TVA and the Grass Roots at 75: The Legacy of a Planning Classic

Abstract

Planning struggles with the tension between professional expertise and public voice. The approaching 75th anniversary of Philip Selznick's classic, TVA and the Grass Roots, is an apt time to revisit that tension. In Selznick's analysis, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was a modernist institution aligning with local agricultural elites at the expense of vulnerable Black and poor farmers. He coined the term ‘informal co-optation’ to characterize TVA's affiliation with the powerful. We bring renewed attention to informal co-optation and the institutional aspects of engagement by examining how Selznick's analysis was received contemporaneously, and then considering recent scholarship and the current implications of Selznick's work.

Introduction

In John Friedmann's classic definition, planning in the public domain entails linking scientific and technical knowledge to actions that advance the general interest. Thus, even in its scholarly mode planning is action oriented, concerned with intervening in the world for the greater good (Friedmann 1987, 38, 74, 77). Given that concern, a core question is, how should planning institutions – the organizations, the rules (both formal and tacit), and the activities that comprise planning practice – be arranged to most effectively respond to various claims to speak for the public interest (Gradstein and Konrad 2006; Kim 2012; North 2005)? American planning has long struggled with that question, especially as it pertains to the place of public involvement in the planning process. The approaching seventy-fifth anniversary of TVA and the Grass Roots, Philip Selznick's classic 1949 study of a renowned rural regional development planning institution, is an opportune time to reconsider the matter. Our aim in revisiting Selznick's pioneering work is to appraise its ongoing relevance through a reflection on what he said, how it was received by contemporaneous observers, and how it connects to planning, especially rural regional development planning, today.

Top-down, expert-driven rational planning in the service of the public interest, often called the high modernist approach (Gilbert 2015; Scott 1998), was the standard for American planning through the World War II era. It was assumed a priori as the paradigm for the field. Planning professed to speak with the authority of scientific knowledge about the best interests of the public and how to improve the human condition (Hibbard and Frank 2021). Distinguished planning scholars/practitioners Alvin Hansen and Harvey Perloff made the argument for the high modernist approach, asserting that ‘regional development can be expected to receive its most potent stimulus (when) a single agency is assigned definite planning, research, and operating responsibility. Day-by-day decisions will be required and can hardly be performed by negotiation with any other groups or agencies’ (Hansen and Perloff 1942, 30).

However, the economic and social crises of the 1930s raised questions of how to reconcile the obvious need for planning with the threat to democracy implicit in top-down, expert-driven planning approaches. ¹ There was great interest in understanding the actual behaviour of planning institutions, rather than what planning theorists normatively thought it should be, particularly with respect to power and the politics of the planning process (Flyvbjerg 2002; Friedmann 1998). Social scientific case studies of planning institutions, which have become a dominant form of inquiry in planning scholarship, emerged from that interest (Birch 2012). Among the best known early case studies are the investigation of Chicago public housing by Meyerson and Banfield (1955), Gans’s (1962) ethnography on urban renewal in Boston's West End, Anderson's (1964) study of urban renewal, and Altshuler's (1965) examination of multiple issues in Minneapolis–St. Paul. TVA and the Grass Roots (Selznick 1949) was one of the first and most important contributions to that literature.

TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority, was established in 1933 as one of the initial New Deal efforts to address the catastrophe of the Great Depression. It was a pioneering regional development planning agency, seen as a model for that emerging field. It served as a prototype for international development planning into the 1950s and 1960s (Gilbert 2015). Among other things, TVA was held up as an exemplar of ‘democratic planning’, as having reconciled the tension between planning and democracy. Selznick, an organizational sociologist attentive to the importance of describing and explaining the actual behaviour of institutions, undertook a deep empirical investigation of democratic planning by TVA.

Grass roots democracy was the term David Lilienthal, TVA's long-time director and major spokesperson, used to characterize its approach to public participation and democratic planning (Lilienthal 1944). However, Selznick found that TVA's behaviour did not reflect Lilienthal's idealized view. He called TVA a ‘shining example’ (266) of technical competence but saw that public participation in TVA was limited to the region's agricultural elite. In Lilienthal's conception the grass roots consisted of large-scale landowners and supporting organizations such as the Farm Bureau, along with officials from land grant universities administering the cooperative extension system. ² They came together to press their own agenda, excluding such vulnerable populations as Black farmers, small landowners, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers from TVA programs.

Selznick argued that TVA's alignment with the powerful was a defensive posture to avert threats by local elites to TVA's very survival. He coined the term ‘informal co-optation’ to characterize the willing collusion in which TVA covertly ceded control of its agricultural program to local elites and ignored the needs of the dispossessed. ³ Selznick's study of co-optation in TVA sheds important light on an ongoing set of challenges. He was among the first to recognize that planning institutions confront multiple publics whose interests often do not coincide with one another and who have widely varying access to power. As well, planning institutions sit at the intersection of rational-bureaucratic administration and power politics and mediate between them in the effort to advance the public interest. After nearly seven decades of planning scholarship those challenges remain (Chaskin 2005; Leino and Laine 2011), so it seems germane to remind ourselves of the origins of this line of inquiry and where it has brought us. To do so, we explore what Selznick wrote and commentaries on his work from that time, then examine recent scholarship to probe their implications for current thinking about the behaviour of planning organizations, especially regarding democratic planning and public participation. Additionally, we take inspiration from Selznick's study as an exemplar of social scientific case studies of planning institutions. Our aim is to bring attention to Selznick's ongoing relevance.

