Dissolving “Wicked” Problems: Beyond Institutionalist and Participatory Approaches to Land Title Regularization

Abstract

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Chinese

A central contribution of institutionalist approaches to planning has been to illustrate how planners’ constraints can also present opportunities for creative action. Through an ethnographic case analysis of a successful land title regularization project on the South Texas-Mexico border, this paper identifies two critical factors not reducible to institutional features: groups’ perceptions of shared needs (vulnerabilities) and the range of actions that groups recognize as legible and valid for addressing these needs (repertoires). These additional factors reveal how planners can dissolve apparent “wicked” problems by allowing disparate group perspectives to transform the means and ends of planning intervention.

Keywords

international planning and development methods politics and society community development global context of planning governance

Planning and Local Capacity-Building in Developing Contexts

Developing countries are home to 80 percent of the world’s population (UN Population Division 2016).¹ Their economic, demographic, and institutional contexts pose formidable challenges to many of the central activities of urban planning. Prominent among these challenges are constraints in local institutional capacity. As a result, scholars have come to focus more on how local learning can be instigated to address these issues (Evans 2008; Hausmann, Rodrik, and Velasco 2008). Planning scholars have participated in this shift by attending to the resourcefulness of planning approaches developed in the global South (Mukhija 2001; Roy 2005; Watson 2013), as well as the seldom-recognized prevalence of such challenges in the “global North” (Dovey 2012; Durst and Wegmann 2017; Watson 2013).

This article contributes to our understanding of how planners can build the institutional capacity necessary to serve marginalized groups through an in-depth empirical case study of an informal settlement (colonia) regularization project on the Texas-Mexico border, a region that simultaneously displays important contextual features of both developed and developing countries. Using multiple data sources pertaining to the project’s implementation from 1995 to 2005, it documents how project success required planners to move across and assimilate distinct group perspectives regarding what are the most urgent needs for planning action (vulnerabilities) and the types of behaviors that can legitimately address these needs (repertoires). These distinct group perspectives are rooted in shared experiences regarding “matters of concern” (Latour 2004), and to access them, planners must look beyond their conventional professional toolkits.

Integrating group repertoires and vulnerabilities into planning activity contributes to both institutionalist and participatory planning approaches. In general, institutionalist theories focus on building institutional capacity, but they are limited by their emphasis on skills and understandings that originate within state institutions (Friedmann 1987, 10; Moroni 2010). The case analysis here reveals ways to overcome these limitations without forsaking the valuable insights of institutional theory. We do so by employing a specific institutionalist framework—the “anticipation of resistance” approach (Sanyal 2005)—as a key reference point. This article also connects the contributions of repertoire and vulnerability to traditional participatory planning approaches by showing how the preservation of institutionalist insights alongside attention to group perspectives helps to fill a gap in participatory planning’s attention to resources and institutional structures (Huxley and Yiftachel 2000; Umemoto 2001).

Scholars have long depicted informal settlement regularization as ideal for the types of sequenced capacity-building interventions advanced by an “anticipation of resistance” approach (de Soto 2000; Durand-Lasserve and Selod 2009). In practice, however, these interventions have frequently proven challenging and prone to backsliding (Galiani and Schargrodsky 2016; Ward, de Souza, and Giusti 2004). By tracing the process of successful land formalization in the Texas-Mexico border case, this article reveals that planners’ integration of disparate perspectives into their work may resolve some of the limitations of standard institutionalist approaches by loosening constraints on problem definition and project implementation. This suggests the potential to “dissolve” what may initially appear as open-ended, intertwined “wicked” planning problems (Rittel and Webber 1973). Such “dissolution” of wicked problems does not imply that marginalized groups’ challenges are wholly eliminated, but rather, that opening planning processes up to more perspectives on problem definition and policy implementation can break down or bypass many apparent complexities which are actually artifacts of planners’ specific professional perspectives.

This article proceeds with an overview of prior research regarding institutional capacity-building as well as group-level repertoires and vulnerabilities. This is followed by an introduction to the South Texas-Mexico border colonias, their status as a “wicked problem” for planners, and the research methods employed here. We then document the process by which planners successfully resolved the seemingly intractable land title issues, establishing that while institutionalist and participatory approaches were relevant, they were insufficient to produce success without planners’ commitments to immerse themselves in themselves in local populations’ distinctive repertoires and vulnerabilities, which allowed them to re-define the means and ends of the project. In light of these findings, the research and pedagogical implications of a multi-perspectival model of planning as anticipation of resistance are considered.

