ACSP abstract — Ecological planning
An abstract I have submitted for the annual meeting of theAmerican Collegiate Schools of Planning (Oct. 18-21, Milwaukee, http://www.acsp.org/events/conferences.html). The session is entitled “Ecological Planning – New Theoretical Approaches for Planning Paper.”
Jeff Howard
Intelligent trial and error as a theoretical framework for ecological planning
Intelligent trial and error (ITE), an extension of political theorist Charles Lindblom’s work on incrementalist decision making, has been developed in the field of science and technology studies as a framework for coping with the inevitable and frequently profound uncertainty inherent in technological development – and for minimizing the frequency and seriousness of mistakes that plague such development. The paper begins by outlining the premise of ITE and briefly reviewing its application in technology studies. The paper then explores ITE’s applicability as a framework for understanding and addressing the analytical and political challenges of ecological planning. If we understand planning as a pivotal species of technological decision making, how might ITE help us (re)interpret the ecologically haphazard character of conventional planning and the significance of the marginalization of ecological planning? How might it help us strategically confront the challenge of making ecological planning sufficiently intelligent to help move humanity beyond the global environmental crisis to which conventional planning has made such an enormous contribution? Answers to these questions, the paper argues, revolve around how these forms of planning approach six strategic considerations – precaution, the pace of feedback, monitoring the pace of scale-up, commitment to flexibility, and incentives for error correction – and, consequently, how planning expertise is conceptualized and politically enacted.
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