We begin by briefly setting the context for TVA and the Grass Roots, the rural situation in the U.S. over the first three decades of the 20^th century and particularly the circumstances that led to the creation of TVA. Next, we take a deep dive into Selznick's work – the TVA story, what he said about it, and how it was received by contemporary observers. We then look at more recent scholarship, with special attention to co-optation and the issues of public participation in planning. Finally, we offer some observations from this literature for planning scholarship and practice.

The Roots of TVA: The Rural Crisis of the Early 20^th Century

The modern field of planning that arose around the turn of the 20^th century was essentially a response to the problems raised by rapid urbanization and industrialization (Birch and Silver 2009). It was one expression of the emergent societal emphasis on science and empiricism. It was premised on the idea that there is a collective or unitary public interest that can be furthered through what came to be called rational planning. In the inaugural issue of Public Administration Review, Rexford G. Tugwell, one of the leading intellectual architects of planning as we know it and at the time director of the New York City Planning Commission, ⁴ argued for planning as the foundation of governance based on ‘public rather than on private objectives, … general interest rather than special interests’ (Tugwell 1940, 33). It was assumed that technical experts armed with information and analysis could identify the general welfare or public interest and devise the best methods for advancing it. ‘The employment of the scientific method in the study of social phenomena promises to provide us with the knowledge necessary for control of many social processes’ (Adams 1950). As Ernest Alexander has summed up, ‘the existence of such a public interest was taken for granted … and the ability of planners … to identify this public interest and justify their proposals in its name, was rarely questioned’ (Alexander 1992, 129).

In one manifestation of belief in the general welfare or public interest, it was commonly recognized that urbanization and industrialization depended on agriculture and natural resource production, that the rural landscape was the site for production of the primary commodities – food, fiber, timber, minerals, and so on – essential to industrialization and urban life. But traditional methods of commodity production were held to be inadequate – inefficient and wasteful. As well, rural social life was seen as backward and disorganized. Critical resources such as soils, forests, minerals, and water needed to be managed scientifically and social institutions such as schools, churches, local governments, and banks needed to be reformed to promote ‘sound community life’. In short, the rural economy and rural communities were in a crisis that threatened the entire society. ⁵

Rural reformers, mostly urbanites, came together under the overall heading of the Country Life movement to deal with the rural crisis, in the interest of society as a whole. As they saw it, natural resource and agricultural production needed to be made more efficient to support urban industrial society, and rural society needed to be modernized to make that happen. Rural institutions were inadequate to deal with the problems facing rural regions, so County Lifers worked to reform existing institutions and develop new ones. They addressed a broad range of issues including school reform, road improvements, adult education in scientific agriculture, farm mechanization, better marketing of agricultural and natural resource products, and rural electrification (see, e.g., Butterfield 1908; Douglass 1927; Mead 1920).

The Country Life movement engendered rural regional development planning in the United States (Hibbard and Frank 2021). It took official form with the activities and report of the seven-member Commission on Country Life, appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 to investigate and make recommendations regarding issues identified by the rural reformers. The Commission conducted a national survey of community leaders (with 115,000 respondents), received written reports on rural issues from almost every state, and held public hearings at thirty sites across the country. Its report, completed in 1909 and published in 1911 (Bailey 1911), addressed national social and economic problems the Country Lifers saw as having rural roots and thus rural solutions. Although the report was hazy with respect to specifics, it set the rural planning agenda. Modernization of the rural economy required community development, not just economic development. The report called for promotion of social and economic organization and efficiency, for scientific agriculture and civic responsibility. Specific to planning, it called for: (1) empiricism and the scientific method, careful inventories of local conditions as the initial step in formulating practical action; (2) joining ecological, economic, and social analyses for a holistic understanding of a region; and (3) replacing tenant farming, share cropping, and similar peonage with smallholding ownership (Bailey 1911).

These propositions were supported not only by the Commission but by the Country Life movement generally. They were manifest in the work of, for example, the Regional Planning Association of America (MacKaye 1928) and the Southern Regionalists (Odum and Moore 1938). They played themselves out concretely in a variety of rural regional planning schemes in the 1920s and ‘30s, including large scale dam projects such as Hoover dam on the Colorado River and Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams on the Columbia River, irrigated ‘farm colonies’ such as Durham and Delhi in California and the Klamath project in California/Oregon, and a variety of ‘new town’ projects (Hibbard and Frank 2021). The most visible was the development planning for the Tennessee River valley.

TVA and its Co-Optation

The Tennessee River valley was one of the poorest areas in the U.S. in the 1920s. The river passed through eight states on its course from Virginia to western Kentucky where it emptied into the Mississippi. It drained, and frequently flooded, a forty thousand square mile basin. Much of the watershed was badly eroded farmland and over-exploited forest (mostly in absentee ownership). Much of the population was illiterate and one in every three farmers was a tenant or sharecropper. Like Appalachia as a whole, the Tennessee River valley's largely rural population of two million lived in relative isolation from big urban markets and the only practical response to their subsistence-level existence was out-migration (Scott 2006). TVA was designed to transform this static, underdeveloped subsistence society into a dynamic, productive, growing society. It would build dams to encourage industry through flood control, navigation, and electricity generation. It would start cooperatives, train workers, build schools and clinics. It would conserve topsoil and replant clear-cut forests and teach modern agriculture. It would improve diets and teach personal hygiene and sanitation. In short, it was to be the prototype institution for the sort of integrated development planning envisioned by the County Life Commission, holistically joining ecological, economic, and social goals (Gilbert 2015; Hargrove 1994; Hargrove and Conkin 1983). In the end, though, TVA took a different path.

