- Still climbing the stairway to heaven: public participation in planning   115 kb by    Burton, Paul | p.burton@griffith.edu.au    Short Outline Arnstein's seminal conception of a ladder of participation continues to exercise the imagination of planners and to confound us by its assumption of a moral dimension whereby 12 climbing the ladder takes us closer to participatory heaven. This paper proposes other criteria with the potential to improve the practice of participation. Abstract Arnstein's seminal conception of a ladder of participation continues to exercise the imagination of planners, who remain convinced that more rather than less participation is the key to good planning. Whether this is true in practice and whether good planning leads to good planning outcomes is not so clear. Indeed there are few rigorous studies of the costs and benefits of more participation in planning and fewer still that attempt to link through to planning outcomes. This paper considers why the practice of participation in planning is not subject to greater empirical scrutiny and proposes a number of conceptual principles that might help prepare the ground for such studies. While there is acceptance of the wide range of participatory possibilities in the practice of land use or spatial planning, there is also a common belief that those practices at one end of Arnstein’s ladder of participation are somehow superior to those at the other end. In other words participatory practices associated with forms of citizen control are often held to be inherently and self evidently better than those labelled ‘therapeutic’. In short the ladder is given a moral as well as an analytical dimension. However, the moral principles that underpin these assumptions are rarely scrutinised. For example, it is often taken for granted that participatory forms of democracy are better than representative forms and that the public has an obligation to participate. These assumptions have been subject to much greater scrutiny within the field of political philosophy, where conclusions are much more varied. The paper considers these principles in more detail and explores how they are being applied in contemporary Australian planning policy and practice. It concludes by proposing a research agenda designed to explore empirically the costs and benefits of various participatory practices and thereby to strengthen the theory of public participation in planning. Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2013: Frontiers of Planning - Evolving and declining models of city planning practice   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper