Public Participation in Planning in India
Public Participation in Planning in India
in Planning in India
Public Participation
in Planning in India
Edited by
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Public Participation and the Role of NGOs in Two Slums of Delhi........ 274
Sujeet Kumar
First of all, we would like to thank the contributors for agreeing to spend
time and write these papers in the form of book chapters, which are
significantly different from papers presented at a national seminar. We are
also grateful to all the participants who were part of the seminar. Listening
to insights and experiences of many of the planners who came from practice
was a learning experience. It was very heartening to see sensitivity and
commitment to the profession from some of the participants.
We offer our sincere thanks to Prof. Chetan Vaidya, Director, School of
Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and Ms. Nalini Thakur, Dean of
Studies and the faculty colleagues of the Department of Physical Planning
for their constant support and encouragement. We would also like to take
this opportunity to thank the students of the Department of Physical
Planning, who voluntarily supported organisation of the seminar. Many of
the ideas shared in this book have been developed while teaching the
students of planning in the Department, one of the several arenas of teaching
and learning.
We would like to acknowledge the Housing and Urban Development
Corporation for their financial support for organizing the seminar as part
of the HUDCO Chair activities, where these papers were originally
presented. We would also like to thank the Town and Country Planning
Organisation, New Delhi, particularly R. Srinivas, for his wholehearted
support for our efforts.
We would also like to express our gratitude to the team at Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, who provided support and assistance at every critical
stage of the publication of this book. We would particularly like to thank
Ms. Amanda Millar, Typesetting Manager, for the finalization of the book
manuscript, which required many rounds of readings and several changes.
We would also like to thank Aditya Ajith for overall support during long
and difficult days. His enthusiasm is infectious and energizing. Finally we
would like to thank our families for their support during the late hours
spent on editing this publication.
Ashok Kumar
Poonam Prakash
July 2016
LIST OF FIGURES
Context
Participation has always been a concern in development practice,
particularly since the sixties. In the early years, many practitioners worked
with communities at a local level as individuals or in small groups. By the
eighties, the focus on participation was up-scaled. This was reflected in the
introduction of decentralized planning and the creation of participatory
institutionalized structures through the Seventy-fourth Constitutional
Amendment of 1992, along with other larger economic reforms initiated in
the early nineties. In India in most of the states these structures have been
put in place through amendments in the local government laws. In the
beginning of the twenty-first century, the second generation of economic
reforms was initiated. Most of the funding of the central government
programmes to states was linked to participation. In 2007, as part of the
urban renewal mission a model participation law was prepared for states to
enact as part of the reforms. According to the data from the Ministry as
given in the TERI report by 2009, twelve states in India had enacted this
law (TERI, 2010: 17). This mission also required ‘stakeholder
consultations’ to be undertaken in preparation of ‘city development plans’.
In the recently launched Smart Cities mission by the government of India,
this focus on participation has been further enhanced. It requires the
preparation of the Smart Cities plan through citizen engagement
framework. Thus participation from a being a localized project in small
communities has now pervaded institutional structures and planning
processes, affecting decision making.
A more recent Smart Cities Mission has introduced the idea of participation
through the use of technology in the city-building process. This mission
mode programme, to be implemented in 100 cities in the first phase,
includes a citizen engagement framework, the contours of which are not
xvi Introduction: Framings and Formulations
Our engagement with the concept of participation thus stems from both
theory and practice. Ashok Kumar has been teaching planning theory for
the last two-and-a-half decades. He himself has made several contributions
to building collaborative planning theory (see for example Kumar and
Paddison, 2000). We are aware that most of these theories advocating
participatory planning land up in India from certain specific western
contexts. In India, however, planning practice continues to be
predominantly driven through the techno-rational model. This book,
therefore, is expected to develop an understanding of these theories in the
Indian context and in the process of Indian practice. For Indian planning
and development practice, race is not a significant element; it is crucially
important for city planning and development in the western context. Caste
and religion appear to be hugely significant elements for city planning and
development in the Indian context. Only religion matters in the western
context, as caste is non-existence in the public sphere. However, recent
events show that caste is also beginning to become important in the
western public sphere, particularly in countries where Indians have
immigrated. Gender-based exclusions and discrimination are global
phenomenon and critically significant for city planners in India. Culture
and participation are inseparable, like planning and culture are.
purpose of developing new ideas and relevant materials for the Indian
context. While the project of participation in India already seems co-opted
for pursuing neoliberal agendas, we hope to find spaces through such
endeavors to bring the focus back on public participation as a process of
social change. While we remain hopeful about participatory planning and
development, that would lead empowered citizen subjects, our
ambivalence is also clear in various chapters. We are aware that critical
reflection alone is insufficient for bringing about societal transformations
(also see Friedmann, 1987).
The final structure of the book has developed differently from the way the
seminar was organized and the initial structure for the book. The seminar
was organized around four themes on theory, practice, methods and
values. Many of the participants came from practice and were more
inclined towards methods. The session on values was an activity-based
session for an experiential learning of inequality and identity by the
participants. These two sessions, therefore, are not part of the book. The
initial proposal for the book was organized around theoretical
perspectives, planning and governance. In the final structure the first
section remains the same. The other two sections, instead of distinguishing
between planning and governance, have made a distinction across scale. It
would appear that the nature and level of participation is different at
different scales. Some of the concerns that we hope these papers have
addressed are discussed in the next few sections.