TVA had its roots in the controversy over the hydroelectric possibilities of the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals in northern Alabama. ⁶ Early efforts to develop hydropower to manufacture nitrates for fertilizer were over-ridden by the World War I need for nitrates for ammunition, which led to construction of the Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals. The dam was not completed until 1925, by which time there was no longer agreement about its use. Several unsuccessful efforts were made through the 1920s to combine hydropower generation with the production of nitrates for fertilizer. However, the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 pointed to a vision far beyond hydropower and fertilizer. FDR had longstanding interests in regional development. As governor of New York, he had sponsored and brought about a statewide planning movement (Scott 2006). ⁷ He maintained that interest as president. In his request to Congress to create TVA he called for it to be a model for the nation, charged with planning broadly for the proper use, conservation, and development of the natural resources of the Tennessee River drainage basin and its adjoining territory, for the general social and economic benefit of the nation (Selznick 1949).

The special regional focus and broad scope of the project gave it a character reflecting one of the major concerns of the time, a concern that continues today, the centralization of government power. New Deal efforts to respond to the Depression vested increasing authority in the federal government, acknowledging the growing recognition that many basic problems could not be addressed effectively through local institutions. At the same time, there was real fear of the threat to democracy from government centralization. That concern was particularly germane to TVA, what with its broad mandate across multiple states, responsibility to deal with the resources of the region as a unified whole, and the concomitant necessity to coordinate with myriad federal, state, and local jurisdictions.

Speaking for TVA, David Lilienthal conceded the fear. ‘The dangers of centralized administration are all too evident. They cannot be ignored’ (Lilienthal 1939, 4). TVA believed it had found the solution, through centralized government but decentralized administration. Lilienthal (1939, 10) went on to say that TVA is ‘invested with the authority of the national government …. At the same time, administration of these powers is effectively decentralized’, through grass roots democracy. Selznick's exploration of TVA focused precisely on the issue of centralized authority and decentralized administration – ‘grass roots democracy’.

Selznick spent a year (1942–1943) at TVA conducting participant observation, document analysis, and key informant interviews. His approach was to examine the ideas and theories of an operating organization, what he termed its official doctrine, vis-à-vis its actual behaviour. As he explained, TVA and its official doctrine was a particularly apposite subject because the administrative leadership was ‘especially active … in propagating a systematic formulation of (TVA's) meaning and significance’ (Selznick 1949, 21). The first third of the book is a description of the official doctrine as TVA and its advocates saw it, a synthesis that united positive government and top-down rational planning with bottom-up democratic participation. It entailed:

Managerial autonomy – in its area of operation the responsible agency (i.e., TVA in the Tennessee Valley) has freedom to make significant decisions on its own;

Partnership – carrying on operations with and through existing ‘people's institutions’ already organized in its area of operation; and

Decentralization – the responsible agency has a key role in coordinating the work of federal, state, and local programs, with primary responsibility for dealing with the resources of the area as a unified whole.

The supporters of TVA believed the doctrine would serve as a model for regional development and hoped that it would eventually be applied throughout the nation.

The balance of TVA and the Grass Roots is a brilliant critical synopsis of the implementation of the official TVA doctrine. The focus of Selznick's analysis is TVA's three-man (sic) board of directors. As Selznick tells it, the board and TVA as a whole struggled with the tensions between the need for centralization of authority on one hand and democratic decentralization on the other, tensions exposed in the relations among the three initial directors that spilled out across the organization.

The TVA Act called for the board to be appointed by the U.S. president. FDR's first appointee was the first board chairman, Arthur Morgan. Morgan was a civil engineer and later president of Antioch College. He specialized in land reclamation projects, the most important of which prior to TVA was the Miami Conservancy Project in the 1920s, an integrated river management project on the Great Miami River and its tributaries in southwestern Ohio. He shared FDR's vision of TVA as an integrated regional development institution and, going further, a laboratory that would demonstrate solutions to the social and economic problems facing the nation. As Selznick put it, he ‘combined a practical knowledge of water control problems with an active interest in the general problems of social reconstruction’ (Selznick 1949, 91).

Roosevelt asked Morgan to help him find his co-directors. FDR specified that one should be a Southern agriculturalist and the other knowledgeable about electricity generation and distribution. Morgan approached Department of Agriculture Extension Service officials for recommendations of possible candidates and settled on Harcourt A. Morgan (no kin to Arthur Morgan). Harcourt Morgan was president and former Dean of Agriculture at the University of Tennessee, and head of the (national) Association of Land Grant Colleges and Universities, which was closely linked to larger well-to-do farmers through the American Farm Bureau Federation. This proved to be a crucial choice in that Harcourt Morgan's institutional connections decisively affected the direction of the TVA agricultural program.

The third original member of the TVA board was David E. Lilienthal. He was an attorney specializing in public utility law and a vocal advocate of public ownership of electric power production and distribution facilities. At the time of his appointment to the TVA board he was a member of the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. He strongly believed in the combination of science, technology, and organization as the path to advancing the public good. As well, he was the primary public advocate for the concept of grass roots democracy, which he believed could overcome the threats of centralization.

