The framing of power in communicative planning theory: Analysing the work of John Forester,Patsy Healey and Judith Innes

Forester’s framing of power in participatory planning

The early Forester (1980, 1982, 1989, 1993) framed planning organisations as embedded in the ‘system world’ of market economy and bureaucracy that tended to colonise the ‘lifeworld’, where ordinary citizens lead their lives. ‘Thus, planners can expect (with a few exemplary, democratically structured exceptions) that the organisations in and with which they work will systematically reproduce socio-political relations […]’ (Forester, 1989: 78–79). In his early work, Forester draws on Lukes (1974) and Habermas to theorise how power distort communication in planning. ‘[…] misinformation is often not an accidental problem in planning, but rather […] that such distortions of communication are systemic, structural and institutional problems to be addressed and counteracted on that basis’. (Forester, 1982: 70). This is an example of how the early Forester frame a problem around the illegitimate power over that is exercised by corporate and bureaucrat actors over marginalised communities.

The early Forester’s critique of top-down power makes the solution to democratise planning from the bottom-up logical. He frames participatory planning as capable of empowering citizens, transforming power relations and thereby carrying potential to play a ‘[…] counterhegemonic or democratising role [through]: the exposure of issues that political–economic structures otherwise would bury from public view, the opening and raising of questions that otherwise would be kept out of public discussion […]’ (1993: 6).

Forester’s later work, after his Habermasian period in the 80s and early 90s, takes shape as ‘critical pragmatism’, and Habermas’ influence is less explicit. ‘We really need less often to keep rediscovering politics and ‘power’, and more often to carefully assess forms of power and their specific types of vulnerabilities, for only where dominating power is vulnerable is critical resistance possible’ (Forester, 2000: 915). Hence, the later Forester is sceptical of the universal theorising á la Habermas and prefers situated analysis. Nevertheless, he maintains his view that participatory planning is about minimising the negative effects of ‘power’, a concept that he tacitly confines to be illegitimate power over.

So, when we read critical analyses, we need to learn how, in the face of power and deep difference, our lives can be better, not just to hear once again that who gets what is political, that the ruling rule, the powerful have power, that racism and sexism shatter lives, that environmental injustice is widespread. ( Forester, 2009 : 11)

The later Forester pays attention to eliciting and analysing planners’ own stories of encounters with power in participatory planning (Forester, 1999, 2009). While he sheds light on many aspects of planning, he refrains from theorising power beyond his earlier framing of power as a distortion of authentic communication, as illegitimate power over. Hence, Forester’s account of power is about how incremental improvements of planning practices might lead, not all the way to, but towards, power with: concerted action towards shared planning objectives. Hence, Forester does not provide us with elaborate conceptualisation of the manner in which power relations are constituted in planning (the concept power to in my terminology) and refrains from supplying definitions of conflictual, yet legitimate, power over.

Forester’s framing of planners’ role in power relations

Forester frames planners as working in contexts distorted and/or shaped by illegitimate power over, ‘in the face of power’ (1989). Thereby, his account of planners and power is usefully critical, yet, leaves conceptual voids when it comes to power to and legitimate power over, due to the tendency to use power as a merely negatively loaded concept or see it as a necessary evil.

When Forester leans on Habermas, working ‘in the face of power’ means that, ‘[…] planners serving the public face particular special, private, or class interests (e.g. corporate development interests), which may work systematically to violate [the] norms of ordinary communication’ (1980: 278). Forester then makes salient how the biases of planning organisations influence planners’ dealings with power. ‘[…] planners will often feel compelled to be less frank or open than they might wish […]’ (1980: 279).

When Forester draws on critical pragmatism, he poses questions about planners and power.

In a world of conflicting interests – defined along lines of class, place, gender, organization, or individuals – how are planners to make their way? […] When planners are mandated to enable “public participation” even as they work in bureaucratic organizations that may be threatened by such participation, what are planners to do? ( Forester, 1989 : 5)

This quote captures the essence of Forester’s early and more contemporary framing of planners’ role in power relations: planners are restricted and influenced by illegitimate power over. Planners ‘may be conservative, resistant to change, captured by conventions and language, habits and frameworks that may not truly reflect “all they can do”’. (Forester, 2013: 7). Even so, Forester’s planners desire to and are capable of making a difference.

