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Center for Democratic Planning and Participatory Research (CDPPR) within the Context of ASPECT

The 21st century brings pressing problems that require new forms of research, teaching, planning and action. The proposed center (CDPPR) would be an incubator for new models of democratic planning in the context of globalization. The center will be dedicated to producing academically rigorous scholarship for practical use in long-term planning that builds community wellbeing on local assets, knowledge and leadership. The proposed center will bring highly specialized academic experts and single-issue civic organizations together with place-based, multi-issue community actors for world-class, collaborative research.

Sustainable prosperity in the 21st century will require supple, rigorous, field-tested, multi-causal and multi-scalar analysis of problems and opportunities at global, regional, national and local levels. To be effective, such analysis must be ground-truthed, enacted and tested in the particularities, histories, accountabilities and contingencies of local places. Such planning is place-based, but not place-bound. It is highly specialized but integrative. It is long-term and holistic, but flexible and open to revision. Such research is suffused with a democratic spirit that seeks to build civic infrastructure between many types of players in the public domain. It recognizes that experts do not have exclusive access to truth. Rather, local knowledge and democratic debate often bring out exceptional insight, data and civic motivation. Scholarship focused on nurturing local quality of life through participatory action research, will produce better data, better policy and better pedagogy. It can better meet the highest calling of a land-grant institution‚ building sustainable prosperity with healthy democratic participation.

This emerging ASPECT sponsored research/teaching cluster builds upon an established network of partnerships between academic and community based organizations in various global regions, including Appalachia, and builds upon a four year program of resident fellowships funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (Co-PIs Wolfgang Natter [Virginia Tech), Herb Reid [University of Kentucky], Betsy Taylor [Johns Hopkins University]) to support these collaborations.

At Virginia Tech, the CDPPR Coordinating Committee consists of three faculty with a wealth of experience in community/academic partnerships fostering social and ecological justice. Please contact any of them with queries and expressions of interest.

    Richard Rich, Director, Center for Environmental and Energy Studies: urban@vt.edu

CDPR Issues, Questions, Research and Teaching Agenda

Over the past several decades, research demonstrates that economic globalization poses the following intellectual and pedagogical challenges, to which the ASPECT research/teaching cluster intends to contribute:


  • How can we construct multiscalar analytic models? The pace and scope of global changes heighten the urgency for multi-scalar research as profound systemic change creates degrees of complexity that undo ecological and socio-political buffers between local and translocal causal patterns. Long term, place-based field studies are needed to track multi-scalar change. Interdisciplinary centers can help create the institutional infrastructure for the sort of long-term, field-sensitive and flexible analysis required to understand complex contemporary phenomena at multiple levels -- local, regional, national and global.

  • How can we nurture interdisciplinary research and pedagogy to solve multicausal problems? The most important challenges of the 21st century have intertwined causes and effects, ecological, economic, socio-cultural and political, and require flexible interdisciplinary research teams. However, higher education is still too fragmented by 19th-century divisions that split important theoretical questions into interdisciplinary silos that do not communicate with each other. We must actively nurture a rich, interdisciplinary community of scholars to solve urgent, multi-faceted, global problems, through holistic and place-based research. Without deeply interdisciplinary communities, we will not prepare our students for the supple, innovative and multi-causal thinking that the 21st century will require.

  • How can we integrate theory and action in our teaching and research? In the 20th century, there was too often an unhealthy divide between "applied" and "theoretical" sectors of the university. 21st century problems need complex and subtle theory that is grounded and energized in concrete application in situ in real-time, real-life complexity and contingency.

  • How can we nurture civic professionalism and civic engagement in our students and in the application of our theory? There is increasing recognition that education should nurture future citizens and professionals with the skills, motivation and values to engage with public concerns and in public debate and action for the common good. Service and action learning programs are growing fast. However, it has proven difficult to integrate such experiential learning with systematic and cumulative curricular substance. CDPPR can assist faculty and students to plan field placements that meet real community needs and are systematically integrated into long-term, interdisciplinary research with policy implications.

