Participatory practices are both necessary and demanded in contemporary domains of politics, governance and policy making. Participation acts as a corrective to or redirection of the power dynamics that shape the neoliberal and post-democratic tendencies inflected in these domains. Participatory Research and Planning in Practice provides insight into how participation can be enacted in ways that are concrete, meaningful and productive. The volume is comprised of 13 chapters in which specific examples and methods of participatory research and planning are examined to reveal their methodological diversity, impact and opportunities for improvement. The three related themes of power, theory and process are woven through the book chapters. Practices and disciplines of power are challenged by and in participatory processes. In examining power and politics through the lens of practice, several of the papers point to a dearth of participatory work due to consultation path dependence through which public institutions and participants can be controlled. Participation is rarely, if ever, a leveller that seeds the ground for equity and justice but a contest in which voices can compete to be heard. Authors point to the state of practice in policy domains such as a transport, housing, natural resource management, conservation and heritage, finding platforms that range from enabling alternative politics to affirming existing power relations. Politics and policy emerge in relation to the capabilities and capacities of institutional arrangements to implement participatory processes and understand the role of actors in them. As an instrumental approach to participation prevails in government entities, actor agency in participatory governance establishes accountability and legitimacy. As many of the authors attest, while participation is political, it is not an event in which community or consensus is easily enacted through one-off public meetings and workshops.
展开▼