From Policy Models to Problematizing Capacity

The widespread disappointments, and downright disasters, resulting from the export of development models from the global North to the global South (Hirschman 1981, Ostry, Loungani, and Furceri 2016) have motivated renewed focus on how local actors learn to identify and solve their emergent problems (Evans 2008; Hausmann et al. 2008). A wide array of scholars at the nexus of international development and planning have focused on how institutional insights can be the basis of capacity-building, whether by cultivating the insights of front-line workers (Joshi 1999; Tendler 1998), strengthening accountability (Andrews, Pritchett, and Woolcock 2013; Evans and Heller 2015), investing in technical skills (Rauch and Evans 2000), or employing diverse regulatory approaches (Coslovsky 2011; Pires 2008). All of these institutionalist² accounts deliver empirical examples of successful institutional capacity-building in resource-constrained contexts, often with the calibrated use of state power by “street level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 1980).

One approach, referred to as “planning as the anticipation of resistance” (AoR) (Sanyal 2005), synthesizes many of these empirical insights into a broader framework that encourages planners to survey the landscape of existing challenges and begin with those with the greatest prospect of success. Drawing from the work of Albert Hirschman (1963), this approach suggests that planners make such choices by comparing possible planning efforts based on their technical complexity, the rivalry of material interests involved, and the urgency with which they are presented. The approach suggests that planners can instigate systemic change by astutely engaging with one problem at a time.

Much of the empirical scholarship on regularizing informal settlements adopts an approach similar to AoR’s, focusing on creating sequences where solving smaller problems (e.g. providing clear land titles) can build leverage to tackle larger ones (e.g. infrastructure provision) (de Soto 2000; Durand-Lasserve and Selod 2009). The underlying premise is that by cultivating expertise regarding the landscape of resources, institutions, interests and technology, planners can gain traction through “small, non-antagonistic efforts, which do not invoke serious institutional resistance” (Sanyal 2005, 239). Yet, planners’ experiences with the South Texas case study examined here concord with a wide array of empirical studies which find that such a sequence-building approach, once put into practice, tends to experience significant persistence of informal activity and backsliding (Galiani and Schargrodsky 2016; Gilbert 2002, Payne, Durand-Lasserve, and Carole Rakodi 2009; Ward et al. 2004).

This article explores the possibility that the reason for these frustrations is that a significant sources of the “resistance” that planners may face is not immediately legible using tools of technical planning or institutional analysis. Sometimes, the resistance lies in how different groups perceive the same phenomenon in different ways. For example, Galiani and Schargrodsky (2016) highlight how the full range of contexts in which landowners use their properties—including “irregular” household arrangements and shifts in response to sudden changes and emergencies (e.g. divorce, death)—complicate and ultimately undermine many of the apparent benefits of formalization. Such differences in perspective illustrate the possibility that a “victory” from a planner’s point of view might not appear the same way for members of other groups, potentially destabilizing the logic of the problem sequence. Based on the South Texas case study, this article identifies specific aspects of groups’ perspectives that can complement and enhance the traditional considerations of an institutional planning approach.

Examining the process by which planners in South Texas regularized land titles for over 2,000 households allows for an assessment of what was necessary and sufficient to overcome obstacles to substantial project success. This case provides an ideal test of an AoR approach, both because the policy topic was the basis of the approach’s original formulation (Sanyal 2005), and because of the case context. As a more agricultural, remote, and high-poverty area situated within a binational border community (Martinez 1994), South Texas introduces pertinent elements observed both in the global North and South.

The case analysis reveals that the successes in land formalization required planners to step beyond institutionalist approaches’ technical and material “matters of fact.” The “matters of concern” from groups’ specific perspectives that planners needed to understand to make progress were twofold: first, the key vulnerabilities of security and status whose urgency focused and motivated collective action. And second were the group-level repertoires of acceptable practices for addressing these vulnerabilities. Repertoires are an important aspect of group epistemology (Umemoto 2001), and they have been widely researched by sociologists as forms of self-expression and claim-making that facilitate interaction (Bourdieu 1977; Swidler 1986). Examples of repertoire include valid forms of consultation, such as the rules of discussion in community meetings, ways of establishing that a land claimant is telling the truth, or means of settling disputes. Examples of vulnerability include residents’ understanding of a homestead as a source of intergenerational security, or bureaucrats’ need to see their labor as directed toward “deserving” populations.