There quickly arose a ‘disaffection’ (Selznick 1949, 93) among the members of the board. In part it was due to a personality conflict between Arthur Morgan and Lilienthal, both of whom were ambitious and driven (Gilbert 2015). But the larger issue was their differing conceptions of what TVA should be. Selznick described their differences and the consequences of them in great detail. Essentially Arthur Morgan saw TVA as a regional socio-economic development planning organization while Lilienthal, the public power advocate, wanted it to concentrate on electric power production and distribution for the region. Local elites in the Tennessee Valley were strong proponents of the private sector and ideologically opposed to public power. Harcourt Morgan, the only board member from the region, was suspicious of the centralizing tendencies of TVA and of the federal government in general. By August, 1933, an agreement was reached between Harcourt Morgan and Lilienthal over the objection of Arthur Morgan, whose social reconstruction concerns were disregarded. Arthur Morgan was given responsibility for TVA's general engineering program, Lilienthal was placed in charge of power development, and Harcourt Morgan placed in charge of agricultural matters. The latter consisted primarily of erosion control and production and distribution of fertilizer for soil enrichment. ⁸

Although the public articulation of grass roots democracy came mainly from Lilienthal, Selznick credits Harcourt Morgan as the source of its formulation within TVA. Harcourt Morgan was in a position to mold public support or condemnation of TVA from his long association with established institutions in the region. Selznick characterized the Harcourt Morgan - Lilienthal coalition as logrolling: Lilienthal received support for the power program in exchange for his support for Harcourt Morgan's vision of the agriculture program. Thus, Harcourt Morgan's connection with the land grant colleges, Farm Bureau, and agricultural extension services had crucial implications for the existence of TVA. He could turn the tide of popular opinion from support to antagonism or vice versa. Recognizing that the future of public power was on the line, Lilienthal was willing to delegate control of the agricultural program to Harcourt Morgan and his allies. That alignment doomed the integrated development program envisioned by Arthur Morgan. Such initiatives as self-help cooperatives, subsistence homesteading, and rural zoning were not acceptable to the land grant colleges and their extension agents, present in every county in the Tennessee Valley. TVA essentially became a producer of power and fertilizer. ⁹ FDR fired Arthur Morgan in 1938 and appointed Harcourt Morgan as chair, though Lilienthal took on the role of public spokesperson for TVA and ascended to the chair in 1941.

In 1944 Lilienthal published TVA: Democracy on the March, holding up grass roots democracy as an important innovation that reconciled the need for centralization with the ideals of democratic planning. Per Lilienthal (1944), the key to grass roots democracy was to give voice to pre-existing ‘people's institutions’ in the region. However, it was based on what Jess Gilbert has called a ‘one class view of society’, which sees corporate farmers, plantation owners, small family farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers as all having shared interests (Gilbert 2015, 28, 87). Operating under the one class view, the representatives of people's institutions who participated in TVA's grass roots democracy were extension agents, Farm Bureau officials, and the like – the organizations with which Harcourt Morgan had close ties. As one interviewee explained to Selznick in justification, ‘the extension service must deal with the landlords, but in this way we reach the “croppers”’ (Selznick 1949, 123).

Selznick called out the problem with the one class view as it shaped the TVA agricultural program. The overarching reality was that the program was in the hands of men (sic) whose attitudes and social commitments relative to Black people and to farm tenancy reflected prevailing Southern cultural biases. ‘There is evidence that the typical position of the TVA agriculturalist on (Blacks) is one of white superiority. … On the problem of land tenancy, the problem is one of paternalism, with the assumption that landlords should ‘take care of’ their tenants’ (Selznick 1949, 112). Given those attitudes and commitments, it is unsurprising that the services and benefits of the agriculture program were denied to Black farmers or that tenant farmers and sharecroppers – Black or white – received benefits only through the owners of the land on which they farmed.

In sum, Lilienthal, Harcourt Morgan, and TVA more broadly put the agriculture program in the hands of Tennessee Valley agricultural elites as a way of making peace with a major segment of local institutions and heading off opposition to the public power program. They believed the local elites had a common interest with the agricultural community in general and could speak for it. However, grass roots democracy operating through these ‘people's institutions’ molded TVA's policies on farm tenancy and on the problems of Black farmers, excluding the views of a wide swath of the agricultural community, the least well-off, and blocking them from the benefits of TVA programs.

In his major theoretical contribution, Selznick characterized TVA's grass roots democracy as informal co-optation, in contrast to formal co-optation. Formal co-optation involves what we usually think of as public participation, bringing citizens formally into the administrative apparatus of a public organization, ‘sharing of the public symbols or administrative burdens of authority, and consequently public responsibility, without the transfer of substantive power’ (Selznick 1949, 261). Selznick saw formal co-optation as a method of control, an attempt to ‘organize the mass, to change an undifferentiated and unreliable citizenry into a structured, readily accessible public’ (Selznick 1949, 219). ¹⁰ Informal co-optation is the opposite. It occurs when an organization responds to threats from external entities by ceding some degree of control to those entities, in order to bolster its chances of survival, which the agency must do ‘in the shadowland of informal interaction’ to avoid undermining ‘the legitimacy of [its] formal authority’ (Selznick 1949, 261). Thus, according to Selznick the ideals of grass roots democracy were at variance with the actual behaviour of TVA.

TVA and the Grass Roots was widely reviewed at the time of its publication. The implications of Selznick's analysis of grass roots democracy and co-optation were evaluated from several perspectives. Most agreed with Selznick that TVA's grass roots democracy was a stratagem rather than a philosophy, with informal co-optation as an unintended consequence. University of Chicago political scientist Herman Pritchett and distinguished public administration scholar Wallace Sayre (Cornell, CCNY, Columbia) were especially impressed with Selznick's theoretical formulations. Pritchett (1949) pointed to Selznick's contribution to understanding the actual behaviour of organizations, emphasizing that as the TVA agricultural program became hostage to local agricultural elites and largely adopted their biased views, it was unable to deal with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs directed at less affluent farmers, such as the Farm Security Administration and Soil Conservation Service. Similarly, Sayre commented that ‘the grass roots doctrine of TVA … has become a protective ideology providing a cover for the fact that one of its major programs has been delegated to … an influential outside group’ (Sayre 1949, 1032).

