Planners’ Changing Relationships With Participation: The Impact of New Training and Certification Schemes

Abstract

Public participation is increasingly designed and facilitated by specially trained practitioners drawn from within the planning profession as well as outside of it. This shift is at least partially driven by the rise of new training and certification schemes. Drawing on exploratory interviews, and the example of the International Association for Public Participation in Canada and Australia, this paper highlights how these new forms of expertise are changing planners’ relationships with public participation. Our research reveals several points of tension, including a bifurcation between planning and public participation professionals along with a consolidation around narrowed ideas of public participation.

Introduction

Planning theory has long situated participation as a core virtue of urban planning. The trajectory of planning, from the period of modernism onwards, has recognized participation as a fundamental part of practice (Lane 2005). Some theorists even suggest that participation is not simply a part of planning; it is planning (Frediani and Cociña 2019). The links between these theoretical perspectives and how planning is practiced on the ground are complex and even contradictory. While some planners embrace a participatory approach to their work, others continue to operate within a rational-comprehensive model (Carr 2012; Diller, Hoffmann, and Oberding 2018). When planning processes do necessitate more extensive public participation, this work is increasingly delegated to specially trained public participation practitioners whose expertise is being defined and consolidated through recent efforts to professionalize their work. In this paper, we take a deeper look at how new training and certification schemes that support the professionalization of these public participation practitioners are reshaping the identities and roles of professional planners.

We begin by summarizing the literature on the emergence of specially trained community engagement practitioners and position the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) as an influential organizational actor in the changing landscape of participatory practice in Canada and Australia. IAP2-trained practitioners are not the only “non-planning” professionals hired to support and take carriage of the participatory aspects of planning processes. For example, mediators and other practitioners trained in alternative dispute resolution have long been recognized for possessing a distinct skill set that may be useful for planning (Susskind and Ozawa 1984). In many local governments and other areas of public administration, public relations practitioners are also taking on increased roles in the design and implementation of public participation (Bherer 2021). We have chosen to focus on IAP2 for several reasons. First, in Australia and Canada, it has become one of the most recognizable providers of specialized training, creating new certification schemes for public participation professionals. As we explore in this paper, professional planners are an important market for this training and, as has been documented elsewhere, some local governments require IAP2 training for planning consultants bidding on municipal work (Legacy et al. 2023). Second, IAP2 does have a degree of conceptual overlap with both alternative dispute resolution and public relations, drawing in insights from both fields in its training materials. This overlap suggests that, while IAP2 exists as a distinct organization with unique training and certification schemes, its relationship with professional planning may be an “exemplar case” that is helpful in terms of illustrating a wider phenomenon (Flyvbjerg 2006).

We use exploratory interviews with both IAP2-involved planning practitioners and planners who are experienced in community engagement but who have not sought IAP2 training to examine how planners experience and perceive the IAP2 approach. Our interviews with practitioners in Victoria, Australia and various Canadian provinces reveal how IAP2 is contributing to a bifurcation between planning and public participation professionals and a simultaneous consolidation around certain conceptions of what counts as participation. We build on existing concerns about an increasingly marketized participatory practice by highlighting how planning practitioners position themselves and the work of IAP2 in relation to these broader shifts. We find that some practitioners believe that the methods and values disseminated through IAP2 training support their efforts to plan in the public interest. However, others view the IAP2 approach to engagement as primarily serving client reputation management and project de-risking. We recommend that planning theory and education focus more on both possibilities, critically examining who takes carriage of participation, under which organizational bodies’ training and guidelines, and with what resulting impacts on planning.

Planning and Participation: By Whom, for What?

Nearly four decades ago, the “collaborative turn” in planning theory was catalyzed by Healey’s (1997) collaborative planning, Forester’s (1999) deliberative planning, and Innes’s (1995) communicative rationality, as well as Friedmann’s (1973) earlier work on transactive planning. It, along with earlier theories of advocacy (Davidoff 1965) and equity (see, Metzger 1996) planning, offers a vision of participatory planning in which planners work in close collaboration with communities to make “sense together” and to jointly pursue “a democratic form of planning” (Healey 1992, 144). In the proceeding years, the link between participatory planning and democratization has been increasingly questioned. For example, participatory processes may be used to legitimize planning decisions (Legacy 2012) and coopt public opinion (Alfasi 2003), in ways that some scholars have described as structural gaslighting (Legacy, Gibson, and Rogers 2023).

