Abstract
Critical pragmatism provides a line of analysis and imagination that might contribute both to academic planning theory and to engaged planning practices as well. To do so, it must build upon, and develop more politically, Donald Schön’s seminal work on reflective practice. It must help students of planning think critically about outcomes as well as processes, about institutional and process designs, about power and performance. It must resonate experientially with perceptions of change-oriented practitioners facing complex multi-party “problems” characterized by distrust, anger, strategic behavior, poor information, and inequalities of power. Not least of all, a critical pragmatism must—and can—help students of planning reconstruct possibilities where others might initially perceive or presume impossibilities.
To explore the challenges of a “critical pragmatism,” I write as a reconstructed theorist who’s come to appreciate how much we can learn, intellectually and practically, from carefully gathered accounts and reflections of practitioners like urban planners or diverse intermediaries working in the face of public disputes. I begin, first, by setting out what I believe a critical pragmatism can achieve as an analytic, theoretical perspective and as a mode of planning practice. Second, to characterize pragmatism more generally, I will explore both the contributions and limits of Donald Schön’s seminal pragmatism as we find it in his Reflective Practitioner (Schön, 1983). Third, then, in the paper’s second half, I turn to some brief “practice stories” about work in the face of public conflicts. I offer these accounts not as “proofs” of any conclusions, of course, but instead to characterize and exemplify how a critical pragmatism might help us in the face of both the difficulties and the opportunities we find in planning and policy-shaping practice.
Part 1: The project of a critical pragmatism
To anticipate these practitioners’ short stories, we can make an initial case for the following five broad attributes of a critical pragmatic mode of analysis and action. First, because a critical pragmatism informs not a unilateral but a co-constructed, co-generative or negotiated planning practice, it attends both to processes and outcomes. A critical pragmatist would treat very skeptically, if not reject outright, anyone’s claims that attention to process alone, or outcomes alone, could be justified pragmatically in a planning or public policy context.
Second, because a critical pragmatism appreciates multiple and contingent or evolving forms of knowledge, local and scientific, initial opinion and considered judgment, it might help us to listen in a more critical and less credulous way, helping us to learn from and through ambiguity, to learn about interests and values, and to learn sensitively and perceptively as emotions like fear and anger bring new issues into view (Hoch, 2007). Pragmatism teaches us to treat knowledge claims as fallible; critical pragmatism anticipates that—and hopes to explore how—knowledge claims often reflect systematic or structural framing involving continent relations of power (Healey, 2009).
Third, we will see, a critical pragmatism can help us to rethink the complexities of deliberative processes by showing us crucial but simple and deep differences between practical processes of dialogue, debate, and negotiation—and so too, correspondingly, between effective modes of practice we call facilitating, moderating, and mediating. For our purposes here, we take “debate” not in its broader colloquial meaning of “discussion,” including dialogue, but in its stricter, technical sense of adversarial argumentation. By distinguishing the three distinct practices of facilitating a dialogue, moderating a debate, and mediating a negotiation, we will come to see another significant lesson too: mediators do not make stakeholder agreements any more than midwives make babies (Forester, 2009). It is parents, not midwives, who make babies, and it is stakeholders and representative parties, not mediators, who make mediated agreements, even if those stakeholders may be assisted by skillful, sensitive, and probing intermediaries.
Fourth, critical pragmatism can thus teach us about process design and, not least of all, about the danger of reducing “conflicts” to “debates,” presuming that conflicts are arguments over (just) what parties “say” they’re about, instead of involving the complex and multiple relationships always in flux between parties (Forester, 2012b; Gilligan, 1982; Kelman, 1996). As a corollary, a critical pragmatism opens our sense of practice to creative and inventive processes of search and brainstorming, play and “thinking outside the box,” humor and irony that take ambiguity as generative not paralyzing, probing and reframing options rather than presuming relatively uninformed problem definitions (Forester, 1999; cf. on bricolage, Innes and Booher, 1999, 2010).
Fifth, I hope to make it plausible that a critical pragmatism can move us from a deconstructive skepticism toward a reconstructive imagination, from presumptions of impossibility to explorations of possibility, from a more passive listening to joint, co-generated problem-solving, from any premise of narrow, zero-sum adversarial bargaining to creative and expansive, joint-gain oriented negotiations satisfying the interests of diverse publics (Laws and Forester, 2007a, 2007b).
These are tall claims, but not over-ambitious ones. I have tried to make a case for them not so much by theoretical argument but by practical example—or actually, by now, through two earlier books of theoretical argument (Forester, 1989, 1993) and in another two later books of practical examples (Forester, 1999, 2009), The Deliberative Practitioner and Dealing with Differences. In all of these books I have been concerned with practice in the face of power, inequality, and ideology, not (not ever I might say) concerned with anything remotely approaching some fiction of “ideal” communication. As planners face public disputes, I’ve argued, they might learn from the ways mediators have wrestled with problems of representing parties, tapping expertise, enabling understanding of others and issues, and far more—all that remaining quite distinct from achieving anything remotely resembling “ideal speech,” and all quite practically instructive.
