Once a top-down process, over the past four decades governance has shifted to the local level, and there towards civic engagement and the democratization of policy making [1, 2, 3]. Civil society now plays a larger role in setting priorities for and contributing to local community development, environmental management, transportation, health, and public safety issues [4, 5]. Highlighting its general acceptance in society, public participation has become a rhetorical feature of good local governance and sustainability governance [3, 6, 7, 8, 9].

Urban development is one prominent arena for local governance efforts. Following the general trend, public participation is now a common feature of urban development projects [10, 11, 12, 13], in particular when they aim at fostering urban sustainability [14, 15]. Its rise in urban development in general, and urban sustainability efforts in particular, is due to a number of benefits public participation is assumed to offer.

Supportive perspectives contend that public participation builds trust between participants and experts [16], and between the public and decision makers [5]; facilitates conflict resolution [17]; establishes support for implementation [18, 19]; creates equitable processes, which in turn produce just outcomes [20]; fosters social learning and builds capacity in individuals as well as across society [21, 22, 23]; engages stakeholders with diverse perspectives that collaborate to understand and solve complex societal problems [24, 25]; develops social capital through the formulation of social networks [23, 26]; and builds institutional capacity [26]. As such, there are many case studies that describe public participation as a beneficial process [18, 27, 28, 29].

While there are numerous arguments in favor of participation, other researchers and practitioners caution that there are also challenges to and adverse effects from public participation: governments are often overly dominant in public participation processes [26, 30], or lack capacity to conduct such processes [4]; civil society’s civic capacity is declining, and many citizens now lack competencies needed to participate [4, 31]; citizens often do not have the time to meaningfully engage [26], or are apathetic and not interested in participating [32, 33], while others distrust participation as a process that bends to manipulative sponsors and powerful elites [34]; and resources to participate are not equally distributed to disadvantaged groups [26], among other challenges. As a result, public participation processes are often formulaic [35], susceptible to cooptation [31], or can even be coercive [36].

Many pitfalls can be mitigated and avoided through careful process design [37, 38], and one popular recommendation is to design processes to fit the local context [7, 37, 38, 39, 40]. Yet, little specific directives are provided for how such contextualization might be achieved.

Here, the concept of local context in public planning may include considerations of local priorities and issues specific to locations across geographic settings, from local [7] to regional and national-scales [37]. Working within and across spatial scales, one must consider contextual factors including local knowledge of participants; public preferences; types of interested stakeholders; local conditions; the environmental context; laws guiding public decision and policy making; local and national interests; social relationships within communities [37]; cultural norms of decision making; race, class, and gender; environmental problems and their significance; and political stability [40].

Dietz and Stern [37] identify numerous contextual factors for public participation processes in environmental decision making, and they organize these factors into two categories: (1) Agency Factors and (2) Participant Factors. Von Korff et al. [38] list contextual factors that include conflict between stakeholders, participants’ previous experiences in public processes, legal and regulatory rules, budgets, and stakeholder interest (or apathy). Bryson et al. [39] define both a general and a specific context. They explain the general context as the “social, demographic, political, technological, physical, and other features and trends in an organization’s environment (p. 25)”. The specific context, they note, includes “stakeholders, applicable mandates, [and] resource availability (p. 25)”. All of these issues may be influenced by and specific to the location where a participatory process is being designed and/or carried out.

Urban development is generally guided by planning processes that include opportunities for varying degrees of public involvement on topics such as transportation, land use, infrastructure, housing, economic development, and environmental management. Yet, public participation may not be fruitful if the process is not well aligned to the local context. The objective of this research is to better understand the local context of urban development projects by asking what categorizable impediments to high quality public participation arise when the participatory process is not attuned to the local context.

The research presented in this paper studies peer-reviewed articles that report on public participation processes in urban development projects. The research catalogues common challenges that are reported in the literature, and the analysis categorizes these challenges into generic cases of when public participation processes may be misaligned with their local context. This study’s intent is to caution and guide planning practitioners and researchers on how to contextualize public participation in urban development projects through the categorization of misalignments that ought to be avoided.

Public participation is often vaguely defined in the literature, while in actuality it can take many shapes and forms. Dietz and Stern [37] acknowledge that public participation may encompass all facets of democracy, including voting, expressing opinion, interest groups, demonstrations, and even songs. Thus, we first present the concept of public participation we adopt in this study, which is based on a proposal made by Wiek et al. [41].

