How to bring institutional change to participatory urban planning – operationalizing discoursive institionalism for participatory practice of urban planning

Despite the growing prominence of participation in urban planning discourses, participatory practices often reproduce existing routines and power structures instead of transforming them. This paper addresses the persistent gap between the normative ambitions of participation and its limited institutional impact. It asks: Why does innovation in participatory formats rarely lead to institutional change in planning? To answer this question, the article employs discursive institutionalism (DI) to conceptualize institutions as orders of meaning that are stabilized or transformed through articulation. This theoretical lens allows for analysing how ideas of ‘good participation’ are negotiated and institutionalised through discourses. While DI has increasingly been applied in urban research, its conceptual use remains fragmented and methodologically underdeveloped. There is still no integrated operationalisation of the discursive mechanisms through which ideas gain institutional validity or trigger change. This paper therefore advances DI by developing an analytical framework for how discursive processes shape the persistence and transformation of participatory planning practices. Empirically, the article examines participatory urban development in the small post-industrial German town of Wittenberge, where since 2019 new collaborative formats have gained (supra-)national professional and public recognition. Drawing on qualitative interviews with administrative and civic actors and a media analysis, the study traces how local actors translate expert discourses into practice and how these translations affect institutional meanings. The findings show that institutional change in participation in urban planning is incremental, occurring through subtle shifts in discursive practices rather than formal restructuring. Building on this, the article develops an operationalisation of DI for participation in urban planning, identifying mechanisms of discursive stabilisation and transformation. The article contributes to theory and practice by (1) explaining the resilience of participation routines through discursive mechanisms, (2) identifying communicative processes that enable gradual institutional change, and (3) advances DI as a conceptual toolkit for analysing and shaping participatory planning.