Planning theorist Rexford Tugwell and his University of Chicago planning program colleague Edward Banfield used their review (Tugwell and Banfield 1950) to expand on Selznick's analysis, concentrating on the implications of ‘grass roots democracy’ for the ability of public organizations to act in the public interest. They began by highlighting Selznick's conclusion that the official doctrine concealed the unintended consequence of informal co-optation: it actually reversed TVA's democratic intent and put power in the hands of hostile outsiders. Tugwell and Banfield wryly observed of the local agricultural elites with whom TVA shared power, ‘it would be more accurate to speak of them as grass-tops than grass-roots organizations’ (Tugwell and Banfield 1950, 51). They commended Selznick for his accurate appraisal of the grass roots approach. ‘We ought to see the social structure in which administration is carried on as it actually is, not as we wish it were’ (Tugwell and Banfield 1950, 54).

Tugwell and Banfield didn’t leave it at that, however. They went on to discuss the actuality of the social structure of agriculture and its implications.

‘To think of farmers as equal sons of the soil is absurd. The class and caste differences which exist within most farming communities are very marked. In the South grass-roots democracy can only mean the exercise of the powers of government by the white planters; elsewhere it must mean control by and for the prosperous farmers who have hired men to do their work while they go to committee meetings’. (Tugwell and Banfield 1950, 54)

And even if these inequalities did not exist, they were concerned about entrusting public policy to farmers as a special interest, arguing that city people were no less concerned with agriculture. ‘Grass-roots planning is a contradiction in terms, for planning can take place only from a perspective which includes the whole social organism’ (Tugwell and Banfield 1950, 54).

Specific to TVA, but thinking about planning and public administration in general, Tugwell and Banfield maintained that democratic administration must begin with a central authority strong enough to make local democracy possible. ‘It cannot be done by local associations composed of the very people whose vested interest must be relinquished’ (Tugwell and Banfield 1950, 54).

To sum up, Selznick's analysis and the reviews of his work support important observations about the behaviour of planning institutions, the formal rules and informal norms that define ‘the way the game is played’ (North 2005, 48). It is helpful to think of them in terms of TVA's official doctrine. First, the notion of managerial autonomy, allowing the responsible agency the freedom to make significant decisions on its own, has appeal. However, autonomy can be illusory. The problem, of course, is in the danger from the unintended consequences of co-optation. Speaking for TVA, Lilienthal (1944) claims autonomy for the organization. Selznick disputes that, convincingly showing how co-optation has undermined TVA's mission to act in the public interest.

This is because, second, the apparent partnership between TVA and pre-existing ‘people's institutions’ is misleading. There is a view that TVA is acting on behalf of ‘the public interest’ because co-optation reinforces the impression that the interest of local elites is the public interest, failing to note race, class, and similar biases. Thus, the partnership is between TVA and a powerful minority rather than the community as a whole. And even then, power is not equitably shared, with local elites exercising authority over spheres of concern to them.

Finally, co-optation put the lie to the notion of decentralization, under which TVA would coordinate the work of other relevant programs, enabling them to deal with the resources of the area as a unified whole. Co-optation led TVA to abandon its mission of comprehensive regional development planning. Instead, it became a fertilizer manufacturer and power generation and distribution company.

In sum, Selznick, with help from other commentators and interpreters, refutes Lilienthal's concept of centralized authority implemented through decentralized administration working with ‘people's institutions’. But the claim by Tugwell and Banfield that centralization is a necessary precursor to true democracy has its own problems. Can centralized authority empower the local underclass or is it more likely that centralized authorities will seek power and control for themselves, over both local elites and local underclasses?

This brings us back to Friedmann's questions regarding the ‘correct’ institutions for planning. What is the nature of the public interest, how can it be identified, and how should planning be organized to respond to various claims to speak for it?

Relevance for Today

Selznick showed us that participation per se isn’t enough. ‘Grass roots democracy’ indeed promoted participation, but in a way that led to co-optation by a singular interest. Can planning institutions give voice to the multiple interests that need to be heard from? Two types of analyses have emerged in recent decades. Both follow in the empirical tradition of Selznick and other mid-20^th century planning scholars. One focuses on the post-TVA experience of rural regional development planning, the continuing significance of high modernism and centralization and the continuing concern that it is anti-democratic. That work has been largely historical and descriptive, aiming to build a conceptual framework much as Selznick did.

A second approach has been much more behavioural or practice oriented, tracking the shifts in urban and regional planning scholarship from participatory to collaborative planning and governance, and the advancement of equity planning and extra-institutional insurgency. As planning has acknowledged the reality of multiple and often conflicting interests in many public issues, scholars have described and assessed efforts to bring competing viewpoints, ‘stakeholders’, into the planning process; and in complementary fashion, scholars have advocated practices for stakeholder representation, capacity building, and empowerment.

We take up each of these approaches in turn.

Modernization and Its Discontents

Selznick's negation of Lilienthal's claims for grass roots democracy did not put an end to the high modernism-democracy debate and how it applies to planning institutions. The quarrel did not represent warring camps so much as competing impulses regarding how development should proceed. Speaking for modernism, Lilienthal (1944, 120) promoted efficiency, ‘the great potentialities for well-being of the machine and technology and science’,  … faith in ‘the experts – the technicians and managers’. In contrast is the view that development must be based on local knowledge, democratic debate, and community. As Arthur Morgan (1942, 12) put it, the local community is ‘the seed bed from which a new order would have to grow’. Interrogation of those competing impulses has continued into the first decades of this century. Three general positions have emerged. ¹¹ One is that modernism, in the form of ‘big government’, is important to democracy. A second is that modernism is unstoppable, a steamroller that, whatever its successes, demolishes local societies. A third view puts modernism and the search for community in tension with one another. To explicate the current status of thinking about modernist institutions we consider one important contemporary exemplar of each of these positions.