As suggested earlier, there are also emerging questions about whether the link between planning, participation, and democracy, which is often so passionately argued for in theory, resonates with how planning is practiced on the ground. A key fracture in the relationship between participation and planning relates to who is doing the work. Not only do some planners continue to practice in a way that centers their professional expertise but, when participatory processes are pursued, the work is increasingly done by specially trained community engagement practitioners (Bherer, Gauthier, and Simard 2017) who may have tenuous or non-existent links to planning.

This “new category of expert” (Bherer and Lee 2019, 196) operates within an ever-evolving and multi-dimensional marketplace (Hendriks and Carson 2008) that supports the buying and selling of specific skills and services related to public participation. As we describe in more detail below, there are also efforts to define and protect these skills by professionalizing this emerging category of experts through organizations like IAP2. The professionalization and marketization of public participation are interrelated but there are also distinct dynamics that present several risks. One of the most obvious risks of marketization is that community participation becomes a commodity to be bought and sold. The commodification of participation parallels the rise of neoliberal planning, which has led to the withdrawal of some of planning’s core work from the remit of government, shifting it to the private sector (Linovski 2019; Parker et al. 2020; Raco 2018; Steele 2009). As Loh and Norton (2013) observe, one of the risks of using consultants is that they may lack the local knowledge needed to make contextually sensitive planning decisions. The authors go on to note the fact that consultants are not embedded in the community in the same way may be used to deflect the “heat” of contentious decisions away from public sector planners. While there may be strategic advantages to this, it does suggest a widening disjunct between the ways that public participation has been conceived, in theory, as one of the “virtues” (Barry and Legacy 2023) of the profession and how it is practiced on the ground.

This disjunct is further complicated by a growing tendency to assign the core work of deciding how participatory planning processes ought to be conducted to private sector community engagement consultants (Bherer and Lee 2019) or public servants hired to lead new government departments and oversight bodies (Bherer, Gauthier, and Simard 2021). These practitioners may be planners, but many possess and deploy specialist knowledge drawn from the fields of marketing, communications, and public relations to design and host participatory spaces. This specialist knowledge in process design and facilitation may even exceed the training offered in many planning schools, creating the opportunity to improve participatory processes. But when participatory planning work is done by non-planners, it is not bound to the same codes of practice and risks placing all the attention on the quality of the process, potentially sidestepping professional planning responsibilities to also guide the process toward more just and sustainable outcomes.

The work of these practitioners is also increasingly informed by professional networking bodies that offer various training opportunities and professional development resources and define this new category of expert (Bice, Neely, and Einfeld 2019). These resources and training opportunities are sometimes consolidated and marketized into new credentials, which practitioners may use to gain a competitive edge over other public participation service providers. These dynamics align with more critical strands of scholarship within the sociology of the professions that move beyond well-established “traits” assigned to the professions: “prolonged education, specialized knowledge, regulatory associations, developed rules and codes of ethics” (Ackroyd 2016, 14). Rather, professionalization consolidates ideas about practice; it is a way of articulating what is common and “good” within the practices of certain occupational groups. It inscribes a sense of legitimacy to different governance actors while also articulating and enforcing the boundaries of a field of practice (Fournier 1999) through new credentials and membership in institutional bodies. Thus, the professions are as much a mechanism to wield power, intervene in labor markets, and manage competition between different occupational groups (Johnson 1972; Larson 1977) as they are a force for protecting the public interest.

The sociology of the professions has long been used as a framework for articulating and critically interrogating planning’s status as a profession. For example, a paper by Alterman (2017) uses the sociology of the professions, along with some planning-specific work by Glazer (1974) and Schön (1984), to argue that planning would be well served by a more assertive professional identity and clearer separation from other fields of practice. In the United Kingdom, Campbell and Marshall (2005), along with Inch (2012), used the sociology of the professions to critically examine the changing role of the planner in the face of increased competition from other allied professions as well as statutory changes that altered planners’ sense of purpose. As we have argued elsewhere, the growing influence and organization of these professionalized public participation practitioners creates a new need to use the insights from the sociology of the professions to reconsider the role of the planner (Barry and Legacy 2023), and their changing relationships to participation in particular. Planning literature has said little about these new public participation professionals, what is behind them, and what they mean for planners and the practice of participation. In the remainder of this paper, we explore how IAP2 is contributing to the shifting relationship between participation and professional planning practice in Canada and Australia.

