- Collaborative Roles of public Officials in urban planning Processes: an exploration    65 kb by    Dezeure, Karolien & Voets, Joris & De Rynck, Filip | Karolien.Dezeure@hogent.be    Short Outline Communicative planning emphasizes the ‘new’ role of local public officials in mediating among stakeholders in the urban planning context. But to what extent are they able and willing to play these roles? How do they manage stakeholder participation? Abstract Local public officials are expected to function as key players in urban projects, but they face difficulties in implementing urban projects in the context of a ‘network society’ (Albrechts and Mandelbaum 2005) with complex problems and increasingly active community groups and citizens (Toscis 2003). To be successful, intensive and long-term collaboration among the diverse stakeholders is required. Hence, the focus of projects shifts from planning product to planning process (Healey 1998). Communication and participation are now key elements in different literatures on urban projects (Innes and Booher 1999). Communicative planning emphasizes the ‘new’ role of public officials in mediating among stakeholders in the urban planning context. While they remain experts, they are also increasingly expected to take up the role of network broker, facilitator and/or communicator (Agranoff and McGuire 2003). But to what extent are local public officials able and willing to play these roles? How do they manage stakeholder participation in urban planning processes? These questions can be dealt with taking different perspectives. This paper brings in a politico-administrative point of view, as local public officials are embedded in and act from within local government. The first part focuses on the main public administration discourses concerning the roles of public officials and stakeholders in order to define a theoretical framework. In the second part, case studies of strategic planning processes in the city-region of Ghent (Belgium) are brought in to see how the empirical findings relate to the theoretical framework in part one. The paper will show how some public officials succeed in taking up these roles while others do not and defines a complex set of variables that help explain why they manage collaborative processes successfully or not. Keywords local public officals, communicative planning Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2007: Urban Trialogues   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper