Sunday, March 16, 2014
Congressional A (Omni Shoreham)
Can deliberative models of regional and urban planning be exported to Eastern Europe? Can integration go beyond a legal and regulatory harmonization into institutionalizing associational governance models? The article examines this question through an ethnography of a two-year regional planning project on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, initiated by the Dutch government. The project was led by a team of Dutch and Bulgarian consultants who proposed to lead negotiations among industry, NGOs, and government agencies in order to chart a territorial plan for the next twenty years for the area. The communicative model of planning, with its emphasis on Habermasian exploratory dialogue proved a poor fit in the Bulgarian context. Like the technocrats they liked to criticize, the Dutch consultants believed that they could have a special claim on disinterested morality. What they found was that in order to achieve any of their goals, however minimal, they had to find allies with similar discursive and structural positioning. Borrowing from theory of political communication, the article argues that projects of deliberative planning cannot succeed on their claims for disinterested facilitation, nor on attempts to broker relationships among actors but have to integrate themselves in oppositional networks of organizations and projects.
