Thorbjoern Mann
An effort to clarify the role of deliberative evaluation in the planning and policy-making process.
Many aspects of evaluation-related tasks in familiar approaches and practice, call for some re-assessment and improvement even for practical applications in current situations. These will be discussed in more detail in sections addressing requirements and tools for practical application. Others are more significant in that they end up questioning the entire concept of deliberative evaluation in planning on a ‘philosophical’ level, or resist adopting smaller detail improvements of the first (practical) kind because they may mean abandoning familiar habits based on tradition and even constitutional provisions.
The very concept of deliberative evaluation — as materialized in procedures and practices that look too cumbersome, bureaucratic and elitist ‘expert-model‘ to many — is an example of a fundamental issue that can significantly flavor and complicate planning discourse. The desire to do without such ‘methods’ is theoretically and emotionally supported by concepts such as the civic, patriotic, call and need for consensus, unity of purpose and even ideas such as swarm behavior or ‘wisdom of the crowds’ that claim to more effortlessly produce ‘good’ solutions and community behavior. A related example is the philosophy behind Christopher Alexander’s ‘Pattern Language’ . Does its claim that using patterns declared ‘valid’ and ‘good’ (having ‘Quality Without a Name — ‘QWAN’) in developing plans and solutions, e.g. for buildings and neighborhoods, will produce overall solutions that will ‘automatically’ be valid / good etc. and thus require no evaluation ‘method’ at all to validate it?
A related issue is the one about ‘objective’ measurement, fact, ‘laws’ (akin to natural laws) as opposed to ‘subjective’ opinion. Discussion, felt to consist mainly of the latter, ‘mere opinions’, difficult to measure and thus lacking reliable tools for resolution of disagreement is seen as too unreliable a basis for important decisions.
On a more practical level, there is the matter of ‘decision criteria’ that are assumed to legitimize decisions. Simple tools such as voting ratios — even of votes following the practice of debating the pros and cons of proposed plans: the practice (accepted as eminently ‘democratic’ even by authoritarian regimes as a smokescreen) in reality results in the concerns of significant parts of affected populations (the minority) to be effectively ignored. Is the call for reaching decisions better and more transparently based on the merit of discourse contributions and ‘due consideration’ of all aspects promising but needing different tools? What would they look like?
An understanding of ‘deliberation’ as the process of making overall judgment (of the good, value, acceptability etc.) a function of partial judgment raises questions of ‘aggregation’: how do or should we convert the many partial judgments into overall judgments? How should the many individual judgments of members of a community be‘aggregated’ into overall ‘group’ judgments or indicators of the distribution of individual judgments that can guide the community’s decision on an issue? Here, to, traditional conventions need reconsiderations.
These issues and controversies need to be examined not only individually but also how they relate to one another and how they should guide evaluation procedures in the planning discourse. The diagram shows a number of them and some relationships adding to the complexity, there are probably more that should be added to the list.
Additions, connections, comments?
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