The International Association for Public Participation

The International Association for Public Participation, or IAP2, was established in 1990 with a mandate “to promote and improve the practice of public participation” (IAP2, n.d.-b, 1). According to IAP2’s organizational history (IAP2. n.d.-b), it has grown over the last thirty years from a relatively small networking body to a much larger organization with a far more complex governance structure. In 1992, it had a volunteer board of directors, approximately 300 members and was focused on hosting an annual conference and distributing a newsletter for members. Today, it operates as a global “federation” of regional affiliates with varying levels of activity and organizational complexity in Australasia (Australia and New Zealand), Canada, Indonesia, Latin America, Southern Africa, and the United States. There continues to be a volunteer board of directors for IAP2 International, which provides common resources and networking opportunities for all the regional affiliates. In addition to this growing organizational complexity, one of the key elements of IAP2’s evolution is its effort to consolidate the work of public participation practitioners through specialized education and the articulation of a common code of practice –two of the “traits” that have long been a profession.

Implementing and refining IAP2’s training programs are a key part of the work of IAP2 Australasia and IAP2 Canada. Despite COVID-19 restrictions on travel in Australasia, the organization recorded 7,434 training participants over 2021-22 (IAP2 Australasia 2022). In 2018, IAP2 Canada led the affiliates in terms of the number of training days with over 4,000 days (IAP2 2018). IAP2 Canada relies on the training programs developed by IAP2 International, the first of which was introduced in 1999 and included modules on how to plan and communicate public participation, with a new module on participation techniques added in 2000 (IAP2 2017). This course was rebranded as the “Foundations of Public Participation” in 2014 and was rolled out across the IAP2 federation as a three-day module on planning public participation and a 2-day module on techniques. In 2014, IAP2 Australasia launched its own training program, the IAP2 Australasia Certificate in Engagement, which supplanted the Foundations course as the most popular traini-ng program in Australia and New Zealand. While the Aus-tralasian Certificate in Engagement includes some of the content that is used in the Foundations courses, it was created to be a flexible training program that was more responsive to its regional context. Practitioners who have taken the Certificate in Engagement are eligible to register for an Advanced Certificate, as are those who have taken the Foundational courses and who possess either five years of experience or additional training (IAP2 Australasia, n.d.-b).

IAP2 Canada also uses a certification program initially piloted by IAP2 USA (IAP2 2015). This certification is meant to signal a level of competence and standard of practice akin to the certification and licensing schemes that are found in more well-established professions such as engineering—and planning. IAP2 Canada offers two levels of certification, the Certified Public Participation Practition-er (CP3) and the Master Certified Public Participation Practitioner (MCP3), both of which are available to those who have already taken the Foundations course. Practitioners must be accepted into the CP3 program based on their work history, references and attainment of key skills and competencies that are seen by IAP2 as foundational to public participation practice. These practitioners must then complete a participation plan for a hypothetical project and have their work assessed by a representative from IAP2. Notably, seven of the thirty-one current CP3 or MCP3 professionals in Canada are also Registered Professional Planners while many others work in planning-related fields (IAP2 Canada, n.d.). IAP2 Australasia is also in the early stages of introducing Australasian post-nominals to recognize the “professionalism of the work our members do” and a “key way for broader networks to recognize your membership of a profession” (IAP2 Australasia, n.d.-b).

These training and certification schemes draw upon and disseminate IAP2’s beliefs about the foundations for effective participatory practice. As we discussed elsewhere (Legacy et al. 2023), these foundations have been adopted by local governments in ways that set standards for how participation is practiced in areas like urban planning, with the potential to raise the floor of participation by introducing a “shared language” and lower the ceiling by potentially stifling more creative, place-based and community-led participatory planning efforts. This paper expands on this earlier work on the potential benefits and risks of IAP2’s growing influence by homing in on a potential conflict in values and the implications for planning practitioners. IAP2’s Code of Ethics and Statement of Core Values (IAP2, n.d.-a) are primarily focused on the character of participatory process. In contrast, planning codes of ethics are more expansive and express concern for the outcomes of planning decisions. Recognition of this broader role for planning has long been reflected in scholarly work on the importance of both substantive and procedural aspects of the public interest (see Campbell and Marshall 2002).

