on the failure of the typical public engagement processes in addressing underlying inequities and power imbalances and in truly advancing justice and power redistribution.

Overall, the work in this volume offers insights into four key issues that are indicative of where planning is as a field in integrating public engagement. First, we examine issues of institutionalizing public engagement. Arnstein’s 1969 article in part reacted to initial efforts to institutionalize participation requirements in federal urban renewal policies. It is clear that those efforts were insufficient and even further marginalized affected residents and other stakeholders. For example, she illustrates the lowest rung of her ladder—manipulation—in describing Citizen Advisory Committees and their subcommittees on minority groups as functioning “mostly as letterheads, trotted forward at appropriate times to promote urban renewal plans” and venues wherein “it was the officials who educated, persuaded, and advised the citizens, not the reverse” (Arnstein, 1969, p. 218).

Since that time, we have seen requirements for public participation and public noticing emerge in many public sector organizations and policies, and subsequently be challenged as insufficient in many public sector organizations and policies. Even as early as 1981, Checkoway’s analysis of the literature on public participation and public hearings highlights serious deficiencies in terms of access to information and attendance in participation opportunities. In the decades that followed, more substantial efforts to institutionalize participation in federal and state policies, to allow for earlier and more meaningful participation, were pursued. Planning researchers sought to evaluate the impacts of new participation requirements and expectations (e.g., Brody, Godschalk, & Burby, 2003; Margerum, 2005; Slotterback, 2008). In contemporary scholarship, we see work such as from Quick and Feldman (2011), Karner et al. (2019), and Legacy, March, and Mouat (2014) evaluate and point to the challenges in institutionalized structures for public engagement in communities in the context of park and recreation planning, budgeting, and redevelopment. Also reflective of the growing focus of the planning field, at least in the US, on public engagement is its presence in language in the American Institute of Certified Planners Code of Ethics (2005), which sets forth the principle that “We shall give people the opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the development of plans and programs that may affect them”. It also suggests that “Participation should be broad enough to include those who lack formal organization or influence”.

Second, we focus on public engagement efforts as a means of sharing power. Arnstein introduces language around power sharing at the placation and partnership rungs of the ladder, calling out roles for participants in advising, negotiating, and engaging in “tradeoffs with traditional powerholders” (217). It is widely acknowledged that power is not held equally among all in our communities. There is also evidence that those who are non-white and have lower levels of education and lower incomes are less likely to participate (Fagotto & Fung, 2006; Hoang, 2019). In addition, there are significant barriers to participation for those who have language barriers, distrust government, and more (Allen & Slotterback, 2017; Lee, 2019; Sandoval & Rongerude, 2015). Reflecting on our progression as a planning field, advocacy and equity planning approaches of the 1960s and 1970s coming out of the US context position planners as promoting power sharing by representing communities, offering technical support, helping them to reveal their interests, and integrating their priorities into planning documents (Davidoff, 1965).

Moving forward we have seen the growing emphasis on planners as facilitators and mediators, creating and supporting processes by which multiple interests could come to the table, deliberate around community and individual interests, and have opportunities for equal influence (Susskind & Ozawa, 1984; Forester, 1994). Communicative, evolving to collaborative, planning approaches and scholarship in particular have centered planners in the role of advancing shared power by supporting consensus building through the design and facilitation of participatory planning processes (Healey, 1992; Innes, 1992; Margerum, 2002). This work places an emphasis on planners’ roles in facilitating learning among participants and the cogeneration of plans, policies, and decisions (Innes & Booher, 1999; Mandarano, 2008; Schively, 2007). At this time, we also saw an intentional focus on identifying those who have not been represented in prior participation processes. Following from the focus on the how in public engagement, Bryson (2004) offers insights on defining and identifying stakeholders, including those who have lower levels of power. Research also highlights those not represented or even excluded including youth, immigrants, and those with intersectional identities (Botchwey et al., 2019; Kondo, 2012; Osborne 2015, Roberts & Catungal, 2018).

A third strain of current work, exemplified by some of the authors highlighted here, focuses on public engagement as a means of power redistribution. For Arnstein, redistribution occurs at the upper rungs of the ladder at delegated power and citizen control when “have-not citizens obtain the majority of decision-making seat, or full managerial power”. Coupled with Arnstein, work by Krumholz (1982) on equity positions planners in the role of making plans that are equitable, which inherently requires shifting power from those who have traditionally held it to those who have not. Fainstein (2010) further reinforces redistribution with her work on justice, positioning planners as activists in redistributing power through engagement and other tactics. More recent work focuses on capacity building via public engagement, accomplishing redistribution in a sense by creating new power in communities (Laurian & Shaw, 2009; Rosen & Painter, 2019).

These developments, adopted throughout much of the world, have not been received uncritically (e.g., Maier, 2001; Sager, 2011). This post-politics school (see Allmendinger and Haughton, 2013, 2015; Metzger, Allmendinger, & Oosterlynck, 2015; Purcell, 2009; Swyngedouw, 2005, 2009) emerged from the early post-Fordist and regulationist theories of Dear and Clark (1981) and democratic political theories of Mouffe (2000) and Ranciere (1998). These analysts, working loosely within these political economic frameworks, have noticed that these engagement/collaborative theories and techniques have been implemented in a staged fashion (analogous to Arnstein’s ladder non-participation rungs of manipulation and therapy) and often in democratically insolated structures (e.g., tasks forces, ad hoc committees, collaboratives) in order to disguise and depoliticize neoliberal elite preferences as pragmatic policies, plans, and projects of wide-ranging consensus and thereby silence dissenting viewpoints often in the interest of Arnstein’s haves. This depoliticization has led to the use of protest as the only “have-not” voice, and a growing focus on insurgent approaches to planning (see Laskey and Nicholls and Haughton and McManus here) offer new insights on how planners can use organizing, protest, resistance, and other tactics to exert pressure on institutions and even work ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Learning from Arnstein’s Ladder: From Citizen Participation to Public Engagement
• SECTION 1 INSTITUTIONALIZING PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
• SECTION 2 PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AS POWER SHARING
• SECTION 3 PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AS POWER REDISTRIBUTION
• SECTION 4 PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT IN PLANNING EDUCATION AND RESEARCH
• SECTION 5 BUILDING PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT IN THE 2020S
• Index