Critical Reason and Political Power in Project Review Activity: Serving Freedom in Planning and Public Administration

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Abstract
If planners and public administrators are to conduct well-informed and publicly responsive project reviews, they need accurate information, trustworthy sources, an involved citizenry, and clearly formulated issues to addess. These conditions of project review are precarious, though, for they are shaped by social and political-economic inequalities of power, wealth, information, and expertise. Indeed, planners, administrators, and affected citizens too can ordinarily expect to face systematically and inequitably structured agendas in their practical work of project review. Such biased agenda-setting operates through the management of public consent, belief, trust, and attention to suppress responsive, informed project review discussions. By anticipating such obstacles, planners, public administrators, and citizens alike may counteract such agenda-setting and thus foster democratic and accountable project review processes. Anticipating and encouraging practical responses to inequitable agenda-setting, critical reason may empower radically democratic professional practices and genuinely democratic planning and public administration in the face of anti-democratic political-economic forces.

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