Contemporary Public Involvement: Toward a strategic approach

Abstract

Many planning agencies and stakeholder groups experimented with innovative forms of public involvement in the 1990s. British Columbia is one such jurisdiction which embraced the concept of public involvement in a broad range of land and resource management planning scales - to the degree of collaborative planning with communities, using consensus. The purpose of this paper is to present lessons for planners, supported by literature and by research in British Columbia, Canada from 1995-97, on these public involvement processes. Building on earlier 'typologies' for public involvement in planning, it proposes a strategic approach for identifying and analysing stakeholders, for setting objectives and for subsequently choosing the most appropriate level of public involvement.