To do better in our applied fields, we need to beware of two dangers, those of naïveté and cynicism. The first assumes too easily the motivating power of abstract ideals; the second assumes too easily that those with power yesterday must prevail today and tomorrow. Assuming in many political settings that sincerity or reciprocity will independently motivate others can easily be a fool’s errand, to be sure. But we ought not, either, assume or presume that the powerful will simply get what they want, for that, after all, is an assumption not of politics but of metaphysics, not of realism in each contested case but of cynicism, a debilitating, apolitical, and self-fulfilling presumption that nothing can change. A critical pragmatism must not just recognize, then, but avoid both of these dangers, that of a dreamy naïveté no less than that of an obstinate cynicism.
So let us explore how we can do better than we have, how planners and policy shapers might not be ideal, but might take seriously ambitious aspirations, to be less callous and blind, less racist, sexist or classist, less apolitically technocratic, less self-defeatingly defensive or inept, less arrogant, less unimaginative, less disastrous as listeners, less exclusive and less condescending, less needlessly deferential to professional and political power both. Yes, in many cases our professionals and applied practitioners (community leaders, their advisors, municipal staff and officials and so on) may be conservative, resistant to change, captured by conventions and language, habits and frameworks that may not truly reflect “all they can do.” But that’s just the point: let’s spend less time rediscovering that power of course matters, and let’s spend more time exploring how we can do better—less time presuming impossibility and more time exploring actual possibility. That, as I understand it, is the deeper promise of a critical pragmatism: a critical, realistic analysis of public possibilities, neither a presumptively defeatist cynicism, a facile resignation, nor a simply convenient search for what seems to get by, an expedient pragmatism that seems to work, if not very well.
To be both explicit and clear: nothing I argue here depends on any particular claim of Jürgen Habermas, or on his work as a whole, nor on particular claims or the work as a whole of Michel Foucault. What I argue may owe far more to the Aristotelianism of Martha Nussbaum (1990) than to the Kantianism of Habermas (1979), and no doubt it owes still more to the pragmatisms of John Dewey (1927), Paulo Freire (1970), and Richard Bernstein (1983) (cf. Healey, 2009). My argument will have an obvious debt to, and a clear difference from, the influential but more politically mute pragmatism of Donald Schön’s Reflective Practitioner (Schön, 1983; see also Argyris and Schön, 1978; Fischler, 2012; Kadlec, 2006).
Part 2: Pragmatism and critical pragmatism
But what can “pragmatism,” and then “critical pragmatism,” really mean in planning and policy-shaping settings? A beginning answer, that is both a conventional and an intuitive one, involves a concern with consequences (and what is consequential, what has value and significance) rather than a concern with any actor’s intentions (or hopes or promises).
When a mayor or planner announces a new program, a rationalist might ask first if the program is a good idea, a coherent idea, if it makes sense as a strategy of action; the pragmatist might ask instead what difference the announcement might make: what it might accomplish, what votes might be swayed, what attention focused, what trust built or manipulated. Later, certainly, if the proposed program ever sees the light of day, the pragmatist will want to know if and for whom it might “work,” to be sure. But given the initial announcement alone, a pragmatist would hardly assume that there’ll be a program and would ask instead, as CW Churchman (1972) so pointedly put it in his lectures, “So what?” “Will anyone care? What difference will it make?” (cf. Forester, 2012a).
In the field of urban studies and planning, as many have argued, no one has done more to show the power of pragmatic analysis than Donald Schön (1983) in his Reflective Practitioner (Fischler, 2012; Healey, 2009; Hoch, 1994, 1996, 2007; Verma, 1996). Schön, following Dewey, and elaborating upon the wisdom of “trial and error,” showed us that a practical move (an artist’s sketch, a counselor’s question, a planner’s proposal) can not just express some intention, but it can produce, for better or worse, practical consequences: it can alter in some way the situation at hand.
But Schön showed far more than that, too, for he wonderfully showed that sometimes our moves have unexpected consequences, consequences that our orienting theories failed to anticipate, even though those theories-in-use had made these moves sensible for us in the first place. Here Schön taught us about the dramas of practice in complex settings, and the plot was thickening, for Schön was now linking our orienting theories to our success or failure, our happiness or disappointment with the actual practical consequences of our “moves.”
If we make a move and are not surprised, we confirm our earlier expectations, our theory-in-use. But when we make a move and are surprised, either positively or negatively, Schön argued, we need to re-examine our orienting theories that we’ve been using and adjust them to account for what they’ve missed, what we hadn’t expected—so that in the future we’ll be more able to continue to reach the positive outcomes we might have discovered—or so that we’ll be able to avoid more negative outcomes, if that’s what our unexpected consequences produced.
