REVISITING THE FIELD
Planning from “above”
and “below”
11.201 GATEWAY: Planning Action
Rajagopal and Briggs
18 October 2005
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 1
Bankers are people too
“World Bank wants to
bring happiness to
ordinary people”
Times of India (May 7, 2002)
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 2
Today’s agenda
ƒ Taking stock: Modern planning’s origins
ƒ
ƒ
ƒ
ƒ
vs. planning-from-below
Contexts for planning: Planning in the
Third World, assumptions and realities
ƒ Participation and democracy
ƒ Law and institutions etc.
Development as change
ƒ History of paradigms
ƒ Development as freedom (Sen)
Dams/big projects: state of play
Radical planning, power
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 3
Rational planning … from above
Assumptions of the rational model:
ƒ Stakeholders are already organized (in
political communities)
ƒ Guiding values are clear
ƒ Citizens are trusting and the state is
trustworthy – liberal “harmony” vision
ƒ Technically competent bureaucracies have
the needed expertise (no citizen learning or
participation required)
ƒ Alternatives have been considered
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 4
Planning from above vs. below
ƒ Rights, accountability, and
power
ƒ The promise of citizen
involvement vs. the risk of
cronyism, parochialism,
process paralysis (impasse)
ƒ Civil society and
government interaction:
Competing, collaborating,
contesting, other?
ƒ Globalization: Transnational
coalitions, media influence,
information technology
shifts in power and voice
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 5
Trained vs. indigenous experts
ƒ What forms of knowledge
are valid? Who sets the
rules?
ƒ What does public
participation add to what
technical experts provide?
ƒ How can distinct types of
expertise be blended to
create better, not just more
popular, solutions?
ƒ Technocratic modernism vs.
“deliberative democracy”
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 6
Context: Planning in the 3rd World
ƒ Differences with the West:
ƒ Democratic
ƒ Legal
ƒ Inward-looking
ƒ Breaking boundaries
ƒ Domestic v. International
ƒ Institutional v. Non-Institutional
ƒ Within ‘Development’ discourse
ƒ Globalized
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 7
Law and legal institutions (A)
ƒ Is law simply institutional politics?
ƒ Law as a terrain of resistance
ƒ Law and scale: law simultaneously
defines scale and destabilizes scale
ƒ Global space of law
ƒ Proliferation of global norms and institutions
ƒ Human rights and environment
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 8
Law and legal institutions (B)
ƒ Law as a framework for social
mobilization
ƒ Contestation through the law as a
conscious strategy in mobilization and
the tradeoffs
ƒ Resort to law as an escape from politics?
ƒ Domestic legal culture and nature of
legal system as major variables in social
mobilization
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 9
Development as change (A)
ƒ
ƒ
ƒ
ƒ
ƒ
ƒ
History of paradigms
Current state of the field
Development and the role of democracy
Sen’s theory: Development as freedom
Critique of income poverty
Commodities, capabilities and
functionings
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 10
Development as change (B)
ƒ Constitutive and instrumental roles of
freedoms in development
ƒ Role of policy in translating capabilities
into freedoms
ƒ Universal nature of the theory and its
tensions with its own ethical aspirations
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 11
Dams/big projects: State of play
ƒ The World Bank
ƒ Revival of Bank interest
ƒ Bank’s role in big projects
ƒ Bank’s Inspectional Panel
ƒ Accountability (e.g. Export-Import
Banks)
ƒ Continuing crisis, examples
ƒ Ilisu (Turkey)
ƒ Lesotho Highlands Water Project
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 12
Friedmann’s radical planning
ƒ Critical (normative + analytic) of the
ƒ
ƒ
ƒ
ƒ
ƒ
status quo
Pragmatic as to means, strategic
Inclusive, pro-participation: But there are
many dilemmas here
Reflective, iterative (social learning)
Guided by meaning, ideology
Oppositional: Mainly? As needed?
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 13
Six levels of power
1. Frames and meanings: How the issues
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
are thought about (“symbolic power”)
Agendas: What’s on it, what’s not?
Options: Expanding vs. limiting
Judgment: Influence over criteria
Decision-making: Influence over choices
Production: Getting things implemented
(capacity to produce)
Source: Briggs (2003) Organizing stakeholders
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 14
Preview: Anacostia Waterfront
KEY ISSUES:
ƒ The city as “growth machine” vs.
“equitable development”
ƒ Comprehensiveness vs. incrementalism
ƒ The power and limits of physical
revitalization and “placemaking”
GATEWAY: Planning Action
Slide 15