The case study suggests that the role of ethnographic methods in capacity-building planning efforts remains undervalued. Ethnography involves in-depth observations of the background knowledge and tools that actors use to make sense of the world (Lofland, Snow, Anderson, and Lofland 2005). The ethnographic approach of “thick description” recognizes that while observers can identify such background cultural knowledge, they do so from one of many possible perspectives (Emerson 2001; Geertz 1973). These tools—identifying other groups’ background knowledge, and placing it in relation to one’s own—are crucial to integrating vulnerabilities and repertoires into the planning process.

Specifying these tools also helps to clarify how planners can engage in participatory approaches without subtly overlaying their existing perspectives onto new settings (Umemoto 2001). Likewise, by identifying how ethnography can be used to place repertoires and vulnerabilities alongside classic institutionalist considerations, a multi-perspectival approach helps to address participatory planning’s relative lack of explicit engagement with structural factors. These include inequalities in who comes prepared to speak, their different ways of speaking, and the options for integrating participatory dialogue into broader institutional processes (Huxley and Yiftachel 2000).

While institutionalist approaches offer some methods for identifying creative solutions, they do not account for the possibility that what might appear from a planner’s perspective as a momentum-building “small win” may be unrecognizable, irrelevant, or worse, counterproductive in the view of key stakeholder groups. Such problems frequently arose in the South Texas colonias. Insofar as planners overcame these problems, it was largely through a deep engagement with group-level ways of knowing. By recognizing distinct, sometimes disparate group perspectives, and allowing them to shift the means and ends of their work, planners were able to dissolve some of the seemingly intractable “wicked” problems they faced.

Colonia Planning as Development Planning and Research Methods

At the southernmost tip of Texas, the Rio Grande Valley (“The Valley”) is one of the lowest-income areas in the United States. Two of its counties, Starr and Willacy, rank 3,137th and 3,139th, respectively, out of all 3,143 in the United States in per capita income (U.S. Census Bureau 2015). Prior to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, the region was largely agricultural and isolated from the global economy (Graf 1942; Phillips and Cañas 2008). Demographically and culturally, The Valley is emblematic of the “hybrid” communities and cultures observed along the US-Mexico border, in which neither nation-state’s broader institutions or cultures prevail so much as appear piecemeal in among a distinctively transnational social fabric (Martinez 1994).

The colonias of the US-Mexico border region are informal settlements which tend to lack basic infrastructural services (e.g. paved roads, sewage) (Texas Office of the Secretary of State Colonia Initiatives Program 2014, 24). Recent estimates suggest there are nearly 2,300 colonias in Texas with over 500,000 inhabitants (Texas Attorney General 2011), although these are widely viewed as underestimates (Durst and Wegmann 2017; Mukhija and Monkkonen 2007). Colonia households have predominantly been established by migrant farmworkers with roots in Mexico and Central America. These general features lead many—including, at first, the planners in this case study—to presume that colonia residents are disempowered, passive, and largely anomic.

In-depth reviews regarding the overall origins and demographics of colonias have been published elsewhere (Larson 1995; Ward 1999). Here, we focus on the Starr County colonias in South Texas. These came to the attention of the Texas legislature and voting public in the late 1980s through news reports depicting them as public health hazards and pockets of “Third World” existence within the United States (Applebome 1988; Hill 2003). Elected officials responded with a narrative of colonias as the products of collusion between unethical local land developers and politicians. As most of the scholarship on this topic observes, however, colonias are the consequence of high inequality and a formal housing market that is prohibitively expensive for the lowest income households (Durst 2016; Larson 2002; Ward 1999). Nevertheless, the frame of colonias as caused by a few malefactors informed a punitive response by the state.

In 1993, Texas Attorney General Dan Morales sued Blas Chapa and Elias Lopez, two prominent developers of colonias in Starr County, for violating the “model subdivision” standards established by the state in 1989 as an attempt to prevent future colonia development. The developers were fined $21.6 million, but declared bankruptcy before the final settlement was reached (Dailey 1995).

The state responded with an emphasis on private-sector solutions in Starr County by placing fifteen developed subdivisions,³ 2,500 land parcels, and approximately 9,000 people (Ward, de Sourza, Giusti, Larson, and May 2003: III, 73; see Figures 1 and 2 below) under the “receivership” of the Community Resource Group (CRG). The CRG was an out-of-state nonprofit that had been involved with water access in South Texas since the 1980s (Roberts 1988). Its charge was to “regularize” the state-seized colonias. To do so, the CRG would have to contend with the fact that the developers sold land under varying terms and with inconsistent documentation, that many lots were sold multiple times, that the actual boundaries of the lots might be unclear, and that some lots were sold on areas that government authorities would deem uninhabitable (Ward et al. 2003).⁴ These characteristics, and the apparently shifting nature of how planners should intervene, gave the tasks many of the qualities of a “wicked” problem (Rittel and Webber 1973).