In this simple scheme, Schön developed a powerful account of how we can learn in action, learn from the consequences of our practical moves, and learn from our engaged attempts to change the world. Notice that learning here happens not through debate, not through argument, Schön has suggested, but through moving in the world, pragmatic intervention, and from the talk-back of the world that leads us then to “reflect in action,” to reconsider the frames and frameworks that led us to these unexpected consequences, be they welcome or unwelcome, benefits or costs (Reardon et al., 1993: 83–84; see also Innes and Booher, 2010; Yankelovich, 2001).
This account of learning through practice in Schön’s Reflective Practitioner was widely embraced; it has resonances with practical activity and with our experiences of wondering now and then, “What were we thinking?” at times when we’ve reflected on, evaluated, and changed our working assumptions, our orienting theories-in-use. Schön’s account is, to be sure, deeply pragmatic in the ways it captures not just what we’re thinking when we act, but also what we’re doing when we act, seeing that sometimes we want to ask, “Do we wish to do more or less of what we did? Was our working theory, our practical expectation and anticipation, spot-on or partially blind? Do we need to reframe our thinking or not?” These are a pragmatist’s questions, both about theory and practice, both about how we do what we do and about the connections between our past doing and our thinking, and our future doings as well.
Nevertheless, in a complex political world, this analysis has some limits, at least some silences. We might wonder about the status of social or political structures in Schön’s account, about the status of politics and ethics. We might wonder, too, how we can extend and refine, even transform, Schön’s Reflective Practitioner to help us to think about power and conflict, to think about dealing with differences, to think about political engagement and learning, in more or less democratic ways.
I tried in part to address these issues in a book called The Deliberative Practitioner—a title I chose, of course, both to honor and also, I hoped, to refine Schön’s work (Forester, 1999). In that book I suggested that in political settings, in which multiple parties or stakeholders argued about or contested or struggled over desired outcomes, the learning that occurred could hardly be captured by Schön’s social-psychological model alone. In deliberative settings, we could see, parties sometimes entered as “I” and later emerged with more developed, more informed, more acute senses of “we.” Relationships between people changed and developed (for better or worse, to be sure), not just individuals’ organizing frames or theories. Senses of identity could change, not just utilities. But more than that, parties could also learn about value and significance, what mattered as well as how things worked. Here Schön’s suspicions of politics as only and deeply adversarial—as expounded in his later book with Martin Rein, Frame Reflection (1994)—might have limited the scope of his otherwise deeply insightful and influential account of learning in practice.
But neither Schön’s Reflective Practitioner nor my Deliberative Practitioner tackled head-on either, first, the problems of working with others in contentious situations animated by on-going practical conflicts, differences, and disputes, or, second, the challenges of the actual design of social and institutional processes that we might explore and develop to help plural publics deal with their differences of interests and values, worldviews and cultures, ideologies and more. I had tried, in The Deliberative Practitioner, to show how we learned in planning processes from far more than “the words” of one another’s arguments. Indeed, in most planning settings, I argued, we learn not by debating arguments but by listening carefully to one another’s stories and by actually participating in diverse ‘participatory rituals’ ranging from storytelling to site visits to sharing meals or drinks to working together (Forester, 1999; see also Sandercock, 2003; Umemoto, 2001; Wagenaar, 2011b).
Perhaps the whole of Deliberative Practitioner is a long footnote developing the chapter on “Listening: The social policy of everyday life” in Planning in the Face of Power, assessing listening as a critically interpretive practice, a “hermeneutic praxis” (Forester, 1989). Listening here is not about words but about value and significance, about meaning and emotion, about respect and relationships, about recognition and power, all far more important than any superficial, literal meaning of “words.” In planning settings, of course, such listening fails immediately if it does not explore “context”; our critical listening has to reach beyond gullibility to recognize ideology and sound bites, to assess racial and gendered stereotypes and presumptions, to wonder about other parties’ self-serving reassurances of “trust me,” or their appeals to their presumed legitimacy, as “officials” or “professionals” or “authorities,” for example (cf. “phronesis” in Flyvbjerg, 2001; Wagenaar, 2011a).
The Deliberative Practitioner explored how much pragmatic work was done through quite mundane stories as planners went about their jobs. “What happened at the meeting last night?” might often produce a story, told not for entertainment but to report a complexly woven thread of events, to attribute character and so shape reputation, to assess implications of legal or political or moral obligations and responsibilities, all of this descriptive, moral, and political work then coherently forming part of an agenda of what deserves further attention and what does not.
So in many planning settings, stories do pragmatic work; they select and focus attention; they enact relations of power, deference, more or less respect, and more. Paying attention to all this goes several steps toward characterizing what we might call a “critical pragmatism” for the simple reason that listeners in planning settings can routinely expect, can anticipate, not just that they will have to respond to what they hear literally, but that they will also to have to respond in ways that will recognize power plays, recognize inequalities threatening equitable planning outcomes, recognize strategic exaggerations, misrepresentations, withholding of information, and much more.
