Speaker
Description
Public engagement is readily placed in defacto and binary categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ practice. At its best, scholarship demonstrates the major benefits of resilience and wellbeing enacted through procedural justice, inclusion and placemaking. More commonly however, practice is dismissed as performative and a tick box exercise, highlighting schisms in practice and rhetoric and is one way. Historically, criticism has stemmed from an overrepresentation of engagement of the ‘usual suspects’ – i.e. more educated, affluent, older and often white and male sections of the population. However, procedural limitations are also levelled at public engagement strategies with respect to eliciting broad public visions as contributions but lacking direct avenues for influence and genuine participation. Despite concepts of reciprocity implicitly involved in debate about practice, only a small number of empirical studies have applied a framework by investigating notions of the reciprocity within the planning system and fewer still in terms of public participation. In this paper, we outline the development of a three-tired reciprocity typology; direct and indirect, encompassing the ‘how’; instrumental and symbolic reciprocity, encompassing the ‘what’; and lastly, balanced, generalised and negative, regarding ‘impact of exchange’. Applying a qualitative framework analysis, we present findings from focus groups (n=4) with public participants and interviews (n=7) with urban planning practitioners involved in a pre-consultation engagement. We argue that a reciprocity framework enhances understanding of symbolic versus authentic practice, articulating greater nuance involved in public engagement planning, and trace how the implicit reciprocal flows set up a cascade of interactions affecting the most basic premise for trust and exchange between planning governance engagement practices and the public.
Aspirations for meaningful engagement can be challenging in resource constrained local government settings and necessary compromises may impact the effectiveness of engagement activities. However, a greater clarity about the purpose of engagement through awareness of reciprocal exchanges could help to prioritise activities and lead to greater sensitivity for public engagement. Our findings are relevant for concepts of ‘whole- of-society’ approaches in achieving healthy communities.
| Keywords | Reciprocity; public participation; procedural justice |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
