Learning from Experience: Virtual Participatory Planning and Policy-making During the Pandemic
By: Dan Milz, Assistant Professor, UH Manoa Department of Urban and Regional Planning & the Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution
For the last few months, I have been studying how planners in Hawaii and across the country have shifted from face-to-face to virtual public meetings. While, like a lot of you, I would prefer it, meeting face-to-face will continue to be a challenge for the foreseeable future, so to understand how planners have been adjusting to these changing circumstances, I have been interviewing practitioners to document their experiences during this time of change. The stories I have heard are stunning reminders of the perseverance, ingenuity, and innovation of planners everywhere. My colleagues and I are currently writing up our results and will be publishing our findings in both research papers and white papers, so keep an eye out for those in the coming months.
In the meantime, the good news is that I have seen a relatively positive reception to virtual public meetings, and that is because the technology is rapidly maturing especially as people become more comfortable working online. There are also a lot of options available. Some of the tools focus on meeting synchronously, like Zoom and BlueJeans, while others support offline or asynchronous interactions, like social media. Tools like “Idea Flip” and “Mural” are fairly incredible facsimiles of our favorite tools for in-person planning meetings: flip-charts, sticky notes, and sharpies. Virtual public participation is also more flexible than physical meetings, and I am finding that that flexibility is encouraging more citizen participation than ever before. There are also environmental and financial benefits. Virtual meetings can help reduce our carbon footprint and avoid the costs of hosting larger public meetings while at the same time broadening the potential audience.
The bad news is that the Digital Divide is still a problem; not everyone has equal access. Yet, I have heard of herculean efforts by practitioners to address access by using grant funds to buy computers and hotspots for residents, and I have heard about the different ways planners have integrated different technologies to ensure that everyone has access to public meetings. Nevertheless, virtual meetings do not seem to scale well. Planners have found that it is very hard to hold a virtual meeting with a large number of attendees and still enable equal participation by all. Additionally, governance of virtual democracy is still a work in progress, and so there are not clear norms for using virtual meeting technology safely, securely, and fairly.
New opportunities for online participation seem to emerge each day. The collective experience of meeting virtually has provided planners with novel tools and stressed the significance of new skills that did not seem as important before COVID. One interviewee told us that this transition has made them realize just how awful most of our face-to-face meetings have been and that they see this moment as an important one for improving engagement in the future. This is a common sentiment. In response, planners have innovated a whole new battery of viable approaches for virtual public participation that had not been tried in the past, and this provides planners in Hawaii with the opportunity to enhance inter-island engagement going forward.
This transition has not been without threats, however. Virtual engagement can be a source of division and conflict that is hard to resolve without meeting in person. There are very real security concerns, such as data breaches and hacked meetings. More personally, Zoom or screen fatigue can impact participation and raises other issues related to accessibility. Lastly, a major threat is that planners and policy-makers would ignore this opportunity to rethink approaches for ensuring transparent, democratic decision-making.
Finally, I have observed that trust comes up a lot.
Virtual engagement requires us to put more effort on building trust and empathy. It seems to take a lot more work to build trust and empathy in virtual meetings, and it cannot be taken for granted like it can be in face to face settings because people lack the humanizing effects of food and coffee breaks. Yet, this change has inspired innovation. Practitioners are finding unique ways to make up for this loss by creating connections across screens. For example, one local practitioner told us how they will have meeting participants hold a flower up to the screen for everyone to see, and the simple act of seeing a plumeria, for instance, triggers our shared sense of smell. We all see the plumeria and the sight alone brings back the memories of all the plumerias we’ve smelled in the past. In these sorts of ways, we can all reach through our screens and claw back some of the personal contact the pandemic has taken from us. Recognizing these opportunities is important because they can help rebuild much of the trust governments have lost with the public over the years. The risk of squandering this opportunity is high if these new tools and techniques are used to exclude and marginalize leading to less transparency in decision-making in the end.
Overall, I recommend taking this time to rethink how and where governments engage the public and would emphasize maintaining virtual engagement practices into the future. What planners have learned during this time will be useful well into the future. So, now is also the time to revisit laws and policies at the state and the local level as they pertain to public meetings, to enable community boards, counties and other state agencies to try out different approaches to community engagement. Planners should continue to cultivate a suite of approaches, tools and strategies, especially those that leverage both synchronous and asynchronous modes of engagement, and engagement and participation efforts should be directly funded on an ongoing basis to support both virtual and face-to-face interactions.
I have also found that there is a need to hire and develop local expertise for public participation especially folks who are well versed in e-democracy and, now, in virtual participation. I recommend designing participatory processes with community needs and capacity in mind. While this has always been true, it is even more true now because different forms of virtual engagement may work better in different places. Some communities might be comfortable working in Zoom while an old-school call in radio show might work better in others. And, finally, I strongly recommend that planners commit to building the digital infrastructure and human capital needed to support synchronous, virtual participatory planning and policy-making. In addition to recognizing that internet access should be considered a public utility to support economic growth, it is now abundantly clear that robust, universal internet access is also necessary to sustain democratic processes.
Dan Milz is an Assistant Professor with a dual appointment in UH Manoa's Department of Urban and Regional Planning and the Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution. He teaches in the Environmental Planning and Sustainability Course Stream and in the Matsunaga Institute’s Conflict Resolution Certificate Program. He is collaborating with Atul Pokharel of NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service and Curt D. Gervich and Kimberly Coleman of SUNY Plattsburgh’s Center for Earth and Environmental Science to understand virtual participatory planning during the pandemic.