The concept composes three key features of public participation (Figure 1), dealing with the questions of who is doing what, with whom, when, for what purpose, and with what outcome [42]. First, public participation as conceptualized here is part of and therefore depends on an ‘official’ urban development project, in which the public participates. We focus here on participation that occurs in ‘officialized spaces’ and is part of regulated procedures [43]. The urban development project, as the main process, is structured into various phases (e.g., preparing, planning, implementing, and evaluating), with each phase generating certain outcomes, including a proposal, a plan, real-world changes, and recommendations.

Second, the urban development project is supervised by Strategic Agents such as elected officials and investors (applying and/or influencing laws and regulations), and is carried out through Operating Agents such as planners and experts (who report back to the Strategic Agents). The Operating Agents engage stakeholders through the public participation process; stakeholders might include citizens, residents, non-profit organizations, businesses, governmental agencies (not supervising), and the media.

Third, through the public participation process the public might participate in one, several, or all phases of the urban development project, and to varying degrees. The public participation process may rely on different standardized procedures, such as public meetings, citizen juries, focus groups, stakeholder workshops, consensus conferences, and web-based engagements, among others [44]. Apart from substantive inputs that might inform, to varying degrees, the outcomes of the phases as indicated above—the public participation process can also yield less tangible outcomes such as agreement, trust, new or strengthened relationships, and enhanced capacities [23].

Even within the parameters used in this study to define public participation, there is a wide spectrum of processes ranging in levels of participant engagement. For decades, planning literature has addressed this issue. Arnstein [1] presented a framework for interpreting degrees of citizen power in local decision making, ranging from manipulative processes, to tokenistic engagements like public hearings, to instances of delegated power and true citizen control. In the years following, many scholars further studied, revised, and built upon Arnstein’s concept to define public participation as an engaged and empowered mechanism for the public [for examples, see [7, 16, 26, 37, 45, 46].

Today, there is much support in the literature for public participation processes to be popular, deliberative mechanisms for shaping public policy. For instance, Voogd and Woltjer [47] present five ethical criteria for what they term communicative planning: (1) involve all relevant stakeholders in the planning process, (2) prevent cultural and educational differences from hindering stakeholders, (3) design manageable and transparent planning processes, (4) provide participating stakeholders with necessary professional knowledge, and (5) prioritize the interests of stakeholders in defining and weighting solutions. Fung and Wright [27] idealize empowered deliberative democracy (EDD), which pursues participatory and deliberative governance by (1) devolving power to local stakeholders, (2) centrally managing participation through governmental structures, and (3) institutionalizing participation within government. Abelson et al. [48] evaluate deliberative processes in terms of (1) representation of stakeholders; (2) legitimacy, reasonableness, and responsiveness of procedures; (3) sharing, presentation, and interpretation of information; and (4) outcomes in terms of legitimacy and accountability, participant satisfaction, and level of consensus.

All of these conceptualizations of public participation define a decision-making process that engages diverse stakeholders through deliberative procedures to shape policy. In this article, we focus on how the public participation process is designed by planners and other Operating Agents, considering the features just described. When aligning the process to the local context, planners need to consider the interplay between issue, public agency, and participant [37, 49], as well as conflicts between stakeholders, participants’ previous experiences in civic engagement, legal and regulatory settings, budgets, and stakeholder interest and apathy [38]. Furthermore, factors including cultural norms, race, socio-economic status, gender, the salience of issues, and the political climate also contribute to how well a participatory process fits within the local context [40].

This study inspects the common challenges to realizing the ideals of public participation with the assumption that considering such challenges at the outset will help project planners understand the local context of where a participatory process is designed and implemented. Through exploratory research, we inductively defined misalignments between the public participation process and local context by (1) reviewing case studies from peer-reviewed literature on public participation in urban development projects, (2) recording challenges identified in the cases, and (3) grouping the identified challenges into overarching categories. We then conceptualize these challenge categories as misalignments between the process (as designed by planners and experts) and the local context.

To select case studies for review we used the following search terms: case study AND public participation; public participation AND urban development; public participation AND urban planning; and challenge AND public participation. We considered only resources published since 1995.

To filter the search results, we created a small set of selection criteria. First, this study seeks to learn from real cases of public participation in urban development projects. Therefore, we eliminated pieces that were strictly theoretical or that spoke in generalities without referencing specific cases. Second, this study is only concerned with public participation in urban development projects. Thus, we eliminated materials that discussed participation in contexts other than urban development settings. Third, we review only cases from the Global North. It is already challenging to compare experiences between such dissimilar cultures as northern Europe and the United States, and we chose to eliminate cases from developing countries that have much different development needs and conditions that further confound cross-context comparisons. Finally, this study synthesizes common challenges reported in the literature, and therefore considers only case studies that acknowledge real challenges that have arisen in public participation processes. After narrowing the case pool further, we consulted the reference sections of the relevant sources to uncover additional empirical studies that did not show up through the Boolean search. These methods yielded 24 cases. Table 1 lists and describes the cases studied for this research.

