Public Participation and the Art of Governance

Theories about communicative planning have forcefully emphasised how language and modes of communication play a key role in shaping planning practice, public dialogues, policymaking, and processes of collaboration. These days, however, discussions on planning seem to reestablish an old philosophical confrontation between Jürgen Habermas's plea for a discoursive ethic and Michel Foucault's thesis of the omnipresence of discoursive powers. Some—mostly overlooked—central themes to this controversy are the epistemological and ontological conditions of Habermas's theory of communicative action. Furthermore, theories of communicative and collaborative planning are criticised because they do not deal with questions on government and governmentality when the power of institutional discourses and the planning of legal decisional structures are discussed. In this paper, I will exemplify the controversy between the Habermasian (the ethics of participation and democratic communication) and the Foucaultian (the art of governance) planning theories, by comparing public participation in Norway with experiments on citizen involvement in Denmark.