Participation a help not a hinder to economic development?

Recent attacks on public engagement in US planning have sparked some interesting challenges for the field as a whole. Thomas J Campanella’s article in Places argues that planners in the US have been reduced to the role of facilitators, letting groups of citizens with no real knowledge of planning guide the process based on their own self-interest. He describes giving away this power as an ‘extraordinary act of altruism’ on the part of planners. Architect Andrés Duany also complained that planning has turned into ‘an absolute orgy of public process… basically, we can't get anything done’.

Both authors make some important points which any engagement exercise needs to address, such as confusion between stakeholders and the general public, and the need to get well-informed opinions through deliberation. However, underlying their arguments is the idea that while public engagement is nice to do, it has no, or negative value. Michael Hooper, Professor of Public Planning at Harvard University is one of the many who have disputed this, claiming that while participation may seem to slow things down initially, it significantly increases the chances that projects will be successful. He quotes a number of pieces of research that compared data from projects trying to achieve the same long-term outcomes which found that participation and project outcomes were positively correlated. In addition, he makes the case that the move towards a participatory culture may be crucial to sustainable economic development at a wider level. This has also shown to be the case in the area of dialogue. Sciencewise-ERC’s work on Understanding the value of dialogue shows that dialogue can save time and money by providing the evidence to policy makers, enabling the development of better policy that can be implemented with minimal conflict and controversy.