Research Methods and Analytical Framework

Given IAP2’s role in the push toward professionalized public participation practitioners, we are specifically interested in how planners perceive, and sometimes pursue, its training and certification schemes, and how these schemes influence planning practice. What do IAP2’s training and certification schemes bring to a planner’s practice in terms of specific skills and ways of thinking about their role in participatory processes? How does IAP2 training affect the professional standing and credibility of planners and participation practitioners? How are planners without IAP2 training or certification reacting to this relatively new way of consolidating, disseminating, and marketing the wisdom of experienced public participation practitioners? And, finally, how are the aforementioned dynamics reshaping the role of professional planners, and with what benefits or unintended costs? Our research is exploratory in nature, and this article provides an early foray into these issues, drawing on semi-structured key informant interviews, as well as an analysis of the publicly available data on IAP2.

Our twenty-five interviewees include professional planners working in government and consultancy (some of whom have received IAP2 training), members of professional planning associations, and IAP2 trainers, staff, and board members. For the Canadian side of the project, we focused much of our interview efforts on the planners who had pursued IAP2 certification. We were able to speak to four of the seven Registered Professional Planners who have successfully obtained either the CP3 or MCP3 designation. We also conducted additional interviews with four professional planners who have taken the IAP2 Foundations course and/or are involved in other IAP2 networking opportunities, such as their local chapters (of which there are five, spread across Canada). Finally, we spoke to two IAP2 trainers familiar with municipal planning and two individuals who are involved with IAP2 Canada as an organization and could speak to emerging relationships between IAP2 Canada and the professional planning institutes. In Australia, we spoke with eight planners who had pursued IAP2 training and conducted engagement as part of their work. We also conducted two interviews with planners who have previously served as part of IAP2 and a member of the Planning Institute of Australia board, all of whom could speak to the IAP2’s influence on the changing relationship between participation and planning. We also spoke with trainers and other dual planning/engagement practitioners who have seen their work affected by what was broadly described as an increasingly top-down application of IAP2 tools and principles across the public sector in Victoria.

The interviews were transcribed and thematically coded. We used a cloud-based code-and-retrieve program (Dedoose) so that all the authors could participate in data analysis. The lead author developed the initial coding framework, which was refined through an iterative process involving all the authors to ensure that contextual differences between the two research contexts were accounted for and that the codes were being used consistently by the authors. During this process, some codes were renamed to bring greater clarity to their meaning, while others were collapsed or expanded as we moved toward the identification of common themes. Given the exploratory nature of our work and our grounding in more interpretative methods (Yanow 1996), we did not attempt to measure inter-coder reliability.

The manifest codes were used to capture substantive information about IAP2’s organizational structure and its different training and certification schemes, as well as how it is interacting with the planning profession through activities like the mutual promotion of events and the sharing of resources. Our manifest coding also accounted for practitioners’ descriptions of IAP2’s overall approach to public participation including its training and certification schemes. Here, we were paying attention to their beliefs about the benefits and limitations, as well as how they described the role of IAP2-trained professionals (both planners and non-planners). The latent coding identified the broader meaning and discourses that underlay these practitioner perspectives. Given recent calls to frame public participation as an emerging profession, the sociology of the professions informed the development of our latent codes. This literature led us to develop codes that capture issues of legitimization, standard or boundary-setting, and any emergent sense of conflict or cooperation between IAP2-trained professionals and professional planners. Our goal with these latent codes was not to make definitive conclusions about the merits of IAP2’s overall approach to public participation, or of its different training and certification offerings, but rather to raise questions about their consequences (both intended and unintended) for the practice of participatory planning.

Planners’ Engagements and Perceptions of IAP2

Our analysis points to some emerging issues in how professional planners interact with and perceive the work of IAP2. We begin by exploring the reasons that our interviewees were drawn to IAP2 and the benefits and limitations it brings to their practice. One of the most common themes in our interviews surrounded the status and legitimacy that credentialization was seen to bring to the work of a professional planner who specializes in the design and facilitation of public participation, as discussed in the second sub-section. But, as we discuss in our third and final sub-section of results, the credentialization of public participation professionals not only changes the professional identity of planners who have pursued IAP2 training and certification, it is triggering new ways of thinking about who has the expertise and experience to take carriage of public participation. This suggests a broader and more foundational change in how participation is perceived within the organizational structures (such as government) that planners work in.