Figure 1.

The Rio Grande Valley (Colonia locations indicated by shaded polygons with black outlines).

Figure 2.

Starr County colonias (Rio Grande City and CRG receivership colonias labeled).

However, at the outset, state officials and the CRG vastly underestimated the effort required to regularize the subdivisions, expecting a few months’ work settling land claims and using the developers’ seized assets to fund basic infrastructure. Yet these expectations were unrealistic due to three main misunderstandings: first, the “bad actor” theory of colonia origins mistakenly assumed that the developers had withheld the resources for infrastructure. Second, colonia residents’ backgrounds and low incomes led to false images of them as relatively helpless. Finally, and particularly important as a test of institutionalist planning approaches, the CRG assumed that it could complete its tasks by placing the simplest, ostensibly least objectionable problems first in a sequence of planning efforts.

Nevertheless, after ten years of effort, the CRG was able to successfully issue clear title deeds for nearly all of the residents involved. It also helped facilitate, if not fund, the provision of some basic infrastructure services, as well as establish home improvement loan and home sale programs. Insofar as the CRG’s initial approach was mismatched to the tasks at hand, we need to understand what eventually produced these successes.

Research Methods

The primary data source used here is the personal experience of working in Starr County colonias from November 2002 to July 2004. Until the end of 2003, I worked the CRG on colonia receivership duties. These included performing title searches, gathering information and finalizing ownership agreements with title holders, attending community meetings, and helping to coordinate with government officials and contractors (e.g. lawyers, surveyors). During these experiences, I regularly kept notes and journals of field observations. I wrote papers based on these experiences in the course a graduate planning degree in 2004-2005. I have continued to visit the region regularly since.

A review of the relevant academic literature revealed similar puzzles to those encountered in the field, especially regarding the challenges of building and sustaining momentum in problem-sequencing (e.g. Arizmendi, Arizmendi, Donelson, and Esparza 2010; Ward et al. 2004). In order to understand the relationship between the planning approaches of interest and project outcomes, the following steps were taken:

Assembly and review of personal notes and unpublished writings regarding field experience in Starr County;

A primary document search of relevant news sources, government data, and organizational documents;

A secondary literature search⁵ planning, economic, and legal scholarly work on US-Mexico border colonias;

Reconstruction of Starr County colonia receivership project sequences from 1995 to 2005 using the aforementioned data.

These data formed the basis of a process trace analysis (George and Bennett 2005; Mahoney 2012) in which multiple within-case observations were compared to see which types of planning activity were associated with project progress or lack thereof. The central comparison was between factors associated with anticipation of resistance framework (problem-level technical complexity, urgency, and rivalry), and the proposed variables for an augmented framework (group-level vulnerabilities and repertoires).

Case Analysis: Transforming South Texas Land Regularization through Vulnerability and Repertoire

Early Efforts and Adjusting Project Scope

Initially, administrators in the CRG anticipated that the Starr County project would require a few months of work using volunteer labor (Field notes, Squires and Korte 2009). However, the organization was surprised to find far less resources than it had anticipated for infrastructure-building. Neither the state nor the CRG anticipated that the developers might lack the resources to service these subdivisions. The CRG discovered that even if it collected 100 percent of the payments outstanding on all of the subdivisions, it would still only possess a little over $600,000 of the roughly $21 million needed to service these communities (Larson 2003, 65).

This forced the CRG to confront a radically different scenario from that which they had anticipated. To follow the technical considerations at the center of an AoR approach—especially in terms of institutional resources and urgency—would dictate that CRG avoid the infrastructure issue. The task far exceeded organizational capacity. Yet the community would not tolerate such a recusal. This pertains to planners’ mistaken assumptions regarding who their colonia stakeholders were and how they related to the planning work.

According to the “bad actor” approach to colonias maintained by state officials and the CRG, colonia residents had been duped or misled by developers who were able to profit by withholding investments in basic infrastructure. Yet residents were far more organized and involved than this narrative allowed. In Las Lomas, the largest colonia in Starr County, residents had been organizing to discuss community issues since at least the late 1980s. They consolidated an organization serving Las Lomas and other Starr County subdivisions called Colonias Unidas. Colonias Unidas organized environmental justice campaigns, citizenship classes and exams, and nutrition and youth education programs. It had also successfully lobbied for state policy changes regarding colonia regulation and infrastructure (Arizmendi et al. 2010), and have even brought the CRG to the attention of Texas Attorney General’s office as a possible Starr County colonia receiver, adding an implicit measure of oversight of which the local residents were highly aware.

