Designing the participation on local development planning: From literature review to adaptive framework for practice

Abstract

This exploratory review of the literature provides a comprehensive overview of the settings that are available to the planner when managing participatory strategic planning of spatial socioeconomic development on the local level. We contextualize individual potential configurations of participation in local development planning practice, documented in a number of case studies from different parts of the world, in order to reflect the multidimensionality of the participatory planning process. These reflections are used to build a participation plan model, which aimed to help local planners, especially local governments, to optimize the participation of local stakeholders, according to the specifics of the local environment. The paper evaluates the options of planners to manage the participation from perspective of the organization of participation, the determination of its scope, selection of stakeholders, methods and techniques of communication, decision-making and visualization, as well as the deployment of resources, or the possibility of promotion and dissemination of information. As a practical implication of this review, we compose a participation matrix, which is intended to be an auxiliary tool for planners to establish own locally-specific participation plans and that can serve as tool for education, or life-long learning of planners.