We begin with the work of rural sociologist Jess Gilbert, who has made an all-encompassing study of the processes and consequences of New Deal rural development planning. Gilbert pushes back against the view that modernism and democracy are incompatible. ‘It is a core task of this book (Planning Democracy, Gilbert's magnum opus) to counter Selznick's and Tugwell and Banfield's negative assessment of agricultural cooperative planning’ (Gilbert 2015, 3). His starting point is that ‘big government can democratize society …, that big states actually have democratized civil society’ (Gilbert 2009, 3, 4). He acknowledges the problems of TVA-style democratic planning and builds his case by looking at the planning and community development efforts of the USDA during the 1930s and 1940s. He focuses particularly on the work of key ‘agrarian intellectuals’ who designed and staffed the USDA activities. ¹²

Gilbert calls the USDA approach low modernism, in contrast with the technocratic, top-down approach of high modernism. Low modernism combines science and rational planning with local knowledge and culture. He tells the story of its implementation through a reorganization of the USDA in the late 1930s. From early 1939 to late 1941 the USDA's Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE) worked with state extension services to develop adult education, action research, and participatory planning programs in nearly 2200 counties across the U.S. However, as with TVA, the Farm Bureau Federation and its allies opposed the effort and by Spring 1942 they succeeded in convincing Congress to prohibit the BAE from engaging in planning.

Gilbert welcomes Selznick's observation that the USDA planning program had gone much farther than TVA in developing citizen participation, but he takes issue with Selznick regarding the depth of that involvement. ¹³ Selznick, along with Tugwell and Banfield, saw the USDA participation as limited to administrative involvement. Gilbert's view is that low modernism was making impressive progress as an approach to rural development when it was killed by politics. ¹⁴

It is of course impossible to know what might have happened with low modernism in the absence of so much political hostility. Nevertheless, the agrarian intellectuals recognized the importance of both high modernism and inclusive, meaningful participation and sought ways to blend them. Gilbert thinks they succeeded. Political scientist/anthropologist James C. Scott is not so sanguine.

Scott is a specialist in development studies. His work has centred on the ways regions and their communities push back against the constraints of high modernism. ¹⁵ To reprise the context, the strong central government associated with high modernism was a response to the problems presented by urbanism and industrialization. The purpose of the high modern state was the improvement of society as a whole, through top-down scientific management and rational planning. Advocates of high modernism assumed that a technologically advanced social order designed along rational, scientific lines was self-evidently superior to anything else. However, the organizational and technical imperatives of the new scientific knowledge clashed directly with the existing order. The high modernists could not recognize social practices other than those derived from their own conventions, dismissing local skills, knowledge, and insights as primitive and useless in the modern context (Scott 1998, 2006). The aim of improving society entailed promotion of a new cultural unity across the nation, overwhelming local cultures and replacing them with a simplified and rationalized national social order. It imposed unwelcome changes in people's work habits, living patterns, moral conduct, indeed their worldview.

Scott acknowledges the successes of high modernism in providing large numbers of people with freedom from want, scarcity, and natural calamity. ‘We are beneficiaries, in countless ways, of various high modernist schemes’ (Scott 2006, 9). As well, he accepts that the state can sometimes play an emancipatory role, much as Tugwell and Banfield advocated (Scott 2012). But he is concerned about the totalizing, authoritarian tendencies of high modernism, its confidence in the correctness of its own schemes.

For Scott, efforts to improve society must take into account local conditions and the ways people explain those conditions to themselves, how they make decisions and act on their own behalf. Through meaningful democratic participation, what Scott terms extra-institutional politics, ordinary people can autonomously and spontaneously create insights and actions rooted in local history and customary practice (Scott 2012). But the hegemony of strong central government associated with high modernism undermines the possibility of mutuality and cooperation associated with extra-institutional politics. As much as Gilbert might want to blend high modernism and participation, Scott sees it as impossible because high modernism has devalued or banished meaningful participation, leaving marginalized peoples with no option other than to push back where they can.

Historian Daniel Immerwahr frames the discussion somewhat differently. In his perspective the debate is between ‘the urge to modernize and the quest for community’ (Immerwahr 2015, 4). He sees modernist ideology in the same way as Gilbert and Scott, industrialization and urbanization that involve centralization, standardization, simplification, and the like. But by juxtaposing it with community he posits an expansive alternative, communitarianism, that includes not only participatory democracy but efforts to shore up small-scale social solidarity and encourage civic action at the local level that embeds politics and economics within the life of the community.

According to Immerwahr, the urge to modernize and the quest for community have alternated as point and counterpoint since the 1930s. Still, there has been a marked asymmetry between them. They were not evenly matched in their institutional expression, there was a structural momentum favoring modernism. In Immerwahr's apt metaphor, the modernizers have had gravity on their side. New technologies and new forms of social organization proliferated. People moved to cities, organized the economy around industry rather than agriculture, and accepted the growth of state power. In response, supporters of communitarianism feel that social institutions have grown too large to be managed effectively. They identify scale as the fundamental issue and hope to craft approaches that support personalized, face-to-face community.

