Midwest Political Science Association Roundtable Summary
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“Collaborative Planning & Democracy: Building Capable Institutions of Governance for Network Society”
Friday, April 8, 2005
Chicago, Illinois
The roundtable convened at 1:45PM in the Adams Room of the Hilton Palmer House. David Booher of California State University Sacramento introduced the roundtable panel. He briefly summarized the purpose and activities of the Collaborative Democracy Network (CDN). CDN is an interdisciplinary and international network of 90 scholars interested in collaborative strategies for collaborative governance and democracy. In addition to sponsoring interdisciplinary roundtables at conferences, CDN members cooperate on research and teaching. Recently the members have prepared a "Call to Scholars” to encourage more research and education for this topic. California State University, Sacramento and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation support the Collaborative Democracy Network.
The roundtable began with a presentation on public participation and deliberation by Archon Fung of Harvard University. Archon made three main points about public participation, using a Democracy Cube he has developed. First, public participation is about ends rather than a method for itself. Second, different methods are appropriate for different situations. Finally, there is not a single form of participation. Rather there are many forms based upon the appropriate ends of the participation. The three dimensions of participation are who participates, the communication and decision model, and influence. See Archon’s Democracy Cube.
Archon then discussed various participatory deliberative practices based upon three objectives for participation: legitimacy enhancing, justice enhancing, and effectiveness enhancing.
John Scholz of Florida State University presented results of his and Bruce Stiftel’s research on adaptive governance in water conflicts, based upon nine case studies. (This work is to be published by Resources for the Future.) John identified five challenges to adaptive governance: Decision process design, representation, scientific learning, public learning, and problem responsiveness. (See John’s presentation: Adaptive Governance of Water Conflicts.)
Half of the nine case studies were considered successful. Several limits to collaboration were identified: Fear of capture, hurtful stalemate, limited resources for scientific learning, agency motivation to retain autonomy, and the difficulty of replicating collaborative processes. Collaboration succeeded when: Consensual approaches were used to allow for broader more novel compromise solution, links were made between scientific learning and public learning by local focus, the local consensual approach may encourage adaptive management and help integrate land use planning with natural resource management, and social capital and fairness were enhanced.
David Booher offered some reflections based upon the recent study "Death of Environmentalism”, California’s gridlock in state and local finance and the budget crisis, and the recent book by H.S. Richardson, Democratic Autonomy. Both the case of the environmental movement and the California budget case point up the deficiency of the expert model of practical public policy reasoning. In this model experts come up with recommendations for technical fixes to a problem based upon either instrumental reasoning or preference reasoning and advocate them in various venues. As Richardson has pointed out, instrumental reasoning is ineffective because the ends are frequently unclear or changing. Preference reasoning is better, but suffers from the shortcoming that it is always dealing with preferences about ends in the past, before learning occurs. Collaborative governance practices present an alternative based upon public reasoning about ends. There are many examples of collaborative governance practices such as consensus building forums, negotiated rule making, network structures, and community visioning. While creating large-scale deliberative processes that involve thousands of people may not be practical or feasible, changing democratic institutions such as agencies to infuse collaborative governance practices is feasible. Creating a deliberative democracy may depend on enhancing the capacity of these institutions to successfully employ collaborative governance and public involvement practices to reason practically about ends. (See David's presentation: Reflections on Governance Reform and Ways of Policy Reasoning)
Other members of the roundtable offered up other case examples, from their own research and experience, of agencies being challenged by collaborative process. Several agreed with the results of John’s research. In particular Nancy Manring of Ohio University discussed her research on U.S. Forest Service collaborative planning regulations over the past few years under both the Clinton and Bush administration. The rule creates an incentive for early, ongoing participation in the collaborative planning process by adding a "stick", i.e. replacing post-decisional appeals of forest plans with a "pre-decisional objection process.” Her research raised questions about the appropriateness of this approach to encouraging public participation, especially as it eliminates a traditional democratic for accountability. Several others agreed that protection of legal rights is a basic element of public participation. David Booher observed that none of the successful collaborative planning processes he has followed tried to restrict other forms of participation or legal options of the stakeholders. In fact, many processes continue ever while one or more stakeholders are appealing to other forums such as the courts or the legislature. This "living in two worlds” is often a challenge for stakeholders.