A Structured Approach or Constraining Practice?

Our research indicates variations in how planners experience and perceive the IAP2 approach. A former staff member and a trainer we spoke to from IAP2 Canada recalled how many of the trainees and new members they interact with describe their experience with IAP2 as finding “their people.” While this is not the exact language used by the Canadian IAP2-affiliated planners we spoke to, they did report feeling like IAP2 was like “hand in glove” (CP3PlannerCanada2) in the sense that it “confirmed and legitimized what we already knew through experience or intuitively knew” (PlannerCanada3). For some Canadian planners, completing the training or certification process helped expand their participatory practice, providing an opportunity to “shore up their skill set” (CP3PlannerCanada2). The IAP2-trained planners we spoke to from Canada frequently talked about how the training was particularly useful in terms of encouraging them to be more attentive to how a participatory process is communicated to the public.

Some Australian interviewees reported similar experiences, particularly in the early 2000s, reflecting IAP2 Australasia’s initial focus on developing a community of practice at a time when participation was seen as a nascent field fragmented across disciplines. More recently, many Australian interviewees expressed concerns about the potential risks of IAP2’s efforts to instill a common foundation for public participation. Some report that IAP2 materials had been deployed in ways that fostered a more rigid, managed style of participation that constrained the possibilities of practice. For some Australian planners, these perceived limitations led to a fundamental rethink of their engagement with IAP2 and the principles it espouses:

It was so long ago now [that I did the IAP2 training], early 2000s. At the time, I thought it was good. And I didn’t realize that it was this formal . . . I understand why they make it . . . so structured and regimented because it makes it easier for organizations in local government to approach engagement as a corporate, but I feel a bit like in a straitjacket . . . (PlannerVictoria5)

Despite these misgivings, with growing demand to follow the IAP2 structure coming from many local governments (Legacy et al. 2023) alongside the continued delineation of public participation as a unique area of professional specialization, more professionals are seeking training and certification from IAP2 itself.

The Credentialization of Participation

In Canada, planners are one of the biggest markets for IAP2 training and certification and are frequently involved in local IAP2 chapters. When asked about their reasons for pursuing IAP2 training, planning practitioners highlighted a desire to give more standing and legitimacy to their work. For example, one spoke about how it allows them to “point to the methodology and the approach that decision-makers seem to get it; here is a metric that is recognizable, that many organizations use, and lends some. . .credence, some gravitas, to why we do certain things the way we do. . . And without that, you kind of get into a legitimacy battle” (PlannerCanada3). Likewise, another IAP2-involved planner felt it has “given me some credibility in the marketplace” and in the broader “world of engagement” (PlannerCanada2). For those who had gone the extra step of becoming a CP3 or MCP3, the post-nominals carried weight. One such planning practitioner felt it was an important way to counteract a lack of awareness within municipal government about the level of training and post-secondary education that a planner who specializes in public participation already has. This was “top of mind” when getting their certification as “it tells people. . . this is something that I am knowledgeable about, without having to every time almost reiterate or justify my past experience” (CP3PlannerCanada1).

In Australia, training has also been used to convey a sense of legitimacy, but here there was a more pronounced discussion amongst our research participants about whose values and approaches are promulgated through IAP2’s efforts to train and certify planning practitioners. IAP2 Australasia’s first forays into conferring post-nominal certification have included the development of partnerships with tertiary education institutions. One example of these efforts is a recently announced partnership with RMIT University to bridge its Master of Communication courses with IAP2 training and membership (IAP2 Australasia, n.d.-c). The collaboration includes measures to encourage the graduates of this program to complete further training through IAP2 to gain the newly introduced “Graduate: GIAP2” accreditation, while IAP2 trainees are also encouraged to bridge into RMIT’s Master of Communication. Notably, the GIAP2 accreditation is currently only available to Master of Communication students, which raises further questions about how IAP2 is influencing who takes carriage of public participation.