  • How can we bridge the divide between academic and public life to bring civic leaders, scholars, officials, artists, journalists and spiritual leaders together in reasoned debate, critical inquiry and collective action for the common good? We feel that participatory action research, combined with other research methods, can provide new models for public scholarship, public intellectuals and an empowered citizenry.

    • A global ferment of experimentation has generated new methods for participatory action research [PAR]. PAR brings multiple stakeholders together for egalitarian problem solving -- involving community, expert and governmental actors in civic deliberation, inquiry and action. The proposed CDPPR could help link existing programs in productive synergy -- including public involvement practices in transportation and engineering, participatory design in architecture and ecological design, various forms of rapid and participatory assessment in applied anthropology, community-based public health and social work, community-based wildlife management and social forestry, public folklore and oral history, civic deliberation and conflict resolution in community development, traditions of public scholarship and activism in social theory, among others.

    Our central mission is to develop powerful research tools and theory for holistic assessment of community well-being in the context of economic globalization. We will do this with long term collaborations between communities, scholars, students and appropriate government units, synergistically combining the unique strengths of citizen, expert, public leaders and youth.

    Goals:

      To provide civic education to undergraduate and graduate students in order to cultivate new generations of civic professionals, citizen/scholars with real-life experience, skills, values and emotional commitment to work at the intersection of policy, research and civic participation

      To apply social theory to concrete, community-based problem-solving, including questions relating to the constitution of democratic public space, civic deliberation and communication, identity politics, ecological and political imagination.

      To organize appropriate interdisciplinary teams of scholars and students to support communities, grassroots networks [GRNs, NCOs] and civil society organizations [CSO's] to inventory community assets or solve community problems.

      To catalyze and coordinate international, interdisciplinary research collaborations with GRNs, NCOs, CSO's and local government in selected global regions -- oriented towards comparative, holistic, place-based, long-term, asset-based audits of local and regional well-being in the context of economic globalization.

      To use, test and disseminate the techniques and values of participatory action research [PAR]. PAR cultivates equality between community and academic partners at all stages of inquiry -- including problem identification, values clarification, fund-raising, research design, training of researchers, data collection and analysis, production and design of publications, dissemination and archiving of results, project evaluation.

      To support learning networks among community scholars that balance specialization in single-issue expertise (e.g., environment, income generation, culture, civic-political mobilization, education, health, etc.) with regular, multi-issue forums that critically reflect on causal connections across issues and different scalar levels (local, regional, national, global).

      To develop an integrated curriculum on methods for participatory action research [PAR]

      To develop a certificate in PAR as part of undergraduate and graduate degree programs

      To develop certificates for community scholars in PAR and social theory, in collaboration with appropriate government agencies, CSO's and UK sectors with existing programs of adult or popular education

      To be a clearinghouse in North America for materials and methods in participatory action research and planning -- gathering, evaluating and disseminating best practices from international national and regional sources

      To provide field sites for service, action and experiential learning by building a civic infrastructure for long-term partnerships with CSO's, communities and networks of community scholars that can manage a clearinghouse where community research needs are registered.

      To seek out, evaluate and disseminate models for collaboration among community, experts and government in long-term civic accounting based on well-researched indicators and inventories of quality of life. What are best practices for institutionalizing holistic civic accounting into civic deliberation, democratic decision-making, planning and policy development? What are best practices for durable institutionalization of excellence in scholarship on civic accounting?

      To evaluate the adequacy and accessibility of existing knowledge and data repositories by tracking the flow of knowledge-in-use for real-life community problem solving from problem identification and analysis, to action programs. program evaluation and policy formulation.

      To develop training programs and materials in multi-issue civic accounting for GRNs NCOs, CSOs, journalists and government policymakers and planners.

      To collaborate with appropriate partners to publish annual "state of the region" reports summarizing available data on topics under study, focusing on the implication of research findings for planning and policymaking at all scalar levels -- local, regional and global.

      To organize forums for critical discussion about democracy, participatory research and planning, and the institutionalization of knowledge, including international and national conferences, regional symposia and workshops, fellowships, a new social theory journal, books and pamphlets.