Forester places his planners at the centre of his vision of planning as the organisation of hope. To him, planners are capable of levelling the playing field to the advantage of marginalised communities and minimise repressive power, or in small steps, decrease the misuse of power. He tells us to ‘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’ (2013: 7). This quote exemplifies how the concept power plays a negative role, as illegitimate power over, in Forester’s optimistic framing of planners who are capable of empowering citizens.

Since Forester largely treat power as a negative concept or as a necessary evil, he does not theorise what legitimate power might be. Nevertheless, his accounts of planners’ practices are full of practical examples of when planners use their ability to act, their power to, to get people to do what they otherwise would not have done. Forester is thereby tacitly demonstrating what he sees as illegitimate or legitimate power over. As Forester explains, rather than theorising the legitimacy of power he wish to ‘show how planners and community leaders might work practically in the face of power and value differences to achieve such ends—more just and beautiful, sustainable, and liveable places and spaces’. (Forester, 2009: 6).

Perhaps one might say that Forester is, by way of instructive examples, showing when planners’ exercise of power is legitimate, without providing legitimacy criteria? Nevertheless, Forester’s preference for practice, useful as it is, does not fulfil the need for concepts of power to and legitimate power over that can transcend context. Even if power relations are situated, we cannot do without a general language of power and widely accepted legitimacy criteria, if we are to justify planners’ exercises of power.

Healey’s framing of power in participatory planning

Healey frames power as embedded in social structures through ‘implicit and explicit principles about how things should be done and who should get what’ (Healey, 1997: 45). Thereby, she makes salient how structuration practices ‘carry power relations from one period to the next’ (Ibid.). She characteristically sees how ‘power over the formation of rules of behaviour, and power over the flows of material resources’ shape human actions and thoughts (Ibid.).

To Healey, planning cultures are based on shared assumptions, which constrain, but do not determine, the ways in which agency works in human relations because,

[…] some [taken for granted assumptions] may endure and get […] inscribed in routine. […] Structuring power is carried through the medium of these ideas and routines, shaping how agency invents ways to use, develop, and distribute the material resources available in any situation” ( Healey, 1999 : 1132).

This quote shows how Healey’s framing of power, in contrast to Forester’s, brings possibilities for explaining the creation of power to beyond Habermas’ communicative distortions and Lukes’ three dimensions of illegitimate power over. Healey’s affinity with Giddens and sociological institutionalism provides tools for a more elaborate analysis of power. Nevertheless, she has primarily paid attention to how illegitimate power over can be transformed into more enabling planning cultures that allows for concerted action, that is, relations of power with. Thereby, her account of power in participatory planning is usefully critical, yet constrained by the same down playing of legitimate power over as Forester.

Healey’s emphasis on problematic power relations leads to a solution that is to transform power relations through human agency in the micro practices of planning. She explains how people can be reflexive, with the capacity,

[…] to penetrate below direct interpersonal and deliberate strategic manipulation, to access an awareness of deeper cultural concepts and practices, and the relations of power that they embody. […] people can become aware that what they do in routine ways is not inherently ‘natural’, but has become ‘natural’ through a social history of acceptance and embedding. If so, it can also be disembedded, though this may involve a long process of cultural readjustment […] to a different kind of governance organization. (Healey, 2003: 113–114)

Healey combines the Giddensian dynamic and situated diagnosis of power with Habermas’ (1984, 1985) universal theory of communicative action. Drawing on Habermas, she diagnoses power relations through a critique of how the Enlightenment, in spite of removing other forms of inequalities, created ‘new bastions of power’ by which ‘people are made unequal’ (1997: 39). Healey (1992: 145) explains how a ‘logic coupled with scientifically constructed empirical knowledge, was unveiled as having achieved hegemonic power over other ways of being and knowing, crowding out moral and aesthetic discourse’. Thereby, she draws attention to how the ‘competitive market’ and the ‘hierarchical bureaucracy’ are responsible for the reproduction of inequality (Healey, 1997: 40). Habermas provides Healey with conceptual tools to critique power, yet her tendency to conflate power over with undesirable coercion, leaves a void when it comes to conceptualising legitimate power over.

Throughout her career, Healey’s prescription for transforming power relations is to use criteria that resemble ‘Habermas’ evaluative concept of the qualities of “speech situations” [as] a valuable tool of critique in […] [power] struggles’ (Healey, 2003: 113). She suggests that power ought to be criticized by way of argument, and thereby opening up possibilities for reflexivity and change of illegitimate power over. Healey stresses how instances of reason carry the capacity for transforming culturally embedded power relations (Ibid.).

