Dear Güneş

>> Terry, I would appreciate if you could provide those references you have
mentioned although I believe none of those techniques are applied in my
city.

The following is snipped from a message I'd submitted to the transforming
google group.

Cheers,

Terry

====



I've been involved in community consultation and related issues at various
times since the late 70s. ...From memory, community consultation in planning
and design (along with critiques of the participatory design process) came
under serious scrutiny and critique in the late seventies to the early
1990s. There was a substantial literature on it at that time in the UK, US
and Canada as well as Africa (in the development and technology transfer
literatures). Other related literatures with similar discussions and
findings besides community participation in planning included early
analyses in problems of collaborative decision making, computer supported
cooperative work, representation, community-based governance and market
research.

The critiques that spring to mind off the top of my head were on grounds
of:
 equity of constituent groups representation, misrepresentation, differences
in relative power between proponents and public, graft and corruption
ranging from financial bribery to the sorts of pressures that come onto
consultation firms wanting to get the answers funders want in order to get
future work, communities being used as a pressure tool between developers
and government agencies (used by both sides), planning used (under the
apparent sweetness of community participation in design) as an oppressive
force to control difficult communities, problems of vested interests,
manipulation of community participation in design used as a means of
reinforcing gender bias, community participation being undertaken in a
biased fashion to ensure social success for financially involved
constituencies at the general expense of the public, problems of selecting
representative groups, problems of ensuring power issues are managed
equitably, problems ensuring that representative groups aren't disadvantaged
by the processes (e.g. professions can generally use the participation
processes much more powerfully than (say) indigenous groups), avoiding those
with influence gaining more influence, differences between affected and
affecting constituencies and 'stakeholders', disempowerment, the problem of
the nil response, closure - as exclusion of some groups from benefits......

Similar patterns of problematic issues are found in participatory design,
focus groups and a vaiety of other smaller scale community participation
processes in shaping the future.

I've just spent a few minutes scanning Google searching on community
participation and was surprised to find:

1) An almost complete absence of the critical material from the 70s to 90s

2) many community consultation projects that I would expect the classic
early criticisms apply being apparently regarded as unproblematic

3) government and professional guides to community consultation that seem to
uncritically regard the process as easy and without problems

4) apparent reinvention by current authors of the earlier findings from the
70s -90s!


An example of the latter is
http://www.social-capital.net/file.php?SK=9f8ffb37148c99bfe6616cf01ae2506e&R
=046ce376c1787911473d04d5bb454d24 This argues many of the points from the
earlier eras.


I did a quick search on Amazon ( community consultation planning) to find
that all of the relevant books under this search seemed to be out of print!

A classic area that reveals many of the issues is community consultation
involving things that affect or affected by young people. Some of the issues
are described in

http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/16_2/16_2_11_ConsultationToSocialLearni
ng.pdf see also Rob White's work on public space consultation from
Australia.

On a different tack, I've snipped some references out of my Endnote library
that relate to critiques of participatory/community consultation design
methods..

===

ANOP. (1987). A Survey of Community Attitudes to Issues Affecting Young
People. Canberra: AGPS.
Bell, C., & Newby, H. (1971). Community studies: an introduction to the
sociology of communities. London: Allen and Unwin.
Branch, Hooper, Thompson, & Chreighton. (1984). Guide to Social Assessment.
Boulder: Westview Press.
Brown, S. (1998). Understanding youth and crime : listening to youth?
Buckingham [England] ; Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Byrne, E. F. (1989). Globalisation and community: in search of transnational
justice. In E. F. Byrne & J. C. Pitt (Eds.), Technological transformation:
contextual and conceptual implications (Vol. 5, pp. 141-161). Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Carley, M. J. (1983). A review of selected methods. In K. Finsterbuch, L. G.
Llewellyn & C. P. Wolf (Eds.), Social impact assessment methods (pp. 35-54).
Beverly Hills: Sage.
Community and Youth Training Services, & Service, F. C. Y. (n.d.). "Not just
a quick fix": A dynamic strategy to address Youth Issues in the City of
Fremantle. Fremantle: The City of Fremantle.
Cox, F. M., Erlich, Rothman, & Tropman (Eds.). (1984). Tactics and
Techniques of Community Practice (2nd ed.). USA: F. E. Peacock Publishers,
Inc.
Giddens, A., & Held, D. (Eds.). (1987). Classes, Power and Conflict:
Classical and Contemporary Debates. London: MacMillan Education Ltd.
Gusfield, J. R. (1975). Community: a critical response. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Hope, A., & Timmel, S. (1996). Training for Transformation: A Handbook for
Community Workers. Gweru, Zimbabe: Mambo Press.
Hutnik, N. (1985). Aspects of identity in a multi-ethnic society. New
Community, 12(2), 298-309.
Local Government Association of Western Australia (Inc). (1988). Models of
change: Community service models for local government. Perth, Western
Australia: Local Government Association of Western Australia (Inc).
Maywald, S. (1989). Consulting with your community: A guide to effective and
equitable community consultation techniques for local government and
associated organisations. Adelaide: Local Government Community Services
Association of South Australia.
Midgley, J., Hall, A., Hardiman, M., & Narine, D. (1986). Community
Participation, Social Development and the State. London: Methuen & Co.
Parkin, F. (1987). Social Closure and Class Formation. In A. Giddens & D.
Held (Eds.), Classes, Power and Conflict: Classical and Contemporary
Debates. London: MacMillan Education Ltd.
Richards, L. (1990). Nobody's Home: Dreams and Realities in a New Suburb.
Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Sarkissian, W., Perglut, D., & Ballard, E. (Eds.). (1986). The Community
Participation Handbook: resources for public involvement in the planning
process. NSW: Impacts Press, Roseville.
Staub-Bernasconi, S. (1992). Social Action, Empowerment and Social Work-An
Integrative Theoretical Framework for Social Work and Social Work with
Groups. Social Work With Groups: a journal of community and clinical
practice, 14(3/4), 35-51.
Stilger, R. (1999). Northwest Regional Facilitators. 1999, from
http://www.resilientcommunities.org/
Wilson, P. R. (1991). Avoiding the dangers and pitfalls of community
policing: ten questions that need to be answered. In S. McKillop & J. Vernon
(Eds.), The police and the community in the 1990s (pp. 1-4). Canberra, ACT:
Ausytralian Institute of Criminology.