Abstract
Good afternoon. Thank you very much to the selection committee, the editors, and our reviewers for this honor.
I am very happy to be here to accept this award on behalf of myself and Martha Feldman, my coauthor. Martha apologizes for not being able to join us today. However, we prepared these comments together.
This award is deeply satisfying to us for a number of reasons.
Of course it is very rewarding to be recognized for the quality of this work.
Equally, however, it is gratifying to be part of a community of scholars who consider the “so what?” of our article—the question of how democratic, community engagement is practically accomplished—to be still a live, relevant, interesting question, not something that was settled by Arnstein’s ladder in 1969.
Our contribution to this ongoing stream of scholarship is to articulate a distinction between participation and inclusion as independent dimensions of public engagement. In contrast with a ladder or spectrum approach, we suggest that both can be present in engagement, each to its own degree.
Participation emphasizes maximizing public input on the content of programs and policies. Highly participatory processes are distinguished by making processes widely accessible, involving participants who represent the affected stakeholders, gathering lots of input, and using that input to shape policies. Inclusion emphasizes connections across issues, time, and people. Coproduction—in which participants work together to define issues, design decision-making processes, and create planning, policy, or program outcomes—is an important means of making these connections. Inclusion engages multiple ways of knowing in deliberative dialogues, and it sustains ongoing communities of participation.
Parts of that definition may sound familiar to you from studies of collaborative governance as well as of public engagement. Inclusion is an expansive framework. Martha Feldman and I, along with Anne Khademian and others, have theorized it, in this article and elsewhere, to involve boundary work that makes novel connections not only between agencies and the public—the civic engagement context of this article—but also among organizations, hierarchies within them, diverse ways of knowing, sectors, issues, and timeframes.
We developed this paper through engagement with people in the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Since 1998, we’ve been involved in a longitudinal, ethnographic study to learn from them—from planners, senior city managers, community organizers, business people, cycling activists, artists. We are not done learning from them, or writing about them either. Stay tuned!
Along with other research questions we’ve each pursued, we’ve stayed involved in Grand Rapids for all of these years because they are an exemplary positive case. Choosing to learn from an exemplary positive case is a choice we have made to highlight positive potentials in planning practice. Our ethnographic methods allow us to take a deep dive into what is going on and extract lessons about how to do things well, or better, that we hope are helpful to both practitioners and scholars. Of course, even exemplary cases have ups and downs: in this paper, for example, things are certainly not all rosy. We tell that story, too.
In other words, we build theory from practice, from examining what planners really do, making sense alongside of them of all of the complexity and mess that is part of planning. So, we would like to thank the committee for recognizing and validating the contribution of bridging theory and practice—something that we hold dear in this discipline—by building grounded theory from practitioners.
Finally, and now I am speaking just for myself, I want to say a word about the education part of JPER’s acronym. It is quite an honor to be standing here accepting an award for work I did while I was still a PhD student. It is a credit to excellent mentoring, from Martha and from numerous others, including people who are here today, for which I am extremely grateful. ACSP does a pretty good job, I believe, of welcoming junior scholars into the fold, of providing feedback and guidance to help us develop our careers. That culture and commitment advances all of us as a discipline, and I hope we continue to cultivate that actively.
Thank you again, on behalf of both of us. We are very honored to receive this award.