Technical and Political Activity - Essay Example

Social Planning as a Technical and Political Activity This essay will discuss the technical and political aspects of social planning. Firstly, I will discuss and define the concepts of ‘need’ and ‘participation,’ and there will be a strong emphasis on how the terms satisfy and do not satisfy the specific aspects of social planning they attempt to address. Furthermore, public housing will be discussed as an example of resource allocation that will illustrate social planning. This discussion will attempt to illustrate the multiple ways in which social planning is necessarily a technical and political activity. An explanation of social justice and its relation to social planning will also help to illustrate the point being made. Through all of this, I will demonstrate how the social and political are intricately intertwined in social planning, and it is not possible to extricate them from each other. Social planning cannot be discussed without discussing need. As social planning is the process through which the problems that the members of a community face are resolved through a series of actions taken in part by those affected and those in a position in which something can be done, need functions as the realization that the problems exist in the first place. Inherent in this is the idea that the needs of a community should be met; it also implies that each community is in a position in which they are to decide what their own needs are (Ife and Tesoriero 2006, pp. 75-76). Need generally takes on a hierarchical order, with the most important being placed first on through to the less important. This, of course, can make the concept of need problematic, as different classes exist within a community, and each call will have its own particular views as to which needs are most important. This is part of the aspect of need that Bradshaw viewed as contentious (1994, p. 45), and for this reason he developed a taxonomy by which to classify needs. First there is ‘normative need,’ and this is need that is defined by experts. Next there is ‘felt need,’ which are generally considered to be the wants of a community in general. After that is ‘expressed need,’ which is need which is demanded be dealt with. Finally, there is ‘comparative need,’ and is deal with equity, as in how great one set of needs measures against another set of needs (1994, p. 46). In defining these needs, there were no intentions of attempting to relegate one of these four as having a greater importance than the other, though this does not keep people from ranking them in importance. In regards to the technical and political aspects of need, felt and expressed can be viewed as the social aspect of need, while normative and comparative deal more with the political aspects of need. Felt and expressed need come directly from the members of a community. As each community is able to define its own needs, felt and expressed need are important to a community so its members can play an active role in regards to its role in social planning. Normative and comparative deal more with the political aspects of social planning as government officials will want to consult experts in regards to which needs should be addressed first. Comparative need also plays a large aspect in the political as it is necessary to determine which needs are most important and should be dealt with. To relate them together, the community members will first want to have a situation taken care of, which is felt need, and then when enough people are in agreement upon this issue, it will become an expressed need as the need becomes vocalized. Politicians must then determine the importance of the expressed need against what the experts say should be addressed, and in this way the expressed need when considered against the normative need becomes the comparative need. As the recent example of the Iraq War shows, the normative need can clash with the expressed need, and considering that the people in power are able to execute their will over the expressed need, public outcries can result. In a call for security, the normative need as viewed by the Australian government stated that in order to protect itself from a possible attack from Iraq, Australia needed to join the U.S. and British led invasion of Iraq. However, the expressed need stated that the citizens of Australia did not feel that their country should take part in the attack (O’Sullivan, 2003; Maddox, 2005). As social planning is essentially a government led attempt to meet the needs of the people, such outright dismissals of the opinion of the people only negates social planning. In regards to social planning, Speier states that there is a balance that exists in regards to freedom and control, and the ability to carry through with a plan is dependent upon the pressure faced by the group planning the action (1937, p. 473). However, this statement leaves one wondering exactly how much pressure is necessary to dissuade the people in power from willfully defying the expressed need of the people. This is another problem with the concept of need; the political side of it can apparently be more powerful than the social aspect of need. Still, even when considering the problems that come with attempting to define what a community is in need of, it is still impossible to ignore the fact that there could be no real social planning without the recognition of need. Participation is another concept that is important to social planning, if need is the impetus that drives social planning, then participation is the means by which the needs are addressed. Menzies states that participation is necessarily an aspect for social planning to be able to function. Again, there are different aspects to participation, yet unlike need, participation has aspects which are inevitably hierarchical. The lowest rung of the ladder includes therapy and manipulation, which are considered to be nonparticipation; the middle rung contains placation, consultation, and informing, which are considered degrees of tokenism; the most ideal forms of participation are citizen control, delegation, and partnership, which are considered degrees of citizen power (Arnstein 1969, p. 217). To further define these terms, manipulation involves the attempt to give people the appearance of being in power, and therapy attempts to make people feel as though their powerlessness is something to be cured by psychologists. Informing is next on the ladder, and it involves the spread of information; the problem all too often is that the information