Opening the black box: a civic action approach to collective mobilisations in planning research

Planning scholarship has long recognised civil society's importance for planning, yet lacks analytical tools to explain how collective action is actually coordinated. Across advocacy, communicative, agonistic, and insurgent planning traditions, scholars examine what groups pursue and whom they engage, but treat collective coordination itself as a black box, underexploring the collective coordination processes through which social advocates develop goals, choose strategies, and establish relations. This paper introduces the civic action framework to planning research, drawing on Lichterman and Eliasoph's sociological approach to collective problem-solving. The framework reveals how social advocates coordinate through culturally-patterned ‘scene styles’ like community of interest and community of identity. These scene styles filter which goals and strategies appear feasible, and which relations with other actors are deemed appropriate. By examining coordination processes directly, this approach addresses two gaps in planning scholarship: explaining how collective goals and strategies emerge, and how social advocates establish and revise relational boundaries. This approach provides analytical tools that travel across planning traditions, enabling comparative analysis of how coordination patterns shape collective mobilisation's possibilities and limitations.