We approached this review with a heuristic developed in urban development projects with public participation we have been involved in over a five-year period in low-income neighborhoods in Phoenix, Arizona (2009–2014). Challenges we encountered include lack of collaborative capacity, civic competence, and sustainability literacy, as well as living conditions and personal circumstances not conducive to continuous and meaningful public engagement [41]. As we reviewed case study literature on public participation in urban development, we recorded when a case provided an example of one of the misalignments we had ourselves experienced in past public participation projects. We also recorded when cases articulated a challenge that we had not previously considered. After reviewing all of the cases, we reviewed our draft list of challenges in public participation processes and created a list of potential misalignments.

As noted above, we recognize the challenge of drawing conclusions across disparate settings. For this reason, we excluded studies from the Global South, but we still must confront the difficulties of conducting an analysis of cases in settings ranging from the United States to Northern Europe to Australia. In each of these locations historical norms, governance regimes, and the local environment, among other factors, play a significant role in shaping the models of public engagements that are pursued and impact the way that participation plays out. To cope with the array of cases across multiple diverse contexts, we required that a potential misalignment must be found in at least three of the articles we reviewed. Capturing examples from multiple settings allowed us to draw careful conclusions generalized across dissimilar contexts. Furthermore, this consideration allowed for some quality control as the analysis is entirely dependent on the research of other scholars.

The literature review resulted in ten misalignments. These misalignments are organized into three categories within the participatory process. These three categories were derived inductively through the literature reviewed for this study. Misalignments that Impede Process and Outcomes pertains to top-down issues of whether policy makers and special interests support public participation processes, divest power to diverse stakeholders, and allow public input to shape policy. There is one misalignment under this category.

Misalignments that Impede Participants’ Attendance considers the structural and systemic barriers to participation that certain communities experience. When these misalignments transpire, participation events may feature low participant turnout, and particular groups may not be included in the process. This category includes three misalignments.

Misalignments that Impede Participants’ Input covers barriers experienced by participants that do attend events. These may include the values, preferences, and capacities of participants. [-10]When these misalignments arise, participants may refrain from full participation, they may feel unheard, or they may even obstruct the process (though it is important to consider that dissent within a deliberative process may actually be constructive [68]). There are six misalignments reported for this category.

All ten misalignments present unique impediments to conducting a high quality public participation process. Identifying, analyzing, and planning to mitigate these misalignments presents a framework for understanding the local context within which the public participation process and greater urban development project take place. Table 2 presents the misalignments.

Impediments to high-quality public participation may manifest themselves through misalignments between the public participation process and policy maker support, civic engagement, and through participants’ personal circumstances and living conditions, engagement preferences, civic competence, collaborative capacity, expectations, trust, sustainability literacy, and issue competence. Designing public participation to fit the local context is a popular recommendation for state-of-the-art urban development projects, but the literature does not provide clear guidance for how this should be achieved. The ten misalignments between the public participation process and the local context identified in this article present a contextual frame for public participation process design that avoids major flaws.

Five research streams need to be pursued to consolidate the findings presented here. Future research should

By identifying tangible challenges that are common in public participation, this study presents a set of issues around which experts and planners should design public participation processes. While this study raises awareness, it does not provide actionable knowledge for coping with the misalignments. The literature on public participation is mostly descriptive rather than prescriptive and lacks clear directives [44]. Future research will need to study cases that have successfully coped with each misalignment to build an evidence-supported toolset of strategies for aligning participatory processes and contexts for sustainable urban development.

Finally, there is a dearth of evaluative studies of participatory processes in peer-reviewed literature [5, 20], and this is partially responsible for the insufficient collection of directives for designing public participation. Defining the misalignments between process and context provides a framework for evaluating public participation processes as we can now ask how well a public participation process is aligned to the local context. Missing from this analysis are potential indicators for measuring each misalignment. By establishing indicators of misalignments and empirically studying real public participation processes, alignment could be measured by collecting data for each indicator. Addressing these misalignments better adapts a public participation process to the local context and presumably result in both a better process and better outcomes. This hypothesis must be tested and validated.

A public participation process that is attuned to the local context is the antithesis to the misalignment framework presented in this paper. Avoiding these misalignments is an aspirational goal and this framework provides a roadmap for achieving an implied vision for high quality public participation in urban development.