flows one way, from the government to the people. The next step, consultation, lets the people inform the government of their views, but it is worthless if these views are disregarded. Placation takes this further and allows a few of the people expressing opinions to be appointed positions where they can be taken seriously. After this, partnership goes further than placation because it does not merely give a few members of the community a voice amongst those in power; it is an agreement to be in full agreement in order for actions to take place. Delegated power happens when a group of citizens is given direct control over an important program. Finally, in citizen control all power is placed in the hands of the members of the community. In studying the differences between these steps, we can view different degrees of interconnectedness between the social and political aspects of social planning. In nonparticipation. The political is in complete dominance over the social. They exist as different realms, and there is no influence of ideas back and forth between the two. In tokenism, the social and political are starting to combine. The political is now willing to accept some of the ideas of the social and even place a few members of the community amongst the ranks of government. Citizen power contains various degrees of the social becoming more powerful and until the social becomes the political in citizen control. Though the social and political are in flux in these relationships, in all three they both exist simultaneously. In order to illustrate the real-life implications of social planning and the ways in which it is both a social and political activity, I will discuss resource allocation, specifically public housing. Resource allocation allows the government to distribute resources within the society as it sees fit. In other words, it allows funds to be sent wherever to take care of the needs as the government sees fit. In this way it is a political activity as the government is deciding what to be spending money on. The program is funded through taxation, and as such, since people are agreeing to pay taxes, they are agreeing to aid in this government funded program to provide housing. I am speaking specifically of the Housing Assistance Act of 1996. As this program helps to provide housing for people, it has recognized that this as a need. It is directly aiding people in their personal lives, and in this way it is directly affecting their social lives, thus showing that the political and social are intertwined within public house, and furthermore in resource allocation. Resource allocation is the way by which the government is able to attend to the needs of the people. The government is able to do this as the people have agreed to pay taxes. The money is collected from the people and redistributed throughout different communities where there is a need for it. People agree to pay taxes because they realise that it will go to benefit them if they are in need. As it is mandated by the government, the paying of taxes is a political aspect in regards to social planning, because people can plan all they want but it would be useless without the funds to carry their plans out. Fenna states that the decision to tax one activity and not another will shape the society accordingly; thus, a tax system is an expression of the society that the people want because they have agreed to the tax system (2002, p. 434). The implications are clear; the political is funded by the social, and the political in turns allows the social to follow the decisions that have been made. Hopefully, need and participation will lead to a resource allocation system in which the people who are in the most need receive what they need. This is all part of social justice, the idea that justice has been achieved throughout all aspects of society. It is finally through social justice that we can see the social and political fully linked together. Social justice can be viewed as the final goal of social planning. How this would happen ideally would be for a need to first be expressed, then through an active participation style, the need would be addressed, and then the people that were in need would have their need met, and the process went full circle from the social to the political and back to the social. In conclusion, I wish to state that there can be no social planning without both the political and social aspects of it. Wood states that “no planning situation actually has complete control. Control is only possible in a given frame of reference” (1944, p. 390). He was commenting on the futility of attempting to be in complete control of an aspect of social planning. A person might attempt to carry out a completely political social plan, but this person will find that this isn’t possible; also, a person would find it impossible to affect a social change without any political means. While some might consider--without thoroughly considering the implications--the political and social to be incompatible with one another, they are, upon closer examination, so inextricably linked as though to be different sides of the same coin. The efficiency of this process cannot be denied if it is flowing smoothly, but as Wood stated, there is no way to be in full control of a social plan. (I paraphrased the O’Sullivan and Maddox from the paper you sent me, but I didn’t have the info, so you’ll just need to add it on) Works Cited Arnstein, S. 1969, A Ladder of Citizen Participation, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, vol. 26, no. 4. Bradshaw, J, (1944), ‘The Conceptualization and measurement of need,’ J. Popay & G. Williams (eds), Researching for People’s Health, Routledge, London, pp. 45-57. Fenna, A. 2002, Tax policy, in J. Summers, D. Woodward & A. Parkin (eds), Government, Politics, Power and Policy in Australia, 7th edn, Pearson Education Australia, Frenchs Forest, pp. 439–457. Ife & Tesoriero 2006, excerpt from Chapter 6 ‘Participation’ in Community Development: community based alternatives in an age of globalisation, 3rd edn, Pearson Education Australia, Frenchs Forest, pp. 149–163. Menzies (1993), ‘3.2 Encouraging community development’ Groundrules: A social planning handbook for Local Government, Local Government and Shires Associations of NSW, Sydney. O’Sullivan, 2003; Maddox, 2005 Speier, Hans, ‘Freedom and Social Planning,’ The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Jan., 1937), pp. 463-483 Wood, Arthus Lewis (May 1944), ‘The Structure of Social Planning,’ Social Forces, Vol. 22, No. 4,pp. 388-398 Read More