Thus, to complete its tasks, the CRG would have to be prepared to work with communities, not just households. Furthermore, these communities were already deeply engaged with CRG’s main areas of work. Their shared perspective had been strongly influenced by organizing experiences which formed the basis for a repertoire of practices for communication, coordination, and decision-making. A central vulnerability that had repeatedly motivated local collective action was household self-sufficiency and security, rendering technical considerations insufficient to decide the matter of infrastructure. To avoid risking the alienation of partners it needed to make progress, the CRG had to demonstrate a meaningful commitment to the struggle for basic infrastructure. As a result, the CRG upended institutionalist problem sequencing by agreeing to provide technical assistance in applications for state and federal resources for infrastructure projects.

Group Factors Affecting the Nature of Tasks: Land Title Regularization

The receivership’s early approach to regularization was relatively passive, conducted at arm’s length from the community, and, as a result, largely ineffective. It used newspaper and radio announcements to invite title holders to an office near the county government to make arrangements. Local residents were invited to volunteer to assist, but few did and those who did were not very well-trained. Because many colonia residents migrated regularly, often for farm work, these forms of outreach were inadequate. They also failed to take into account widespread misinformation. For example, a majority of residents had received some form of title deed from the original developers (Roberts 2005), leading them to mistakenly believe that their claims were secure. As a result of these issues, the receivership gathered patchy information and cleared few titles during its first several years.

The CRG also initially vastly underestimated the complex challenges embedded within many title claims. These might include inconsistent or incomplete documentation, parcels that the developers sold without legally owning, incorrect or overlapping parcel descriptions, multiple sales of the same parcel, and/or parcels that interfered with infrastructure or that were slated for condemnation by the county (e.g. on a flood plain). The CRG’s attempt to treat regularization as a matter of aligning information did not work because the information available was inadequate. By engaging further with Colonias Unidas on issues such as infrastructure, the CRG began to engage at a level sufficient to produce with residents the novel and creative solutions that would be necessary to resolve these complex, layered challenges.

From 1995 to 1999, the CRG receivership had two supervisors, dubbed “receivers” due to their special role in the eyes of the state. In that time, the aforementioned efforts garnered only marginal progress. Hired in 1999, Rebecca Lightsey, the third Starr County colonias receiver, was the first to build momentum in land title regularization. She accomplished this by deepening engagement with the community. Lightsey moved the CRG office from the center of Rio Grande City to Las Lomas, the largest of the colonias under the receivership, renting space in a building constructed by members of Colonias Unidas. This set the organization in the milieu of the community as opposed to the county government. Moving in with Colonias Unidas also established closer ties to the community-based organization.

Second, Lightsey introduced a creative technical approach: rather than resolve ownership claims through property law, Lightsey worked with colonia residents to place the receivership under bankruptcy law. This was accomplished by declaring all of the colonias in the receivership a corporation and having that corporation file for bankruptcy. This shift into bankruptcy law allowed the receivership to determine ownership with much greater flexibility. For example, under property law, if two people were sold the same lot, and the first buyer returned after three years’ absence only to find that the second buyer had built a house on it, the first buyer would be the rightful owner of the lot. Yet this scenario, and many others that occurred with some frequency, would have left both buyers dissatisfied. The bankruptcy structure introduced flexibility by allowing the receivership to resolve conflicts by allowing owners of the same parcel to opt for unoccupied parcels and other compromise solutions.

At the same time, the openness of the bankruptcy structure still had to be put to use effectively. This is where Lightsey made a third important innovation: employing and empowering colonia residents to carry out receivership work. Lightsey maintained formal decision-making authority, but asked local staff to help gather information about challenges and recommend solutions. This was costly: it involved hiring full-time employees and training them, including sending them to real estate training seminars in Wisconsin. It was also risky: it meant that Lightsey would have to delegate and develop trusting relations with local residents who had to serve as impartial agents of the receivership among their neighbors and family members.

These elements carry a flavor of participatory planning approaches while also extending beyond them in significant ways. In the colonias case, professional planners did not invite participation as a means of seeking feedback on their interventions; rather, the Starr County receivership hired, trained, and conferred a relatively high degree of autonomy to community members who also worked as planners. This deep integration with the community is better represented by scholarship on “co-production” (Watson 2014) and “inclusion” (Quick and Feldman 2011), both of which criticize standard participatory planning approaches for their focus on community feedback and lack of an explicit account of empowering communities to define planning priorities and methods of intervention.

