Sustainable Development Sust. Dev. 16, 35–43 (2008) Published online 20 April 2007 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/sd.325 Communicative Planning – Friend or Foe? Obstacles and Opportunities for Implementing Sustainable Development Locally Mariann Mannberg1* and Elin Wihlborg2 1 Lulea University of Technology, Sweden 2 University of Linkoping, Sweden ABSTRACT There is a growing understanding of the potential of spatial planning to constitute a co-ordinating arena for sustainable development, and planning processes are expected to merge all dimensions of sustainability. Since the concrete manifestation of spatial planning takes place at a micro level, it all boils down to the need for bringing together stakeholders at municipal level in a well functioning planning processes. Alongside this viewpoint, there is also an increasing awareness of the need for a decentralization of such processes, bringing them closer to the grassroots. Communicative planning is a planning ideal and a theoretical stream that has developed from this new ‘paradigm’. It is based on citizen participation as a win–win situation, where the planning process builds a social sustainability, in turn enhancing the likelihood of the process to be successful. However, global and national visions of sustainability and local implementation are in many ways separate from one another. Bringing it further, to the individual level, the gaps are even wider. These gaps make the daily job for the planner increasingly complex and difficult. This article aims to contribute to understanding the characters of these gaps by describing them as four threats. The discussion is purely theoretical and based on the eight proposals of Goodin and Dryzek (2006) on possible pathways from micro-level deliberation towards the macro political system. However, the seed of the discussion is based on the authors’ joint experiences from a number of evaluations of planning processes carried out in a Swedish context. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. Received 5 October 2006; revised 19 February 2007; accepted 21 February 2007 Keywords: communicative planning; local implementation of sustainable development; deliberative democracy; rationality; legitimacy * Correspondence to: Mariann Mannberg, Division of Architecture and Infrastructure, Department Of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Lulea University of Technology, SE-976 87 Lulea, Sweden. E-mail:
[email protected] Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment 36 M. Mannberg and E. Wihlborg Introduction: Communicative Planning – Function Versus Theory HE ADJUSTMENT TO A MORE SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY REQUIRES THE ABILITY TO CO-ORDINATE A T considerable number of different interests in functioning planning processes. Physical planning forms physical settings, and aims to influence, integrate and even educate citizens and other actors. These explicit intentions of communicative planning are often said to enhance democracy (Khakee and Barbanente, 2003). Internationally, participation appears to be the prevailing planning paradigm. Within planning the