Advocacy planning: were expectations fulfilled?

Abstract

Civil society engagement in the spatial planning of neighborhoods has been an increasing trend from the middle of the 1960s. Advocacy planning has been a branch of planning theory and a strategy for activist planning practice ever since. This study surveys the properties of advocacy planning cases reported in English in academic journals and books between 1980 and 2020. The main purpose is to provide a reality check intended both for scholars teaching advocacy planning and activists practizing it: Do preconceived expectations and claims concerning the features and effects of advocacy planning correspond with reality as portrayed in the twenty identified case studies? To what extent have advocacy planning processes been successful? The empirical results show that community goals were wholly or partly achieved in the great majority of cases. Further, some expectations held by planning scholars turned out to be quite different from reality, especially regarding how confrontational advocacy planning is in practice, how much attention is given to means and substance relative to ends and process, and how participatory and empowering the process designs are.