The prior impasse on CRG’s progress was broken through local residents redefining the work of clearing land title. Their firsthand knowledge of community life was central to these changes. Community-based employees knew who titleholders were, who the titleholders knew, how different parties were connected to each other, and when a story was plausible or not—which was particularly important given the colonia developers’ patchy documentation. Local hires also learned how to effectively relate the receivership’s technical knowledge to community members, such as the benefits of the bankruptcy proceedings. Employees used local repertoires when communicating with CRG clients regarding how to relay messages, explaining what would be necessary for a client’s needs to be met, and how to resolve conflicting claims. These employees saw the CRG’s investments in them as an opportunity to better the community—a significant source of professionalism and impartiality.

An ethnographic understanding of how community members understood their wants and needs was necessary to assure agreements would “stick” in the long term, and this approach needed to be applied with thoroughness to every claim. Claims were deeply intertwined; if one unsatisfied lot owner gave up on a claim, they could withdraw from contact and their unresolved issues could leave other households in limbo. This illustrates another way in which the receivership had to depart from an institutionalist template. An institutionalist emphasis on “small wins” could not function because no “easy” claim could be resolved without resolving the surrounding “difficult” ones. This thoroughness facilitated the final clearing of title for whole subdivisions, as well as the construction of long-term legitimacy in the eyes of local communities.

Outside observers noted the melding of approaches and practices, describing the CRG’s approach as “receiver law,” or “a set of normative and evidentiary rules [that] grew organically through the claims process … something like a ‘common law’ of the Starr County colonias” (Larson 2003, 75). It was only when the “slow” work of establishing these practices was thoroughly established that the receivership began to build traction. Yet these changes would not likely have resulted from placing attention primarily on technical complexity, urgency, and rivalry. Such considerations defined the work of Lightsey’s predecessors, which observers on all sides agreed left it adrift. Although the declaration of bankruptcy shows the importance of sensitivity to institutional and technical issues, this had to be coupled with significant investments of time and money, as well as accepting burdens of risk that focused on local repertoires and vulnerabilities instead of “small wins” in the planning intervention.

An earlier case of a land titling receivership on the Texas-Mexico border illustrates the pitfalls an institutionalist problem sequencing approach. El Cenizo, a small municipality about 100 miles West of Starr County, pursued a bankruptcy law approach to title regularizations before Starr County did. A court-ordered reorganization in 1992 resulted in a state-brokered agreement for a private nonprofit to clear titles for approximately 600 parcels, with the goal of using residents’ monthly payments to finance housing and infrastructure improvements. After several years, over $1.3 million in payments had been spent on legal fees and staff. Responding to the absence of progress on infrastructure, residents organized and successfully forced the state to pay a $2 million settlement in 1998 for housing and road improvements. The challenges in El Cenizo were similar to those faced in Starr County, albeit with less parcels and more funds collected; yet administrative overhead was too costly for such a project to be self-funding (Austin American-Statesman 1998; Wilson and Guajardo 2000). This establishes the importance of the CRG’s focus on community perspectives as a necessary counterpart to make its shift into bankruptcy law useful as a means to completing its work.

Navigating Boundaries, Problem Discovery, and More Perspectives

The CRG learned over time that giving the community voice to help complete its work sometimes meant acceding to community demands that from the CRG’s perspective were undesirable and even possibly threatening to its stability. The community would perform its own process of deciding whether the CRG’s priorities and means of achieving them were adequate—regardless of whether their input was solicited. The relationship between the planners and the community had become too interdependent for the community not to exercise this right.

One striking example of this dynamic involves the final form of title deeds that landholders received. On the advice of legal counsel, the CRG had elected to issue “quitclaim” deeds. These would be registered with the county, but the CRG would not make guarantees in case future challenges to title emerged. Colonia residents found this unacceptable. Voicing their dismay through Colonias Unidas, they communicated to CRG that quitclaim deeds failed to meet a basic reason for their participation in the receivership—a guarantee of security for their family homesteads. Anything short of a full guarantee was worthless in residents’ eyes. The CRG reversed its initial decision and issued warranty deeds that it would back.⁶ This decision flew in the face of legal advice and basic technical, institutionalist considerations. Although the State of Texas would have accepted quitclaim deeds as a planning resolution, the community would not, and their approval was necessary for the CRG to close the receivership. Once again, the CRG violated an institutionalist logic of attention to resources and problem sequences in order to prioritize community trust and legitimacy.

