Policy Planning and the Design and Use of Forums, Arenas, and Courts

In complex, shared-power settings, planners are unlikely to have much direct impact on action or underlying ‘bedrock’ social structures. What they can influence is the ideas, rules, modes, media, and methods that link action and structure in shared-power settings. In turn, these links will have a dramatic effect on which decisions, issues, conflicts, and policy preferences are discussed, decided, and sanctioned. The characteristic shared-power settings are forums for discussion, arenas for decisions, and courts for management of residual conflicts and enforcement of the underlying norms in the system. Policy planning thus can be seen as the intentional design and use of forums, arenas, and courts in order to produce desired symbolic and substantive policy outcomes.