So how might we distinguish a more ordinary from a more critical pragmatism? The critical pragmatist, we might say initially, will attend not only to the consequences of framing a problem in a certain way, but to the contingencies of the relations of power and authority that can make alternative frames and knowledge claims more or less plausible in the first place. 1
But to deliver on the promise of a critical pragmatism, we have much more to explore. What, for example, might planners or policy analysts, community leaders or public managers, do in the face of public policy conflicts (Laws and Forester, 2007a, 2007b)? In the face of deeply differing interests and values—when senses of place or environmental welfare, for example, might be in conflict—what might be better and worse ways of dealing with such differences?
Part 3: Learning from practice to characterize critical pragmatic work
A “critical pragmatism,” it follows, has to address actual possibilities—what we might really do—in situations characterized by deep distrust and suspicion, deep differences of interests and values, a good deal of fear and, often, anger, poor or poorly distributed information, and more. A critical pragmatism would have not to talk about “power” rhetorically but to explore power relations practically (Wagenaar, 2011b).
How might we learn directly about promising practices of real work “in the face of conflict”? That question poses the agenda explored by Dealing with Differences (Forester, 2009) as it reports in its subtitle, “Dramas of Mediating Public Disputes”: it examines and works to draw insights and lessons from the grounded accounts of intermediaries working on public disputes, third-party assistants to parties finding themselves deeply interconnected, but deeply mistrustful, having to negotiate and come to terms about public policies, lands, spaces, and programs (cf. Innes and Booher, 2010). By considering several examples of such work, we might get a more vivid idea of what a critical pragmatism can mean in practice as well as in theory.
What’s the conflict: Presumption, issue framing, relationships, and creativity
In Maryland, for example, Frank Blechman tells us how he began his a career as an advisor to a candidate for office but then continued building upon those conflict generating/adversarial skills in the early 1990s in a university-based program, the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, at George Mason University (Forester, forthcoming; cf. Forester, 2009). Blechman’s comments take pains to contrast ICAR’s approach to conflict and conflict resolution to that of Harvard’s better-known Program on Negotiation, associated most often with Roger Fisher and William Ury’s widely popular and deceptively simple little text, Getting to Yes (Fisher and Ury, 1983).
Even as Blechman will teach us about creative negotiations in what follows, he warns us first that we risk being held captive, and being misled, by our own presumptive problem framing if we move from a perceived “conflict” to prescribed “negotiation” too quickly.
Blechman tells us, first: I think whereas much conflict resolution practiced in this country is built on negotiation theory—or theories of value, communication, or exchange—in contrast, our program did not start from negotiation theory. Indeed it started from the premises that the conflicts that go on the longest and cause the most damage are rooted in non-negotiable issues: race, class, gender, religion, nationality, deeply held values—and that those deeply rooted issues, therefore, would not be resolved by negotiation. The end product of a resolutionary process, therefore, was not an agreement. That created a different framework for what we do (Forester, forthcoming).
So in this passage Blechman has both eyes open; he tells us clearly and explicitly that it may well be “that the conflicts that go on the longest and cause the most damage are rooted in non-negotiable issues: race, class, gender, religion, nationality, deeply held values—and that those deeply rooted issues, therefore, would not be resolved by negotiation.” But as a pragmatist, perhaps a critical pragmatist, he does not stop there; he continues to address what can and ought to be done, so he goes on, first, to give us an overview, and then to provide what he calls “a classic example”: The end products of the analytical and transformative processes we developed were often understandings rather than agreements. Parties came together, parties who were deeply divided, they joined in an analytical process, and they went away not having agreed about anything but having come to understand their own and the other’s situation better. They acted unilaterally in the future in ways that were less conflictual, more constructive for each, and in fact often they might find that while they could not get within a shred of agreement on issue X, that they in fact had dozens of issues A, B, C, to J on which they could cooperate; many of which were in fact negotiable (Forester, forthcoming; emphasis added).
So the plot is thickening again, for not only, Blechman tells us, can “a conflict” be “about issue X,” but it might simultaneously be between “deeply divided” parties who also “had dozens of issues, A, B, C, to J on which they could cooperate; many of which were in fact negotiable.” So we may have both, he reminds us, irreconcilability and negotiable possibilities at the very same time. We might have both irreconcilability and negotiable possibilities in the same relationship.