Institutional as well as group-perspectival considerations were also important to the CRG’s dealings with groups beyond colonia residents. Most of the receivership’s legal milestones and its work on infrastructure required coordination with local and state officials. Considerations from the original AoR framework, such as different agencies’ priorities and resources, at times made a significant difference in project outcomes. For example, at a time when the State of Texas was recalling funds from its agencies due to a massive deficit, the CRG was able to help bring water and sewer infrastructure to a disconnected portion of a subdivision by discovering a highly specific and protected source of funds that was reserved exclusively for inter-agency efforts in rural areas (Field notes).

Nevertheless, civil servants also had repertoires and vulnerabilities that the CRG needed to take into account to accomplish its work. Many officials viewed colonia residents as getting “something for nothing,” or more generally undeserving of assistance. Engineers from the state water agency expressed resent that some colonia residents were categorized as poor but nevertheless lived in bigger houses and drove larger cars than they. While these observations were selective—of the large houses were self-built and inhabited by families who otherwise lived in extreme poverty—the CRG could not dismiss these perspectives. In another ethnographic maneuver, the CRG had to understand what produced these resentments to work effectively with those who held them. This could involve focusing on officials’ roles—their nobility and professionalism—or helping them to see firsthand more of the poverty of those who needed their assistance. Failing to key into these perspectives would risk the prospects of a project’s completion.

Implications for Planning Practice and Education

Over the course of the Starr County receivership, thinking across group perspectives facilitated progress when traditional institutional approaches did not. Key examples where integrating different repertoires and vulnerabilities proved critical to project progress included the decision to engage with infrastructure issues, infusing the bankruptcy proceedings with local approaches (along with the changes in organizational structure and practices this entailed), and engaging with the perspectival differences of bureaucrats and politicians whose support was necessary for project progress. These examples illustrate that the effective anticipation of resistance is not solely to be carried out based on what planners know about the nature of the problem at-hand; rather, it involves a deliberate and repeated lowering of planning agency boundaries to allow the infusion of alternate understandings regarding what the problem means and how different actors can go about remediating it together.

The attention to group perspectives in many ways aligns with theories of participatory planning. At the same time, the case builds on these theories in two ways. First, by specifying repertoires and vulnerabilities as specific dimensions of group perspectives, it offers more concrete suggestions for how planners can integrate other approaches into their work. These two elements help add specificity to what is meant by “ways of knowing,” which have largely been an ephemeral, underspecified issue in participatory planning approaches (Umemoto 2001). Moreover, attention to repertoire and vulnerability also illustrates how planners can pursue “inclusion” as a matter of moving beyond public input on plans by experts and into the methods by which planners convene a broader community to help them define and address public issues (Quick and Feldman 2011).

Second, placing repertoire and vulnerability alongside classic institutionalist concerns helps to break a longstanding stalemate regarding the relationship between participatory planning and power dynamics and the broader structural influences. Although the question of whether the participatory approach accommodates such considerations has been discussed intensively (Forester 2000; Healey 2000; Huxley and Yiftachel 2000), little synthesis has resulted. An augmented anticipation of resistance approach specifies technical, resource, institutional, and group-based considerations to help formulate and select planning problems effectively. While this does not address all of the sources and dimensions of power—neo-Marxist approaches would likely still emphasize class structures and macro-level political economy—the meso-level considerations of the approach suggested here offer participatory planning approaches a considerably more concrete and integrated means of addressing power issues. These differences between the original anticipation of resistance, participatory planning, and multi-perspectival AoR approaches are summarized in Table 1 below.

Table 1.

Central Tenets and Assumptions of “AoR,” Participatory Planning, and Multi-Perspectival AoR Approaches.

Perspective	AoR	Participatory/Collaborative Planning	Multi-Perspectival Anticipation of Resistance
Motivating problem	Institutional capacity-building amidst resource scarcity	Responsiveness to stakeholders, especially marginalized groups	How groups’ “matters of concern” shape perceptions of planning means and ends
Key tools	Problem formulation and selection based on planners’ technical knowledge	Community input through formal deliberation processes	AoR + immersion in groups’ vulnerabilities and repertoires
Locus of intervention	State institutions	Civil society	Planning institutions broadened to include stakeholders
Key unaddressed issues	How “matters of concern” create divergent perceptions of technical issues	Methods necessary to engage with diverse group “ways of knowing”; integrating marginalized groups into institutional processes	Macro-level influences over power (e.g. political economy)

Note: AoR = anticipation of resistance.