Immerwahr traces the history of the modernization-communitarianism question in the U.S. through the 20^th century, tracking its movement from the New Deal to international development schemes, and back to the War on Poverty and its successor programs. In doing so he rejects Scott's conclusion that modernization is an unstoppable juggernaut than can be resisted only around the edges, and he is not optimistic about Gilbert's desire to resuscitate the low modernist vision. Rather, he asks the shapers of planning institutions to take seriously the idea of community, with meaningful participation as only one aspect of a more robust concept.

From Participation to Collaboration, Engagement, and Insurgency

We now turn to the planning field's past half-century of effort towards giving voice to citizens and multiple interests, and the degree to which it has represented an institutional perspective. We begin with the early years of the institutionalization of citizen participation and critiques concerning citizen power, followed by the rise of collaborative, stakeholder involvement, and governance that are prominent today. We also consider the field's parallel treatment of social equity, especially scholars’ skepticism of communicative rationality and efforts to address political power and the needs of specific groups. Last, we report recent studies taking an institutional perspective of planning outcomes and the extent to which they considered democracy and social equity.

Formal citizen participation in urban planning began with President Lyndon Johnson's ‘War on Poverty’ through the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which established numerous Community Action Agencies (CAAs) and their goal of ‘maximum feasible participation’ of local residents and groups (DeFilippis and Saegert 2007). Within a few years, however, Moynihan (1969) declared that these efforts created ‘maximum feasible misunderstanding’. In the same year, Arnstein (1969) introduced her renowned ‘ladder of citizen participation’, critiquing the CAAs and the Model Cities Program (established in 1966) as lacking real citizen influence over decision making, and at worst resulting in manipulation, placation, and tokenism of the less powerful segments of society. As the expansion of government-convened citizen participation continued into the 1970s, such as through the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, and the 1980s, in response to states’ growth management legislation, the result was an atmosphere of conflict.

Out of that conflict, collaborative planning arose in the 1980s, derived from the practice of negotiation and its field of alternative dispute resolution, with the planner acting as mediator (Susskind and Ozawa 1984). As defined early on by Gray (1989), collaborative processes convened people representing diverse interest groups with a stake in the problem (stakeholders) to work together, face-to-face, toward a consensus based on interdependence. Similar to citizen participation, the institutional aspects of collaborative planning have concerned formalizing specific processes and creating collaborative entities, such as task forces. Since the 1990s, the theoretical frameworks for collaboration, and by incorporation citizen participation, have been primarily communicative rationality and governance (Healey 1996; Innes 1995).

Governance is an abstract concept connected to collaboration theory. From a problem-solving standpoint, theorists have argued that society has become so diverse, and its concerns so complex, that government alone is insufficient to the task. The expanded response, governance, is a system of interacting public, private, and civic actors that are decentralized, yet horizontally and vertically integrated (e.g., Morrison 2006). In Collaborative Planning (1997), Patsy Healey ambitiously sought to understand regional governance through ‘an institutionalist approach’, explaining the roles of various societal structures, their power dynamics, and collaboration's potential to build intellectual and social capital. Other scholars have stayed more conceptual, relying on theories of complex, adaptive systems and networks (e.g., Innes and Booher 2010; Potts et al. 2016). Unfortunately, the biases toward process and abstraction have meant that scholars have seldom evaluated the societal and substantive outcomes of participation and collaboration, such as social equity, and they have missed broader institutional factors, including organizational missions, activities, and specific arrangements.

In The Just City, Susan Fainstein (2010) critiqued participation/collaboration theorists’ ‘intense focus on the process of communication…[which] fails to confront adequately the initial discrepancy of power, offers few clues to overcoming co-optation or resistance to reform, does not sufficiently address some of the major weaknesses of democratic theory, and diverts discussion from the substance of policy’ (p. 24). ¹⁶ Alternatively, she proposed the ‘just city’ concept to focus attention on the structural outcomes of planning, particularly diversity, democracy, and equity. Related, Krumholz (2019) defined equity planning as ‘a process by which professional city and regional planners plan the physical city but also, in their day-to-day practice, try to move resources, political power, and participation toward the disadvantaged…’ (p. 1). Procedurally, Krumholz initially drew inspiration from Paul Davidoff's (1965) advocacy planning (Sager 2022). Whereas Davidoff's advocacy planners advanced civic pluralism by representing disadvantaged groups from the outside, putting their needs first, Krumholz distinguished equity planners as advocating for the disadvantaged from within existing planning institutions (Sager 2022). Further, Krumholz noted that equity planning drew upon, yet split from, the field of community development: ‘Johnson's War on Poverty essentially reassigned responsibility for the poor from mainstream planning to the growing subfield of community development…[which by the 2000s was] focused on building assets for the poor, developing mixed-income housing, revitalizing commercial corridors…’ (pp. 3–4). ¹⁷ Thus, in splitting from community development, equity planning has sidestepped institutional considerations.

This brings us to equity planning's influence on today's participatory practices. As summarized by Lauria and Slotterback (2021), practice has taken power redistribution to heart, moving ‘from citizen participation to public engagement’. Current public engagement incorporates participant capacity-building and empowerment (reminiscent of advocacy planning), cross-cultural communication, and co-production (e.g., Roberts and Kelly 2019; Watson 2014). These practices are increasingly informed by knowledge of specific groups’ needs and systemic oppression, and they are guided by the goals of righting wrongs through reparative planning (e.g., Anguelovski 2013; Fainstein and Servon 2005; Thomas 1998; Williams 2020).

Fainstein's (2009) remarks are telling as to why more attention has been placed on practice and less on reforming existing planning institutions: ‘The movement toward a normative vision of the city requires the development of counter-institutions capable of reframing issues in broad terms and of mobilizing organizational and financial resources to fight for their aims’ (p. 35, emphasis added). Most aligned with this view are radical planning (Huq 2020) and insurgent planning, in which people ‘invent new [participation] spaces or re-appropriate old ones where they can invoke their citizenship rights to further their counter-hegemonic interests’ (Miraftab 2009, 35).