A major concern raised with the different IAP2 training and certification options is the costs, described by one planner as “outrageously expensive” (PlannerVictoria1). The cost of IAP2 training was seen to present a barrier to entry, particularly when borne by individual practitioners rather than employers, making access “kind of exclusive, if you don’t have the time and the cash. . .the supportive employer or whatever” (PlannerCanada1). In Canada, that financial and time burden increases substantially in pursuit of CP3 or MCP3 certification. Meanwhile, multiple Australian interviewees commented on how lucrative IAP2 training had become as a source of revenue, with one drawing a contrast between IAP2’s role as a member-based organization and the “business” of its training. This is linked to repeated concern across both contexts about the cost of IAP2 training contributing to engagement itself becoming a monetized, marketed product. As one planner states, “I think IAP2 could have championed participatory planning in a way that it has just failed to do. And not only failed to do but kind of put barriers out too because it did become a product and people who had different approaches were muscled out” (PlannerVictoria6). This planner, and other interviewees, are highlighting how IAP2’s rise as the arbiter of public participation legitimacy combined with the high barriers to entry of its training risk further narrowing and commodifying participatory practice.

The planners who did find the time and financial resources to obtain IAP2 credentialization did report changes in their professional identities. Several reported that they now see themselves as a kind of “dual professional” with a strong—but separate—sense of commitment to both IAP2 and the national (and, in the case of Canada, also provincial) professional planning institutes. We also encountered planners who had less engagement with IAP2 but still saw themselves as dual professionals, particularly given where industry demands had led their work. The above suggests that the relationship between planners, the practice of participation, IAP2, and professional planning institutes is variegated, contributing to further fragmentation of how planners see their own professional identities in relation to participatory practice.

The Fracturing of Planning and Participation

The credentialization of public participation practitioners and the emergence of “dual professionals” have the potential to catalyze major shifts in how public participation is practiced within local government. Indeed, the growing influence of IAP2 has contributed to a kind of fracturing of participation from planning, reported both by planners and some of these public participation practitioners themselves. In some cases, in Australia, consultant planners found themselves being brought into project teams to run participatory planning projects, only to find the community involvement work was being led by specialist, non-planner engagement practitioners. The use of these public participation professionals has also been formalized in several Canadian cities. With the hiring of specialized consultants and the creation of new ‘community engagement specialist’-type staff positions (if not entire community engagement departments), public participation professionals in some Canadian cities now exist outside the planning department and often report to the municipality’s communications department. Where they exist, these positions or departments tend to be staffed by IAP2-trained practitioners who are tasked with setting the standards and providing high-level institutional oversight for all municipal public participation processes. In some cases, they also provide internal training on public participation and promote the external courses that are offered through IAP2. Two public participation professionals who have worked in these types of departments described their relationships with planners as productive and collaborative, but also one of oversight and quality control. Planning was often described by these dedicated professionals as a more technical profession, whereas theirs was seen as far more relational. Although many planners might dispute this characterization, the sentiment shows how this emerging profession of public participation practitioners is trying to make sense of its role by asserting some conceptual boundaries between it and other groups.

One IAP2 trainer and practicing engagement consultant in Canada cited three justifications for hiring dedicated engagement practitioners on planning projects. The first was an argument that planners often lack the “capacity” to undertake thorough community engagement because of other project demands. The second justification was that dedicated engagement professionals were better positioned to act as “neutral” facilitators, providing the planner with “space for them to be able to lean into a professional opinion” about a planning issue. This public participation professional claimed that planners often want to “be a participant in a workshop, and they can’t do that if they’re also the facilitator.” Finally, this professional also claimed that having an engagement consultant report, rather than only a planning staff report, and the involvement of “a third party who are experts in this domain” could carry more weight with local elected officials (IAP2TrainerCanada2). This sentiment was echoed by an IAP2-involved professional planner who argued that an IAP2-backed approach lends “some credence, some gravitas” (PlannerCanada3) to an engagement process in the eyes of local council.