Healey emphasises how reflexivity can expose repressive power relations of illegitimate power over and how changes in micro practices might lead to shared meaning and concerted action: power with. Following Habermas, Healey argues that the transformation of planning cultures should create a more communicatively rational public realm because, ‘If based on principles of honesty, sincerity, and openness, to people’s views and to available knowledge, then these truths and values can transcend the relativism of different perspectives’ (Healey, 1997: 53). This is, in my interpretation, a call for participatory planning to transform planning cultures infused with illegitimate power over. Clearly Healey’s critical analysis is a necessary part of the answer to the question, when is power legitimate? Yet, it leaves us without a concept of legitimate power over, which is needed in contested episodes of planning.

Healey’s framing of planners’ role in power relations

Healey emphasises that planners, in their micro practices, can reproduce or transform power relations because ‘[…] in the finegrain of planning practice, planners not only bring power relations into being, as Foucault describes. For Giddens, they also have the choice to change them’ (Healey, 2003: 117). Due to Healey’s use of Giddens’ version of sociological institutionalism, her account of planners, in contrast to Forester’s, provides a theorised understanding of how planners’ ability to act, their power to, is created through an interplay between structure and agency ‘in the finegrain of planning’.

Drawing on structuration theory, Healey explains how planners’ identities are shaped through social relations. At the same time, she also emphasises how planners carry the capacity to transform the power relations that shape their identities. Hence, her analysis complements Forester’s focus on minimising communicative distortions, resisting illegitimate power over in Lukes’ three dimensions and his later preference for accounts of planners’ work, without theorisation of power.

Healey frames planners as capable of seeing through assumed relations and practices. Nonetheless, Healey (1997: 85) also acknowledges that for planners,

To change systems, and to re-make structures, requires an effort to challenge the relations of power on all three of Lukes' levels, the formal, the ‘behind the scenes' and the embedded dimensions of power, and a recognition, as Foucault argues, of the power relations of the finegrain of practices.

This reasoning demonstrates the possibilities with Healey’s analysis of planners and power, but also its boundaries. She pays attention to the different dimensions of power and recognises how power is ever-present. This framing provides useful tools for power analysis. Even so, as exemplified in the quote, Healey’s theorisation is based on the same negative definition of power as Forester’s. If power is confined to be a negatively loaded concept or a necessary evil, it limits the possibilities to understand planners’ roles in power relations.

Flowing from Healey’s critique of power is the prescription for planners to develop the ability to be reflexive.

[…] to reveal when communicative and collaborative processes are likely to […] improve life conditions for the diverse groups and communities of interest in cities and regions, and when they are likely to be merely mechanisms to sustain old and well-established power relations. ( Healey, 2003 : 112)

Hence, Healey recognises that established structuration practices, which include injustices, will make it challenging for planners to transform planning cultures. Nevertheless, she maintains her trust in agency. ‘Because people are inventive and creative, and because structuring forces cannot precisely determine events, there is always some scope for innovation’ (Healey, 2003: 105). Thereby, she suggests that planners, by being reflexive, can transform power relations in the micro practices of planning.

Healey recommends that planners should be reflexive in order to reveal when oppressive power (illegitimate power over) can be transformed to concerted action towards shared objectives (power with). This is certainly an important task for planners, but they also need to know what to make of situations when shared meaning is not possible and relations of power over are inevitable. On this question, Healey does not provide an answer.

Innes’ framing of power in participatory planning

Following Habermas, the early Innes (1995: 186) diagnoses how power relations construct ‘concepts [that] can colonise the lifeworld, blinding us to the deeper reality of our own experience’. Later in her career she pursues a similar diagnostic focus by drawing on Castells’ (2009) concept ‘communication power’ since he ‘shares Habermas’ view that communication itself is a form of action that changes the realities of the social world, including power relations’ (Innes and Booher, 2015: 200).

Even so, Innes’ preference is for practice. She argues that her own and others’ practical experiences of planning show how ‘old’ hierarchical forms of power lose ground to the kind of power that is created through collaborative practices (Booher and Innes, 2002: 224). According to Innes, ‘the world is too complex, too rapidly changing, and too full of ambiguities for this sort of mechanical power to produce consistently what the player wanted or to produce sustainable results’ (Booher and Innes, 2002: 222). Hence, Innes’ framing of power is based on the same kind of negatively loaded definition of power over as Forester and Healey’s.