Blechman shows us how this might well be possible in complex and messy cases: I’ll give you a classic example. In [the late 1980s], shortly after we arrived in the area, the pro-choice and pro-life forces in Maryland—which is a historically Catholic state—had really gone to war with each other, and the State Police were proposing to go to the legislature seeking new authority to interpose themselves to prevent violence. There was a meeting arranged between leaders of the pro-choice and the pro-life forces, and they immediately agreed that it would be very undesirable if such legislation was passed. They jointly opposed it on a variety of free speech grounds. As the discussions went forward they discovered, not entirely to their amazement, that they also shared strong common interest in increasing health care for at-risk and pregnant teenagers. And they wound up forming a coalition which voluntarily proposed a set of rules for how they would picket each other—to lower the risk of violence, thereby forestalling the state police proposal. Simultaneously, they formed a coalition in the legislature to increase state funding and support for prenatal health care. That coalition, despite all the ongoing friction including actions of groups like Operation Rescue from outside the state, held up for five years and succeeded in increasing State funding for health care even at times of budget cuts—and that has, at some level, improved the civility of debate. Now, on the fundamental issue of abortion, needless to say, [Blechman goes on,] the two sides did
Notice here that Blechman asks us to keep conflicting ideas in mind simultaneously: parties can come together even when they have deep, fundamental differences that they cannot reconcile, and those same parties, at the same time, might be brought together in a way that they can discover that they care also about many additional issues on which they can make practical agreements, can make practical differences. More significantly, Blechman draws out the critical pragmatic implications: if we focus too narrowly on deep differences and irreconcilability and therefore do not bring conflicting parties together at times, our self-proclaimed pragmatism (“there’s no practical point!”) will be blind and worse, inefficient—missing subsidiary, secondary agreements that might in fact be possible about actions to promote public health and welfare. Here a critical pragmatism reaches well beyond a more conventional pragmatism (Forester, 2009, chapter 2).
It’s easy, Blechman suggests, too easy, not to bring conflicting parties together because of their deep differences, but this might well be an uncritical, expedient pragmatism that’s quite costly and short-sighted, certainly in terms of missed opportunities. So let’s consider the lessons here that might distinguish a more critical from a less critical pragmatism.
Dealing with Differences began to explore Blechman’s work, and that of similarly insightful, practically oriented intermediaries, to ask the question, essentially, when and why might reasonable “pragmatic” planners (or community leaders or government officials) quit too soon (or see or presume impossibility) in cases—while in exactly the same cases skilled intermediaries, for example, as more critical pragmatists, might see real possibilities, might keep going: to assess disputes at hand, to convene parties to listen and learn, to bring in technical expertise as needed, to invent possible moves and strategies and actions that might serve them, to craft agreements to guide actions to address real needs and interests? We need to ask, then: How and why might our less critical pragmatists quit too soon, while more critical pragmatists might know better how to go on to achieve good results?
In Blechman’s “classic case,” for example, he tells us not to focus so narrowly and literally on the parties’ own framing of their identities and positions, “pro-choice” or “pro-life.” He implies that parties care in fact about more than they say at any given time. He tells us that the conflict at hand reaches far beyond the “fundamental” one, so we should attend not only, rationalistically, to the “what” of “potentially irreconcilable issues” but critically to the engaged, interdependent relationships between the parties, parties who also care deeply about interests and values relevant to many other less articulated issues and significant actions.
He tells us that history matters to stage current disputes, not always to predetermine them, so he points to the Maryland intermediary’s work of creating spaces for practical deliberations, practical negotiations about what might be done: eventually protecting at-risk young people and funding pre-natal care to protect mothers and children alike. Here he suggests that such deliberations and conversations among deeply divided parties focused far more on dialogues exploring concerns and interests and then on subsequent negotiations exploring practical outcomes and actions than (if at all) on doctrinal debates concerning ideological or religious differences (cf. Forester, 2009; Innes and Booher, 2010; Margerum, 2011). 2
Not least of all, Blechman shows us that a critical pragmatist orientation might be both process and outcome oriented: both respectful of parties’ initial “frames” and also respectful of the parties’ capacities to learn from, and about, each other, so that they can work to invent creative new options for action, work to produce pragmatic outcomes serving their values and interests, as well.
Framing and reframing performances and multiple dangers of “debate”
Let’s turn now to another brief example of practice in the face of public conflict, this time illustrated through the commentary of a Canadian architect-planner, Larry Sherman. Sherman’s fuller profile appears in an “Interface” symposium in Planning Theory and Practice, with five “expert” responses (Forester, 2011).
Exploring Sherman’s work ranging from design negotiations to community planning through natural resource management to still other examples of community problem-solving, I continually pressed the “how” questions in these cases: “How did you handle differences of information? Of expertise? Of power?” “How did you work in the face of anger, of deep distrust and suspicion?”
I have tried in gathering “practice stories” to learn about a critical pragmatism through the moves, insights, observations, and lessons of experienced, thoughtful, skilled (at least by reputation) “practitioners” (on method, see Forester, 2006). So in practice-focused oral history interviews, I try to evoke “practice stories” about these practitioners’ responses to the challenges that haunt and confront our field, the challenges that many students of planning suppose to obstruct “democratic” or “participatory” or “responsive” or “efficient, outcome-oriented” planning. I take these practitioners’ accounts as suggestive, provocative, exploratory, always open to more or less corroboration, and as posing issues and insights for analysis, in light of critical literature and experience. As a general rule of this research, I ask not about practitioners’ attitudes toward an issue—for example, a party’s power, or anger or distrust—but instead I try to ask practitioners how in an actual case they have responded to, or practically worked with, a particular party’s power or anger or distrust.