Several other interviewees similarly saw no issue in the rise of engagement specialists within government, or even welcomed the expanded focus on participatory process. How-ever, the interface between planners with their own participation expertise and the new wave of dedicated participati-on professionals is recasting how participatory planning is approached, as well as who does the work. The risks associated with this emerging arrangement were highlighted by a number of interviewees. Many Australian planners expressed serious concerns about the badging of projects with an IAP2-backed approach. One planner derisively decried the rise of “pseudo professionals” defining the work of participation within projects they had been hired to carry out: “It’s interesting, if you’re going to employ me and pay money for me, why tell me what to do? You could get anyone to do that” (PlannerVictoria1). This changes the way public participation is conceived and enacted, according to some planners interviewed. They warn that participation becomes more vulnerable to becoming a “comms,” PR, or marketing exercise—more about “the tell and the sell” (PlannerVictoria6) if it is put in the hands of these other specialists. Indeed, some interviewees in Victoria suggest participation is at risk of morphing into public relations or reputation management intended to invest a sense of legitimacy in government organizations and projects. This could fundamentally alter the substance of engagement and have the unintended consequence of jeopardizing trust and relationships with communities (PlannerVictoria4):

I see my engagement work being really about helping communities to participate in change that happens in neighborhoods. I see that as a very spatial question and see that as a social justice question. I see that is really linked in with principles of community planning, and social planning, and anthropology and justice. . . as opposed to marketing. (PlannerVictoria6)

Other interviewees drew parallels between the increasing prominence of IAP2 materials and training and the neoliberalization of governance and privatization of many state functions, including those related to planning. The outsourcing of planning work, including the design and delivery of public participation, has become more commonplace. Two of our Victorian interviewees observed that consultants’ use of IAP2 tools and approaches, in this neoliberal context, is shaped by a “product mentality around community engagement” (PlannerVictoria6), such that “a lot of engagement consultants have a product that they sell and that it’s not about the people. And it’s not even about the project. It’s about them fitting that. . . product into the council” (Plan-nerVictoria1).

On the other side, some IAP2 trainers and public engagement specialists that we spoke with often had equally disparaging things to say about planners, questioning their ability to remain neutral and maintain the space needed for democratic discourse. Such characterizations of the roles and positionalities of public participation practitioners vis à vis that of professional planners suggest an emerging conflict over who ought to take carriage of participatory processes. We would suggest that this conflict is not only a demarcation of distinct areas of expertise that the sociology of the professions suggests occurs when two occupation groups encounter one another. There are also potential impacts on the practice of planning itself. The stakeholder management approach associated with public relations may exacerbate attempts to de-risk planning and participatory processes by making them more controlled. And new tensions arise as communities become more cynical about the ends to which participation is being leveraged.

A New Fluidity in the Relationship Between Planning and Participation?

Our research highlights how the rise of dedicated participation professionals and associated training and certification schemes create new layers of complexity in the relationship between planning and participation. At one level, these developments lift the standards of practice and promote a broader acceptance of a type of public participation within government. Some planning professionals who participated in these training and credentialization programs report associated improvements in their practice and opportunities to assert their expertise when working within government. These findings suggest a new fluidity in the relationship between planning and participation, particularly in formal levels of government. Despite planning scholars’ longstanding efforts to frame participation as a core virtue (Barry and Legacy 2023) or a defining component (Frediani and Cociña 2019) of planning, our research suggests that this core area of planning expertise is not always well recognized outside the profession, or perhaps even all that well developed in planning practice.

IAP2’s training and credentialization programs, and the growing uptake amongst professional planners, may provide an opportunity to address this lack of recognition and to augment planners’ skills in this area. It consolidates ideas and scholarly knowledge about participatory practice into standard frameworks that then support and guide future practice. And as awareness of IAP2 grows, its training and credentialization programs also provide a certain degree of recognition and legitimacy to the practitioners who ha-ve demonstrated a level of knowledge and competency in applying these frameworks. But the emergence of IAP2 as an arbiter of engagement and this consolidation around a particular approach to participation is not without its costs. The sheer expense of these training and certification programs alone raises serious questions about who is included and excluded from public participation practice. We have also seen how this bounding of participatory practice extends to include demarcation of who should take carriage of participatory planning processes: professional planners or these emergent public participation professionals. The fragmentation of participation from planning with the rise of IAP2-guided professionals and approaches means who and what ethical frameworks are guiding participatory process in planning projects is changing. Interviewees expressed concern that participation in planning may well be supplanted by specialized practitioners and standardized participation approaches with local governments outsourcing some of the messiness inherent in planning to dedicated and credentialed professionals. These professionals, while highly skilled, may come from different disciplinary backgrounds, guided by different codes of ethics and standards of practice.

