Consensus Planning: The Relevance of Communicative Planning Theory in Duth Infrastructure Development

Book excerpt: This title was published in 2000: This text offers a standpoint on communicative, participatory planning called "consensus planning". The discussion takes place in the Netherlands, where consensus-based decision-making is part of the national heritage. The book explores recent Dutch infrastructure development experiences and concludes that communicative planning theory does not offer uniform relevance for the challenges that planning practitioners face. Building on these experiences, it proposes the concept of consensus planning as valuable in a complementary, normalized, and contingent way. Consensus planning, in other words, has diverse practical appearances and sometimes may not exist or be desirable.