Repertoires and vulnerabilities are just two of potentially many possible dimensions of group perspectives. Insofar as the original AoR framework emphasizes the circumvention of “wicked problems,” the additional proposed features of group vulnerabilities and repertoires emphasize dissolving them. This becomes possible insofar as these external perspectives are permitted to transform planning goals and methods into something quite different from those that made the problem appear “wicked” in the eyes of planners.

This multi-perspectival approach may become more relevant in developed countries for at least two reasons. First, planning scholars are increasingly observing informal, “global South-like” conditions in advanced countries (Durst and Wegmann 2017; Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris 2014; Ward 1999). Second, in addition to increasing economic inequality and political polarization in the “global North,” scholars also increasingly observe the polarization of group identities and discourses (Mann and Ornstein 2016; Streeck 2016). By beginning with attention to how groups formulate their “matters of concern” (Latour 2004), planners can potentially build bridges across more disparate perspectives.

Planning education can better prepare planners to assess groups’ repertoires and vulnerabilities through more thorough and effective integration of ethnographic training into the curriculum. Ethnography is a broad scholarly tradition whose possible implications for methods of observation, interpretation, and self-reflection extend well beyond the scope of a single paper. Nevertheless, some of the most essential elements of ethnography include a focus on the tools and concepts that people in other cultures use to make sense of their everyday experiences, as well as how the documentation of these tools is itself a problem-driven, and therefore perspectival, activity (Emerson 2001; Geertz 1973). The first component renders different “ways of knowing” more readily apparent; the second trains the professional to be sensitive to unavoidable gaps between the observer and observed. Such gaps must be at least recognized and managed if any kind of equity of consideration is to be achieved across diverse perspectives.

Building cultural competency is an area of active development in planning theory and education (Agyeman and Erickson 2012; Planning Accreditation Board 2012; Sandercock 1998). The anticipation of resistance framework connects these skills to thinking about institutional landscapes, particularly in developing contexts. The integration of skills to better understand group-level perspectives suggests specific areas of curricular emphasis. These align closely with existing accreditation requirements and/or best practices identified in the planning education literature (Agyeman and Erickson 2012; Lung-Amam, Harwood, Sandoval, and Sen 2016; Planning Accreditation Board 2012; Sen, Umemoto, Koh, and Zambonelli 2017):

Increased curricular support for training in other languages;

Training in ethnography and interviewing prior to field experiences;

Qualitative data analysis methods to enhance students’ skills for contextualizing and historicizing group meanings and experiences;

Classroom activities, such as case studies, that encourage students to draw from the different settings in which they have lived to consider how planning problems transpose across different institutional and group contexts.

The last item can particularly benefit from the presence of international students, who understandably show a thirst to discuss how a given case or policy might work in their home countries. Yet without concerted pedagogical effort, students may find such comparative thinking intimidating. For this reason, an explicit emphasis on increasing the number and circulation of different contexts that students can describe to each other may help them to build better facility with practices of contextualized comparison.

Conclusion

Institutional capacity-building is central to planners’ attempts to leverage immediate tasks to respond to more systematic issues. While this has long been a central concern regarding planning in developing countries (Roy 2005; United Nations Human Settlements Program [UN-Habitat] 2016), such maneuvers are of growing concern in developed ones as well (Durst and Wegmann 2017; Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris 2014). In order to meet these challenges, planners must calibrate their efforts with a more diverse toolkit than in the past. An institutionalist “anticipation of resistance” encourages planners to address these issues by acknowledging how problem formulation and sequencing impact project implementation. This article extends this line of thinking by showing that other groups’ perspectives shape how problems are perceived and addressed in ways quite distinct from institutional factors. The Starr County colonias case illustrates how planning work must be infused with group-level perspectives if planners are to take into account how their efforts will reverberate through ongoing relations between planners, stakeholders and other agencies.

This study offers several potential lessons for how the perspectival aspect of anticipating resistance can be encouraged and explored through planning research, practice and education. It suggests that immersion into other groups’ ways of doing things and ethnographic methods facilitate the integration of multiple understandings into the means and ends of planning work. Insofar as planners can grasp and think across diverse perspectives, they increase the potential for discovering solutions that carry the legitimacy necessary to make them sustainable. With a deepened pursuit of methodological integration, the planning profession can more effectively support the aspirations of entering professionals who want to work within institutions without being “of” them, and who aim to generate linkages across different institutional sectors to devise creative solutions with the potential for systemic impact.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Shiben Banerji, Jigar Bhatt, the editors and anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Planning Education and Research, and the people of the Starr County colonias for their helpful feedback, patience and support.

Author’s Note

All errors in the text are the author’s own.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Seth Pipkin is an associate professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include economic development, industrial policy, and group learning processes.

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