When framing power in participatory planning, Innes consistently uses a distinction between ‘power around the table and power outside the dialogue’ (2004: 12). This distinction enables her to problematize power relations outside the planning process as permeated by illegitimate power over, in contrast to the possibility of ‘consensus building’ (Innes, 2004; Innes and Booher, 1999) and ‘collaborative rationality’, her versions of power with, inside the process of participatory planning (Innes, 2016; Innes and Booher, 2018). Hence, Innes’ framing of power in participatory planning resembles Forester and Healey’s focus on criticising illegitimate power over by contrasting it to power with.

Innes’ framing of ‘old’ forms of power as inefficient and illegitimate leads to the solution to create conditions for authentic communication; producing what she calls ‘network power’ (Booher and Innes, 2002) and ‘communication power’ (Innes and Booher, 2015); her versions of consensual power with. Innes’ fundamental idea, expressed in publications over the years, is that striving towards ‘authentic’ or undistorted communication can create conditions under which ‘emancipatory knowledge [can] transcend […] the blinders created by our conditions and institutions’ (Innes and Booher, 1999: 418). According to Innes (Ibid.), such knowledge can be ‘achieved through dialogue that engages all those with differing interests around a task or a problem’. To create such conditions, Habermasian criteria for comprehensibility, sincerity and inclusivity ought to be fulfilled, as exemplified in her later work. ‘The group meets face to face for authentic dialogue, where all are equally empowered to speak, all are listened to and all are equally privy to data and other forms of knowledge on the issues’ (Innes, 2016: 2). This way of reasoning leads to the same preference for concerted action through power with as Forester and Healey, and the same lack of conceptualisation of legitimate power over.

In the analysed publications, Innes consistently argues that process design and facilitation should provide conditions for consensus, or at least negotiated agreement, inside participatory planning processes. She describes the work needed to create such processes as ‘skilful management of dialogue’ and ‘well-run consensus building projects’. These concepts appear intended to build a narrative around the possibilities to change relations of illegitimate power over into power with. Nevertheless, her framing leaves voids when it comes to explaining the power to and the legitimate power over necessary for achieving this result.

Innes’ framing of planners’ role in power relations

In her early work, Innes frame planners as designers of social processes, not as neutral experts following the rules of scientific inquiry. She claims that planners exercise power beyond established planning norms. Based on this diagnosis, she identifies a particular need for ethical principles to guide planners (Innes, 1995). In my interpretation, she thereby criticises planners’ exercise of illegitimate power over and calls for criteria to distinguish legitimate power over.

Instead of supplying such criteria, the early Innes develops a narrative about planners who are ‘[…] uncomfortable with the expert role for themselves, recognizing that they have their own biases and that expertise has its limits. They have strong beliefs about the kind of society that is desirable, but they do not know how to work toward this within their professional roles’ (Innes, 1995: 186).

Based on this claim about planners’ perceptions, she turns towards solution framing by linking the work of ‘innovative planners’ with Habermas’ ideas of communicative rationality.

[Habermas] ideas are attractive to planners because, rather than forcing them to try for a value-neutral, expert role in which they do not believe, they offer planners the possibility of an ethical stance within the world as they experience it. The principles for emancipatory knowing fit with the basic inclination of many planners. (Innes, 1995: 186)

Characteristically, Innes knits a narrative based on claims about planners’ views of themselves and their practices. What she offers seems to be a critique of the rational planners’ exercise of illegitimate power over, and a suggestion to turn to Habermasian criteria as an alternative vision of power with. Even so, this framing does not help explaining what planners might do to act legitimately when exercising power over is inevitable.

Over the years, Innes gradually modify this framing of planners and in her contemporary work she has a more pessimistic view of planners. ‘[…] planners themselves often stand in the way of collaboration, preferring to keep control, without recognising how collaboration can reduce conflict, prevent mistakes, enrich their thinking, offer new options and reframe difficult problems’ (Innes, 2016: 1). Based on this sceptical view of planners, the contemporary Innes place her hope in professional facilitators, coming in from outside the planning system, to create conditions for authentic dialogue or ‘network power’ (Booher and Innes, 2002) and ‘communication power’ (Innes and Booher, 2015). This move does not solve the problems with her original framing since her suggestion does not rest on an elaborated idea of where these facilitators get their ability to create fair planning processes, their power to, and since she refrains from conceptualising the legitimate or illegitimate power over they exercise in contested episodes of planning.