Public Participation in Planning in India xix
Most of the times citizens do not get to know about planning decisions or
have no way to find out how these decisions affect them. Decisions like
changes in development control regulations etc. are orchestrated to appear
participatory in nature. Many also argue that these spaces provide
opportunities for participation only at the proposal stage where most of the
decisions of value have already been made and much effort has already
gone in making the proposal. This makes it very difficult to bring in any
major changes to the proposal.
Conclusions
Despite the increasing focus on participation in plan preparation in India,
public participation in town planning in India has not been a focus of
academic discussion. In practice, ‘stakeholder consultations’ have become
the norm; the nuances and pitfalls of such methods are either not explicitly
known or are usually ignored in the temptation to complete a formality of
participation. Many of the issues of participatory practices faced by
development practitioners are similar in planning. Planning, however,
provides a much greater scope for intervention in larger decision-making
processes. It is hoped that through this book a dialogue and more
systematic study of participation in planning practice in India will be
initiated for a better planning practice.
References
Alexander, A.S. and Bhide, A. (2016) ‘Is Participatory Planning an
Inclusionary Process?: A Case of Kollam District, Kerala’, in Ashok
Kumar and Poonam Prakash (eds.) Public Participation in Planning in
India, Cambridge Scholars Press, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Arnstein, S.A. (1969) A Ladder of Citizen Participation, Journal of
American Institute of Planners, Vol. 35(4) pp. 216-224.
Baker, H.W., Admas, L.H. and Davis, B. (2005) Critical Factors for
Enhancing Municipal Public Hearings, Public Administration Review,
Vol. 65, No. 4, pp.490-499.
Burby, R.J. (2003) Making Plans that Matter: Citizen Involvement and
Government Action, Journal of the American Planning Association,
Vol. 69, No. 1, pp. 33–49.
Coelho, K., Kamath, L. and Vijaybhaskar, M. (eds.) (2013) Participolis:
Consent and Contention in Neoliberal Urban India, Routledge, New
Delhi.
Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (eds.) (2001) Participation: the New Tyranny,
Zed Books, London.
xxiv Introduction: Framings and Formulations
ASHOK KUMAR
SCHOOL OF PLANNING AND ARCHITECTURE, 4 BLOCK B, IP
ESTATE, NEW DELHI, INDIA
Abstract
This chapter treats planning as a practice of ‘politics’ within the realm of
‘agnostic pluralism’. Public participation is presented through a critical
analysis of existing planning theories. It is found that most theories focus
on obtaining consensus among diverse stakeholders after some sort of
discussions and deliberations. Prominent among these theories is the
collaborative planning theory, which assumes that rational consensus is
impartial, objective, and a legitimate way to deal with planning concerns
of empowerment, justice and equity. In this chapter the author presents
‘agnostic pluralism’ as an alternative to collaborative planning (deliberative
democracy), which shows potential for social transformations by resolving
planning conflicts through ‘politics’, rather than morality and law.
Introduction
Consensus among stakeholders has remained the chief objective of public
participation for much of the latter half of the twentieth century. Public
participation aims to achieve consensus by involving citizens in the
framing of planning policies and projects. The legitimacy of planning
activities in the eyes of the citizens was another purpose of public
participation. Planning policies framed with the involvement of the public
at large was assumed by city planners to closely reflect the actual needs
and aspirations of the people. However, over the last two decades,
planning theorists have started questioning this heavy reliance on
consensus as one of the prime concerns of public participation. Some
theorists have even gone so far as to suggest that planning is riddled with
Ashok Kumar 3
spatial conflicts and that consensus is elusive and illusory (Gresch and
Smith, 1985). Others have argued that all cities are contested and
uncertainties in achieving consensus among citizens and collectivities
remain an improbability (Bollens, 1998, 2000). Gaffikin and Morrissey
(2011: 4) argue that the ‘apparent neutrality’ in the midst of urban
conflicts is a delusion.
Planning theorists argued that conflicts are endemic to society and cities,
and proceeding for consensus without explicitly recognizing conflicts
among collectives made up of adversaries is outright evasive and
ideological. These theorists focused on ‘agonistic pluralism’, where
resolvable conflicts among adversaries as legitimate contenders of
competing interests do exist, rather than conflicts among enemies where
one would like to eliminate the other (Mouffe, 2000a). The Marxian
notion of conflicts among classes is that of the antagonistic variety, where
antagonism between classes could be transcended only through
revolutionary processes replacing the capitalist relations of production
with socialist relations of production. As famously noted: "In place of the
old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall
have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition
for the free development of all" (Marx and Engels, 1996: 36). Of course
Marx and Engels were not talking about participation, which is devoid of
empowerment. In this view public participation is meaningful only if it
does transform relations of production, whereby the poor have equal
chances of creating property capital for themselves.
In this paper, the author pursues three main tasks. First, a critical review of
planning theories is carried out in order to show that most of these theories
– from the rational planning model to collaborative planning theory - seek
public participation to secure consensus among citizens involved in a
given planning process. The objectives and methodologies of securing
consensus could be different (legitimation of public policy in the case of
the rational planning model and collaboratively producing places in the
case of collaborative planning), but the overarching aim is to achieve
consensus among different stakeholders. Consensus is premised on the
notion of public interest, which is universalizing in the sense that all
diverse interests could be expressed through selected planning policies
(also see Table 1). Second, I highlight the contours of the development of
the theory of ‘agonistic pluralism’, which clearly recognizes the
prevalence of planning conflicts with the hope that several of these
conflicts could be resolved among adversaries, who have legitimate claims
to contest for different ways of life. In the concluding part, I make some
observations about the future of public participation in planning by
pointing out certain benefits of agnostic pluralism for planning theory and
practice.