We need to explore such issues as practical matters, in part because so many skeptics seem to think that the success of participatory or collaborative planning or mediated negotiations somehow depends on a fantasy-like absence of power differences or absence of anger and presence of trust. But as Sherman makes clear (as does Blechman, and as do many other intermediaries), working with anger and suspicion, distrust and power differences may simply be part and parcel of working in historically contentious, plural, public settings. If we’re interested in a workable pragmatism that’s not just going to help the loudest, angriest, or most strategic to dominate or destroy public planning processes or public meetings, we will need to think both pragmatically and critically at the same time. So we might listen carefully and try to learn: how might a critical pragmatist confront the challenges of working in settings shot through with no shortage of public anger, suspicion and distrust, and differences in power?
Before we turn to an instructive episode of Sherman’s work, consider a few of his reflective comments about how he has approached quite contentious meetings. He responded to my questions this way: Why am I optimistic about this process and our professional role as facilitators, and why aren’t I put off or discouraged if there’s a lot of animosity between the parties? I think there must be some reasons for the animosities. So as an impartial facilitator—though I’m actively interested in the quality of the outcomes because I’m also a planner—I sympathize with people who are angry, and frustrated, and threatened and confused, because I understand their need to be heard and respected, and their need to understand their roles in the process to get the issue resolved (Forester, 2011; emphasis added).
So Sherman begins not by dismissing or avoiding emotions of anger and frustration but by recognizing them and pointing to his job—as both facilitator and planner—to learn, to understand that “there must be reasons for the animosities,” and he points to angry parties’ “need to be heard and respected,” their “need to understand their roles …” But he goes much further, as he explains: So I see contentious meetings as a necessary challenge. If people are locked in, how do you unlock them? That’s a whole skill set that a facilitator must have. If people are so angry at each other, then I think you have to come to understand the source of that anger. In those cases, I have to take a step back, and that, first of all, means that I’m not trying to do the planning, instead I am trying to understand what the folks are really concerned about. If I expect them to collaborate, to invent solutions and agree, then first I must deal with their emotions. Only then can we move on to collaboration and problem solving (Forester, 2011; emphasis added).
Sherman’s warning to us is a pragmatic, not a therapeutic, one: “Only then can we move on to … problem-solving.” “If I expect them to collaborate—to invent solutions and agree—then first I must deal with their emotions,” he says. But not every planner might do this, he knows, and so he goes on: If the planner thinks of himself strictly as “the planner” and not also as the facilitator—and everyone has to define their own role in this—then I think a planner might be right to back off. I don’t think they’re right not to try and have the conflict resolved, but they might not want to try and help get it resolved – they may choose to ask someone else to be the mediator (Forester, 2011; emphasis added).
Sherman suggests, then, that whoever’s to mediate, engaging with parties’ emotions requires critical pragmatic skills of facilitation—that dismissing or putting aside or leaving emotions “at the door” is not pragmatic but evasive, and probably not productive. Indeed, Sherman goes on to tell us that planners might function well as mediators, and his insights inform the combination of a practice-focus and critical thinking that we might call a “critical pragmatism.” He goes on: But if you want to serve as the mediator as well as the planner, and you want to help this community to strengthen itself, then this community will strengthen itself by resolving its own conflicts … In many ways the planner is well prepared to also be the mediator: balancing fact and intuition, and knowing to trust intuition; respecting views that differ, even conflict with one another; translating problems and emotions into opportunities and options; knowing how and why to listen and be curious and ask, “Why?” a lot; knowing that the outcome must be acceptable to the folks who must own it and live with it. But the planner who wants also to mediate must address new dichotomies: being impartial and still wanting an elegant solution; empowering others to plan; trusting that the essential information will emerge from the dialogue; respecting emotion along with reason. I need [Sherman says] to elaborate on this point about respecting emotion—whether dealing with an individual or the public—because we planners are rarely prepared for this. Indeed we tend to ask an emotional person or group to settle down, put aside their emotions for the good of solving the problem, instead of allowing those emotions to lead us to the source of conflicts that often block our chance of planning or designing something important (Forester, 2011; emphasis added).
We might learn here from Sherman about the demands of a critical pragmatism: to be at times impartial and still to seek elegant solutions, to empower others to plan, to trust and encourage essential information to emerge from the dialogue, to respect emotion along with reason. Recall Blechman’s “classic” example of the pro-life and pro-choice adversaries and the critical pragmatic work required to bring them together: not choosing sides but encouraging elegant solutions that protected young people and provided pre-natal care; not telling the parties what to do but facilitating their dialogue and mediating their negotiations; not foreclosing information sources but enabling them over time to learn; not forbidding emotions about deep value differences but acknowledging these and crafting reasoned options as well.