Finally, to further probe the perceived gap in planning theory concerning institutional design and its impact on democracy and equity, we investigated aspects of Learning from Arnstein's Ladder that focused on institutionalization and power redistribution. As well, we conducted a keyword literature search in the chance that we missed some recent articles. For this, we searched Google Scholar, focusing on the past five years (2018 to February 2023) using ‘planning’, ‘regional’, ‘participatory’, or ‘equity’ crossed with ‘institutions’, ‘administration’, ‘organizations’, ‘governance’, or ‘democracy’; and we searched for citations of TVA and the Grass Roots. We also directly searched for these terms in the major US-based and international planning and public administration journals. The search was limited but sufficed to get a sense of the type and prevalence of such studies.

The Learning from Arnstein's Ladder chapter most relevant to the institutional perspective is a case study of a Detroit community development corporation ‘align(ing) with government and developers to facilitate the redevelopment and gentrification of targeted areas’, a situation which led to the insurgency of a minority neighbourhood (Laskey and Nicholls 2021, 205). To reach this understanding, the authors applied social-political theories of urban growth regime, systemic constraints (the ‘iron cage’), and institutional isomorphism (similar to Selznick's view of formal co-optation).

Although other chapters were less explicit in analyzing institutional behaviour, Lauria and Slotterback nonetheless concluded that ‘…we must be intentional in centering issues of justice in public engagement, including who frames the issues to be addressed and the structures of advantage or disadvantage that impact who participates and how…To do this we must be more politically astute while working within these entrenched structures…’ (p. 328).

The keyword literature search identified only a handful of articles demonstrating interest in an institutional perspective for understanding planning outcomes: Grodach (2022) examined three decades of San Francisco governance to reveal how government and non-governmental intermediaries interacted to create policy narratives that shaped industrial land use planning. Skuzinski, Weinreich, and Hernandez (2022) developed the concept of governance topology (based on polycentricity and fragmentation) and illustrated it for transit systems in the Chicagoland region to enable future statistical analysis of how governance affects public infrastructure efficiency, equity, and effectiveness. And Clements et al. (2023) reviewed the literature on infrastructure governance to find that it emphasized ‘integration’ and neglected ‘societal end goals… regarding sustainability, equity and justice, and public interests’ (p. 80). We were not able to identify studies directly examining planning institutions’ impacts on democracy and equity.

Through this account, we have found that procedural theories of participation, collaboration, engagement, etc. and the complexities of governance are well represented in the planning literature, yet since Selznick's time there has been a gap in understanding how power acts through specific planning institutions and how their design affects democracy and equity. Barring a few significant exceptions (Healey and Fainstein), the urban and regional planning field has largely ignored institutional analysis for the past 75 years. ¹⁸ Yet, studies taking Selznick's methodological approach, combining theory, situational details, and critique, have great promise to advance the field towards more institutionally aware, and thus meaningful, democratic practices and reforms.

Discussion and Conclusion

The purpose of this paper is to appraise the ongoing relevance of Selznick's pioneering work. It takes on added meaning in light of the recent call for the ‘urgent need to reinvent rural planning for the twenty-first century’ (Scott, Gallent, and Gkartzios 2019, 1). The explanatory power of Selznick's study and more recent analyses of modernization suggest that reinvention requires attention along four lines.

First, the high modernist approach and associated co-optation has had particular impacts on the effort to move from participation to collaboration in rural planning, shedding light on the problems of both formal and informal co-optation. Formal rules of participation meant to give voice to vulnerable populations in public decisions, can undermine their independence of thought, formally co-opting them. Similarly, powerful elites can capture the public decision process, informally co-opting it. In either case, collaboration is impossible.

Second, high modernism, built on scientific management, simplification and rationalization, is not congenial to efforts with goals across multiple dimensions. As the clash of ideas between Lilienthal and Arthur Morgan showed, TVA's original aim of broad-based community development with social, economic, and ecological goals was beyond reach and the more limited, modernist economic development scheme prevailed.

Third, as Selznick found with TVA, and critics of modernism affirm, planning has no fixed object. It needs to be understood in specific contexts, each with its own characteristic traits, goals, and problems, which change over time. Pertinently, as demonstrated with TVA, the modernist ideal assumes a unitary public interest – definable, understandable, and consensual. This proved untenable but even if agreement on the public interest had been possible, the inequitable distribution of power resulting from co-optation, both formal and informal, left control in the hands of an influential few: Only the powerful had power.

Finally, underlying these points is Selznick's role in laying the foundations for the empirical study of planning practice and institutions, and the theoretical developments that have followed. From deliberative and communicative approaches and the ‘collaborative turn’ that followed (Innes 1995), to more recent studies of planning's relationship to democracy (e.g., Huq 2020), we have learned that the search for causes and solutions will be endless. For example, how can the governance system be adjusted to support better collaboration? If we implement effective collaboration processes, what other parts of the system might ‘give way’ to compensate? And any adjustments in response will ripple through the system, producing further adaptations and need for responses.

What does this mean for the future of planning scholarship? Because of this empirical experience, planning has not abandoned hope that its practice can be perfected. Rather, the field has recognized that in practice knowledge is limited and fragmentary, that there can never be a final, once-and-for-all, ‘correct’ planning process leading to a ‘true’ solution to a planning problem. Planning problems need to be resolved over and over, for continuously evolving contexts. And the field is comfortable with that reality.