Designing Public Participation Processes

The purpose of this Theory to Practice article is to present a systematic, cross-disciplinary, and accessible synthesis of relevant research and to offer explicit evidence-based design guidelines to help practitioners design better participation processes. From the research literature, the authors glean suggestions for iteratively creating, managing, and evaluating public participation activities. The article takes an evidence-based and design science approach, suggesting that effective public participation processes are grounded in analyzing the context closely, identifying the purposes of the participation effort, and iteratively designing and redesigning the process accordingly

Leveraging open-source tools for collaborative macro-energy system modeling efforts

The authors are founding team members of a new effort to develop an Open Energy Outlook for the United States. The effort aims to apply best practices of policy-focused energy system modeling, ensure transparency, build a networked community, and work toward a common purpose: examining possible US energy system futures to inform energy and climate policy efforts. Individual author biographies can be found on the project website: https://openenergyoutlook.org/. DeCarolis et al. articulate the benefits of forming collaborative teams with a wide array of disciplinary and domain expertise to conduct analysis with macro-energy system models. Open-source models, tools, and datasets underpin such efforts by enabling transparency, accessibility, and replicability among team members and with the broader modeling community

Democracy in Action?: NIMBY as Impediment to Equitable Affordable Housing Siting

Effective democracy requires participation. However, the history of urban politics, housing policy, and neighborhood revitalization has demonstrated that wealth and power often overshadow participation and community activism. Proponents of equity planning and advocacy planning in the USA have fought to include vulnerable, marginalized populations within planning decisions, yet there have been few examples of this in action. We apply Fainstein’s principles of The Just City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010) to investigate the extent to which local opposition affects affordable housing development. In doing so, we question the extent to which housing policy and planning in the USA successfully achieve the goals of equity and fairness, or whether not-in-my-backyard forces operating within (and beyond) “democratic” planning processes override those principles in siting decisions. Our results suggest that community opposition is a considerable barrier to the efficient siting of affordable housing, and propose changes to local planning and implementation strategies in order to minimize opposition and produce more equitable outcomes