This article puts the ‘communicative turn’ in planning into conversation with polycentric governance to offer three lessons for communicative and collaborative planning. These lessons probe the nexus of institutional-cultural contexts and (1) stakeholders’ agency to initiate, enter, and exit discursive arenas, (2) incentives and interactions among actors, and (3) information and power (a)symmetries within communicative-action-based planning processes. The empirical moments for these lessons are evinced using an ecological restoration planning project in a Global South context. The conceptual and empirical dialogues foreground Southern critiques of the limits of normative planning concepts, especially when they are decoupled from historically contingent asymmetric power structures and socio-economic differences within planning cultures.
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