Congratulations on the Chester Rapkin Best Paper Award in the Journal of Planning Education and Research! What inspired you to write this paper?

So this paper is called the hidden benefits of facilitated dialogue and it’s actually inspired by a handful of things. The first is, it was really truly inspired by Kevin Lynch’s work on spatial reasoning and urban planning from 50,55 years ago. And the idea here is that we can use the ideas of how humans think about space and scale to understand how they address the spatial complexities of environmental planning problems. So in this case on Cape Cod, they were focused on the mismatch between watersheds and towns and the relationship between how water moved and and flows across the landscape of Cape Cod but also how it’s not aligned with any single jurisdictional entity. So it makes governing wastewater in this case a really challenging phenomenon. The second thing that inspired this paper was the idea that in a public planning meetings facilitators and planners often serving as facilitators often are doing more than just say managing speaking cues or keeping people from screaming at each other. In a lot of cases what they’re doing is they’re helping stakeholders express their their judgments about what they think is the best course of action, what they think about the nature of the problem, and how do folks come together to to support a shared solution to what is essentially a wicked problem. And then the third thing and I think the most important thing that inspired this work was my observations of the professional facilitators who were hired to run all of the public planning meetings on Cape Cod. So in many ways, I took my cues and inspiration directly from them from watching them work uh with the stakeholders engaged in the planning process on Cape Cod.

What are the takeaways from your paper?

One of the key takeaways, the biggest key takeaways from this paper is the idea that we don’t necessarily need to rescale governance every time we’re confronted with an environmental system that doesn’t align with the jurisdictional system. Right, so we often will argue that oh hey we need to govern at a watershed scale or we need to govern at a regional scale and that might erase or erode the local autonomy of folks closest to the problems. What really often we might be better doing is embracing the spatial complexity, working with local stakeholders, and figuring out a way to to create, you know, collective action or cooperative arrangements between folks on the ground so they can be better enable to work together. In the context of this paper what I found is that folks do this work kind of innately. The stakeholders on Cape Cod were really effective at thinking across say local scales up to regional and global scales and the facilitators were really dialed into to drawing that kind of reasoning that cross scale reasoning out from the stakeholders. So rather than allowing stakeholders to think only in a town boundary kind of way, getting them to think across town boundaries and think between the sort of the scale of the whole Cape all the way down to the scale of individual water flows say on a piece of property. The last key takeaway has to do with how we train facilitators or how we go about training facilitators. So one of the things this paper does is it points to stakeholder judgments as being a key factor that facilitators should be attending to as they as they work within public planning meetings. So from a training and teaching standpoint this paper has been very instrumental in terms of rethinking or reshaping how I go about teaching. Drawing in videos from planning meetings so that students can see what’s going on. They can stop, they can rewind, they can replay the videos and think about and talk about how the facilitator’s work are supporting stakeholder judgments.

How do you plan to move this research forward?

This research has already led to two more publications focused on different aspects of the process on Cap Cod. One paper that was published in Planning Theory and Practice looked at the role that uh planning support systems or digital planning tools played in shaping stakeholder judgments about space and scale in the same way that this paper looked at the role of facilitators play. And then the third paper which was published in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management sort of took a comprehensive look at how spatial reasoning or the spatial reasoning of the stakeholders on Cape Cod contributed to their efforts to promote a new regime for collective and cooperative action between the different towns on Cape Cod, how they navigated the the sort of the bureaucratic changes that were necessary to allow cooperative actions between towns to be permitted, how they got credit for that work, and how ultimately all of that work is going to lead to improved water quality in the estuaries that that ring the cave. This paper has also served as a foundation for research that I’ve done on facilitation during the pandemic and so I talked to a lot of planners working as facilitators as they navigated the transition from hosting face-to-face public meetings to meeting the public online and really looked at how their work as facilitators supporting judgments changed because of the change in platform moving from face to-face communication to online communication. It’s also served as a foundation for work that’s just getting started in Boston Massachusetts where we’re looking at how stakeholders can work together to develop plans for green infrastructure that can mitigate environmental injustices in some traditionally marginalized and underfunded and undersupported neighborhoods in the city of Boston. This paper’s also changed the way that I approach teaching facilitation and I’ve rolled it into the my classes on public meetings, public participation and facilitation.

Anything else you would like to share about the award?

I couldn’t have this paper without funding and support from the National Science Foundation so I was lucky to be awarded a an IGERT Trainee Fellowship under the Landscape Ecological and Anthropogenic Processes Program at the University of Illinois Chicago. I also received funding from The Institute of Environmental and Science and Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago. They provided funding that covered my travel from Chicago to Boston to collect all this data back in 2013. I also want to thank Moira Zellner, Charlie Hoch, and Josh Radinsky, who really provided oversight and guidance from the very beginning of this project from the initial conceptualization of it all the way up through reviewing drafts of this paper and helping me through the review process and supporting my work kind of all the way along. I also want to thank the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Journal of Planning Education and Research for honoring my work with this award. It really truly is an incredible honor to be included on a list of authors who I have many of whom I’ve looked up to and aspired to be like for a number of years now. I want to thank the review committee for the Rapkin Awards so that’s Yasminah Beebeejuan and Jeffrey Lowe this year and I really want to thank them for taking the time to comb through what was surely an incredible mountain of really great work for my colleagues and friends in the field of planning.