Evaluation of Public Participation: The Practices of Certified Planners

Public participation has become a central element of planning activity over the last decades. The planning literature has given considerable attention to participation in theory and practice, discussing its benefits for democratic governance, its multiple goals and criteria for assessing success. Al...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of planning education and research 2009-04, Vol.28 (3), p.293-309
Main Authors: Laurian, Lucie, Shaw, Mary Margaret
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Decision making
Democracy
Educational policy
Evaluation research
Participation
Planners
Planning
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Summary:Public participation has become a central element of planning activity over the last decades. The planning literature has given considerable attention to participation in theory and practice, discussing its benefits for democratic governance, its multiple goals and criteria for assessing success. Although planning academics and practitioners understand the importance of participation and know that participatory processes often fail, the field of participation evaluation lags behind. This paper explores how often, why and how planners evaluate participation in practice. It builds on data collected through a nationally representative survey of 761 AICP-certified planners. We find that they rarely evaluate participation formally. Informal evaluations rely on a wide range of criteria about participation processes and outcomes consistent with the criteria identified by planning theory. The paper presents these evaluation criteria and the practices and recommendation of the planners with most experience in participation evaluation.
ISSN:0739-456X
1552-6577
DOI:10.1177/0739456X08326532