So the critical pragmatist sees clearly that the rationalist’s adversarial “debate” ought to complement but not pre-empt or displace practical processes of dialogue and creative processes of inventing options for mutual gain (i.e. processes of negotiation). This raises clear questions of institutional design, including meeting design: how can planning procedures design space and time for debate in ways that complement but do not threaten space and time for probing dialogue and creative negotiation (cf. Forester, 2009, 2012a; Harper and Stein, 1995)?
So let us turn finally to an episode in Sherman’s account that might illuminate the ambiguities and dangers of processes of “debate.” He tells us: I recall a public confrontation that was brewing, where I was called one Thursday by the mayor of a rural township near Toronto, asking me to moderate a public meeting that had been widely publicized as a “debate”, scheduled for the next Tuesday evening. This public meeting was to be held in the local ice arena that seats 700 people, to “debate” a proposal to build a huge incineration plant that would burn Toronto’s garbage and bring much needed revenue to this municipality. The mayor said most people – the residents – would be coming to oppose the idea, others from the struggling business community would likely support it, and that Council anticipated violence and had called upon the Provincial Police to keep order. The “debate” would be between the engineering proponents and the opposing environmental experts. I agreed on certain conditions: (i.) stop calling the meeting a “debate” – this should not be an exchange between “talking heads,” but rather a public discussion; (ii.) all of the elected Council members must attend, sitting to one side, listening and taking notes, but not to speak; (iii.) the local media must be invited and have the opportunity to question the panel, as would everyone else attending who wanted to comment. The mayor agreed.
Sherman goes on: The place was packed. I opened by outlining how the meeting would go, and saying that there was one thing that we all in this room had in common: we all needed more information, and we all needed to hear more opinions about the proposition and the process that must occur for a decision to be made, and that was why we were here tonight, for an exchange, not [for] a lecture or a debate. I could instantly feel the room of 700 people settle down. I had touched upon everyone’s assumptions and anxieties, and they saw their roles and now they understood what was going to take place. The discussion went off very peacefully. Everyone who had something to ask or say was recognized, pro and con. Much information and opinion was exchanged, and when people left, they all knew they had had the opportunity of being heard, and they left with a better idea of what next steps were to be taken and how they might participate. The proposition was ultimately rejected by a special referendum that Council decided to hold, once they had listened very carefully that night (Forester, 2011).
Let’s see what this example might teach us about a critical pragmatism—and its differences from the more ordinary pragmatism of the mayor’s appeal to have a public debate protected by the presence of Provincial Police. A hard-headed pragmatist might well have thought about following the mayor’s wishes, being scrupulous about ground rules for the meeting, making the police presence plain for all to see, bracing for a meeting characterized, as many public meetings are, by angry suspicion, fear, distrust, feelings of powerlessness on many of the public’s part, and recriminations. Planners have seen raucous public hearings too often take the form of “decide-announce-defend,” where little in fact gets debated, less gets understood, and typically even less gets negotiated practically. Still, that might have been a conventional pragmatic response to the mayor’s request of planning professionals.
But Sherman has taken an altogether different approach, and we can call it “critical pragmatic” because it’s attentive to both the framing of the process (a “debate”?) and to a range of intermediary outcomes at stake as well: Will anyone get hurt? How can the interested public attend, participate, express concerns and ask questions as well? How will anyone learn about the incinerator proposal? Will residents and representatives alike understand how relevant decisions are to be informed and made? Will the process at hand be transparent, open to the media for broader public information dissemination? What will the consequences be for public trust and decision-making?
Sherman knows, first of all, that this meeting has not been convened by the mayor in a vacuum: Why else have the police been called? The mayor expects significant opposition, no doubt not just to the incinerator itself but to the prospect of the local politicians welcoming the proposal in the first place. Given such substantive opposition, political distrust, procedural uncertainty, partial information, and fear for the future and anger about “what City Hall’s up to this time,” Sherman knows that the very framing of the meeting as “a debate” has significant pragmatic implications.
An invitation to “debate,” of course, encourages taking sides, escalating argument, perhaps pointing out the limitations and flaws not just of one’s adversaries’ arguments but one’s adversaries themselves. When I criticize your data sources, I can be very close to criticizing your scientific competence and thus criticizing you. So the invitation to a “debate,” Sherman knows, may be quite well intentioned on the mayor’s part, but it’s not the intention here that matters; it’s the pragmatic consequences—and here, Sherman knows, that invitation represents a very public performance of institutional design, here process design, one that invokes the norms and expectations appropriate to a debate, one that signals to invitees the appropriate (adversarial) attitude and approach they should bring to the meeting.
As a skilled intermediary, “in-between” conflicting parties as many planners often are, Sherman knows that under these conditions—partial information, plenty of speculation, and ample threat as residents may wonder, “Will the incinerator’s emissions harm my children? What will happen to my property values?”—beginning with a call to “debate” may very likely not help, but rather hurt, the chances of producing an informed, credible discussion.