Any rigidity or narrowness in how participation is understood by these practitioners may also foreclose space for the critical reflection necessary to adapt and evolve practice and ensure it is sensitive to the places these participation processes affect. Critical reflection is well understood as necessary to the practice of planning (Schon 1984) and essential to public participation. This is especially true in places where the challenges of existing power dynamics require an astute and even politically savvy method of engagement that looks beyond participatory process to ensure that planning outcomes serve communities and not the interests of capital. As our interviewees cautioned, the more curated approach to participation promoted in these specialized training and certification programs seems to focus on process and mitigating the reputational risk and uncertainty associated with democratic planning processes. This raises questions about whether, by running participation alongside planning (rather than situating it as fundamental to its very practice), we ri-sk a further depoliticization of the planning process (see Frediani and Cociña 2019; Legacy 2022). With the substantive politics of planning stripped from participation in sanitized participation processes, communities (and planners) can become jaded.

At a more theoretical level, the empirical observations of planners explored in this paper reflect the literature on professionalization. Planners’ and specialized public participation practitioners’ characterizations of one another illustrate how different professions make sense of each other and enforce the boundaries of their respective areas of practice. These findings point to the potential benefits of revisiting the sociology of the professions and using this longstanding literature to understand not just the profession of planning itself but its relations with any number of intersecting occupational groups. However, our findings also suggest that such efforts to redraw the boundaries between planners and public participation professionals have potential implications for the practice of participation itself, particularly in contexts where neoliberal governance frameworks dominate how planning is conducted and understood.

The bifurcation between planning and participation reflects and potentially exacerbates broader shifts in the political economy of public participation that seem to be leading to a decontextualized commodification of partici-pation, such that it is being recast as a set of skills and approaches that can be put in service of planning, as opposed to a set of practices that are essential to the traditional remit, if not overall identity, of the planner. The cleaving of participation from planning further risks the rise of a revivified technocracy where the planner’s role returns to that of a more technical, land use professional. For some planners, this might be a welcome shift as participatory processes are not without an emotional cost to planners and citizens alike (Inch 2015; Lyles and White 2019). Having specially trained practitioners who take carriage of participatory processes might be beneficial. We know from our own experiences of teaching public participation in accredited planning schools that not all planners are excited to engage in this challenging area of planning practice.

But as a profession, we must question whether we are content to accept these shifts and that planners may no longer be (or perhaps never were) the best group of practitioners to lead the participatory processes associated with our work. If the conclusion is that maintaining a mode of practice that is equally attentive to questions of procedural and distributive justice is important, then it may be that there is a need to return to—and teach—some of the community organizing skills that were so essential those foundational theories of advocacy and equity planning. Many of our interviewees make a connection between the professionalization of public participation practitioners and the neoliberalization of planning and suggest that this deepening connection exacerbates the inability of formal participation to challenge establish-ed power dynamics or question planning technocracy (see Beebeejaun and Vanderhoven 2010). If public participation is to remain within the domain of planning—and not just in theory, but also in practice—then more attention needs to be paid to how we might cultivate the sets of skills, deepened critical thinking and strategic acumen that would allow planners to carve out spaces in which participation may live up to its democratic ethos.

Overall, the emerging bifurcation and consolidation in participatory practice are raising critical questions. Insti-tutions are reconceptualizing what constitutes meaningful participation and why the work of participation is done in the first place. At another level, this shift demands closer scrutiny of who designs and facilitates public participation, the standards they follow and how they are held accountable. If the goal is to adhere to longstanding standards and virtues of deliberative, collaborative, equity-focused and transformational models of planning, the bifurcation of planning and participation may stifle the pathways through which the public’s participation can hold planners (and elected officials) to account. It does so by limiting the opportunities for relationship building between planners and communities, changing how planners are held accountable in planning processes, and reshapes our understanding of planning and participation in democratic urban governance. The rise of process-oriented and even communications-focused public participation professionals could further abstract planning from community, rendering it a more technocratic practice rather than a facilitator of community-building. Consequently, we must question who will stand up for the democratic and spatial justice-oriented aims of participatory planning, especially when these goals clash with dominant power structures or discourses. It is vital to pay more attention to the suite of tensions emerging from the professionalization of public participation, and its impacts on planners, planning, and communities.