Mobilizing the Arnstein Gap for better planning

By Keiron Bailey. Originally published on the Integration and Implementation Insights blog.

What is the Arnstein Gap? How can the Arnstein Gap usefully inform future citizen or stakeholder engagement?

Arnstein’s Ladder and the Arnstein Gap

Let’s begin with a brief reminder of Arnstein’s Ladder, which is a description of eight levels of public participation in government decision making developed by Sherry Arnstein in 1969 and illustrated in the figure below. More detail is available in the i2Insights blog post Stakeholder engagement: Learning from Arnstein’s ladder and the IAP2 spectrum by Gabriele Bammer.

In 2006 my colleague Dr. Ted Grossardt and I introduced the Arnstein Gap (Bailey and Grossardt, 2006), which is the difference between the perceived and desired levels of public involvement according to Arnstein’s Ladder. We measured this difference at numerous public meetings, as well as at professional forums including the American Planning Association meeting in the USA, and created a database, which we continue to update.

We have drawn four conclusions from this database:

1. in every case, public involvement is conducted at a lower ladder level than desired;
2. professionals believe public involvement is conducted at a higher baseline level than citizens;
3. the aspirational level for all groups is level 6 “partnership”; and
4. in almost no case have citizens expressed a desire for level 8 or “citizen control.”

How can this Arnstein Gap usefully inform future citizen or stakeholder engagement?

Lesson 1: The success of the methods or processes used depends on the size of Arnstein’s Gap

For instance, in environments with large Arnstein Gaps, smaller-scale analytic-deliberative processes or intensive stakeholder engagement, such as charettes, are not as useful as in cases with smaller Arnstein Gaps. This is because large Arnstein Gaps indicate that either the premise of the project and/or confidence in the project sponsors and managers – which are interrelated factors – are both low. Instead, when the Arnstein Gap is large, broader visioning techniques that decouple specific scenario options from valuations are useful, together with, for example, game show format edutainment forums where baseline information may be communicated to stakeholders to bolster shared premises.

Lesson 2: Method sequencing is important

Processes are not transitive, in that using a specific technique first and then a second technique afterwards (eg., focus groups and scenario planning) does not yield the same outcome when reversed. Larger Arnstein Gaps favor more consideration of method sequencing because fine-grained, intensive processes involving relatively small numbers of stakeholders, such as charettes, are wasted when the premise and confidence levels are questionable. Conversely, large-scale extensive processes, eg., structured surveys, may not be necessary with stronger concordance on the project rationale and characteristics indicated by a smaller Arnstein Gap.

Lesson 3: Stakeholder resource allocations – time and money – vary based on myriad factors

It is not realistic to design public participation processes that rely on high stakeholder-sourced resource investments. Academics and professional planners for example, have a habit of proposing and developing processes that involve additional intensity; more forums, more time spent, more outreach and so on. Citizens then often feel that their perceived resource investment dwarfs output (satisfaction with the process). This then leads to disengagement.

Conversely, narrowly-focused systems present their own challenges. Analytic-deliberative internet planning platforms often elicit a burst of participation that quickly fades to a small number of highly-invested individuals whose dialog excludes others.

Again the size of Arnstein’s Gap is important and this relates back to Lessons 1 and 2. As another example, large Arnstein Gap situations disincentivize premature use of resource-intensive methods, eg., citizen advisory boards.

Who participates and how is also important. Simply increasing the numbers of stakeholders and groups involved does not always yield useful data. More online participation – web platforms, apps, even text responses – is often promoted as a solution. While certain online methods permit large inclusion and deliver efficiency in terms of data points per dollar spent, there are problems of representative quality of the data, eg., online sharing bias, autoresponse, technological illiteracy or lack of access, and outright frustration with the eternal process of being directed to download apps and create yet another login to manage.

In-person data acquisition delivers a robustness that online data is lacking; when hundreds of people are present and see how their compatriots view the planning proposals, and project managers witness the creation of these valuations, the data acquires a weight that usefully supports the eventual decisionmaking.

Another option is to design in-person forums to triangulate online data elicited in parallel and then perform statistical comparison. The value of both online and in-person data self-augment because the larger inclusion from online data can validate the in-person acquisition, and point to assumptions that merit investigation before the project investment grows large.

Concluding questions

Have you encountered an Arnstein Gap? How did you address it? How did participants react? Do you have other lessons to share?

References:

Arnstein, S. (1969). A Ladder of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Planning Association, 35, 4: 216-224.

Bailey, K. and Grossardt, T. (2006). Addressing the Arnstein Gap: Improving Public Confidence in Transportation Planning and Design through Structured Public Involvement (SPI). In, M. Schrenk (Ed.), Proceedings of the 11^th International GeoMultimedia Symposium, Competence Center of Urban and Regional Planning (CORP), Vienna, Austria, 13-16 February 2006: 337-341.

Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution. (For i2Insights policy on generative artificial intelligence please see https://realkm.com/go/integration-and-implementation-insights-guidelines-for-authors-use-of-generative-artificial-intelligence-ai-statement/.)

Biography:

Keiron Bailey PhD is Associate Professor, Research, Innovation and Impact at the University of Arizona in Tucson, USA. He is interested in structured public involvement, participatory systems design and performance, and geospatial and geovisual systems in planning. He has 25 years of experience working with planners, engineers and urban designers on high-performance public involvement processes to support projects ranging from integrated transportation and land use planning to context-sensitive bridge design and transit-oriented development to large nuclear plant future use site visioning. He is the innovator of Casewise Visual Evaluation (CAVE) and Analytic Minimum Impedance Surface (AMIS) methods.

Article source: Mobilizing the Arnstein Gap for better planning. Republished by permission.

Header image source: Dorine Ruter on Flickr, CC BY 2.0.