The Whistle of a Distant Train

At the 2008 NC Planning Conference, I delivered a presentation called 
"Overcoming Comprehensive Planning Challenges in Rural Local Government". 
Some of the concepts I discussed eventually became part of my dissertation. 
I am interested in how elements of structure and procedure affect land use 
governance. I have been working on some introductory data analyses for my 
dissertation and thought it might make a good blog post to discuss a proposition 
or two for those who may be interested in what I study. 

I am using a dataset from the Wharton Business School at the University of 
Pennsylvania, a nationwide study that was conducted to examine the effect 
of local land use governance on real estate. I am finding moderate to strong 
statistical correlations between the degree of involvement of community groups
in land use regulation, and the degree of involvement of local boards and 
administrators in land use regulation. There are two ways this perhaps can 
be interpreted (from theliterature I have collected thus far). First, municipalities 
with an involved citizenry demand administrators and boards who take more
interventionist approaches in land use governance. This means that even
across municipalities in states with the same enabling statutes, that
planning outcomes are not always determined by the merits of the proposals
or their compliance with local ordinances. Instead, the characteristics of
the population help determine what local government structures and
processes emerge, which consequently influences the nature of the outcomes
of local land use governance.

Another proposition is that local boards and administrators are partially
deterministic of the degree of public participation. Planning is becoming
an increasingly technical process, and the degree of specialist knowledge
(and the cost to effectively participate) is sufficient enough to present
a barrier to effective participation for the average citizen and perhaps
entire groups. Literature from the EU I have found seems to point toward a
model of increased administrator/citizen interaction in explaining
satisfaction with the land use planning process.

Most citizens simply cannot afford to hire private consultants to provide
the technical knowledge to effectively deliberate (which can create a
structural bias towards more resourced interests), so they must depend on
local boards and staff to help them provide this technical expertise. This
is known as the "consultant" model of planner/citizen interaction. The
planner is perhaps not an active advocate of the citizen's (or groups)
position, but is instead can be used as a coping mechanism for the public
to overcome the technical and resource advantages of private interest
coalitions, who often employ their own consultants. Otherwise, public
interest coalitions are largely dependent on the knowledge/resources of
their members can mobilize and government partially cedes its obligation
to protect the "health, safety and welfare" of it's citizens.

Cliffs Notes: Different governance structures and administrative
procedures emerge between similarly enabled local governments, in part from
the characteristics and expectations of their citizens. Administrators/planners 
who actively provide technical assistance to the public enable them to be more 
effective participants in land use governance.