So we see that Sherman, architect and planner both, had to do not just the pragmatic work of facilitating a discussion, but the critical pragmatic work of thinking through the procedural design, thinking through the politics and ethics, the normative structuring, of that discussion in the first place. If the meaning of “vulgar pragmatism” (as an expression in English has it) and the suspicion of pragmatism more generally involves narrow-deal-making and expediency that sacrifice public welfare as a result, then a critical pragmatism must be attentive not just to getting agreements or “getting things done!” but to the legitimacy and transparency and accountability of that pragmatic production of agreements, deals, and consequences. The critical pragmatist, we see, must attend to expertly informed outcomes and to equitably structured processes as well.
So not by accident does Sherman argue to the mayor that all the legislative representatives must be at the meeting visibly and prominently and with the charge not to grandstand, not to make promises, not to make speeches, but to listen and learn. Not by accident, then, does Sherman invite the media and attendees to ask questions, to speak both to knowledge in hand and knowledge necessary yet to learn.
Not by accident, too, does Sherman tell us that he began this meeting of 700 worried residents first of all by saying, “there was one thing that we all in this room had in common: we all needed more information, and we all needed to hear more opinions about the proposition and the process that must occur for a decision to be made.” So Sherman the critical pragmatist knows that surviving a contentious meeting is not his objective: he hopes to help those present to learn, to have better information, to be able to express their concerns and questions, to be able to define and co-generate the fact-finding that’s yet to occur. But more, Sherman tells us clearly that everyone in the room faced two different kinds of uncertainty, one about what the incinerator proposal really involved, and one about the political process of deliberation and decision-making that might now unfold. So Sherman the critical pragmatist directs and frames attention to, and even encourages critical questioning of, both outcomes and processes, as he seeks the best available information about outcomes and consequences and the legitimacy and transparency of decision-making processes as well.
Conclusion
We can learn from these examples of Larry Sherman’s and Frank Blechman’s accounts, as we have explored them, to see why Donald Schön’s reflective pragmatism may be right, as far as it goes, but, in a contentious moral and political world, not right enough. We need to articulate a more critical pragmatism that directs our attention not only to moves and consequences and our orienting theories, but to the political and moral conditions of our deliberations in the first place. Both Blechman and Sherman warn us about our rationalistic biases to reduce conflict and dispute to debate about propositions; both of these practitioners point us instead to the underlying conditions of interdependence of stakeholders and affected parties: to the multiplicity of parties’ interests, to the limited information and the perhaps hyperbolic demands they hear from one another, to their uncertainties and vulnerabilities and their needs to learn—and not least of all, to their capacities to learn, to reframe joint possibilities, to craft new and unforeseen options and actions, to learn and then test and explore options and so creatively generate new steps forward to protect health and the environment.
In Blechman’s and Sherman’s accounts, I believe, we have seen a critical pragmatism characterized by the attributes with which we began: an analytic and practical approach that attends to process and outcome both, that challenges us to listen critically to appreciate multiple forms of knowledge, that rescues both inquisitive dialogue and co-generative negotiation from the dangerous dominance of debate within deliberative processes, that wrestles with a variety of process designs to promote rather than restrict public learning, invention and problem-solving, and that very practically works to explore possibilities rather than to presume impossibility.
This work is not rocket science. We have skilled, perceptive, thoughtful, creative practitioners from whom we can learn, if we listen, if we ask about possibilities, if we ask less about their espoused theories and more about how they’ve handled the challenges that most intrigue us (and them). Don Schön asked us long ago to look beyond espoused theories; what we might well now do would be to assess carefully and practically the often intertwined practices of sensitive dialogue, incisive debate, and creative negotiation as they can threaten or enable robust planning processes and outcomes.
So we can take a critical pragmatism not to be a speculative concoction of theorists writing in some language that too few can understand. We can take it instead, following practitioners like Frank Blechman and Larry Sherman, to be an actual opportunity, an engaged and probing mode of analysis and action. We can take a critical pragmatism, then, not as an academic promise, but as a very real living possibility.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This paper was delivered as an invited lecture at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland on June 7, 2011. Thanks for critical comments from Will Butler, Patsy Healey, Merlijn van Hulst, David Laws, Raine Mäntysalo, and Hendrik Wagenaar. I remain responsible for this text. Thanks as always for the generosity of Frank Blechman and Larry Sherman for their provocative profiles.
Notes
Author biography
John Forester is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Cornell University Department of City and Regional Planning. His best known books are Planning in the Face of Power (University of California, 1989), The Deliberative Practitioner (MIT, 1999), and Dealing with Differences (Oxford, 2009). He is at work on a book with Ken Reardon on the ACORN-University Partnership efforts post-Katrina and a book of planning intermediaries’ practice stories for the American Planning Association Press.