348 Ecological Restoration and Design
the decision making process but as passive providers of information on which such
decisions are made.
Planners then develop an overall strategy and plan of action. The plan usually
consists of a baseline projection, a projection of the desired level of economic activ-
ity, and a description of ways of bringing the two projections closer together.
Once written, the plan and its implementing components can then be used to
prioritize activities and eliminate options or tasks that are not included in it. In
such circumstances, the plan can be used to reinforce the notion of calling on
technical rather than political solutions to problems. For example, if the plan calls
for a golf course, under the technical assistance model there is little need to get
broad community input into the series of decisions that goes into its construction
and operation.
The increasing complexity of the decisions communities are forced to make
gives a great deal of power to the city engineers or administrators who are closest
to the source of technical information. Their clear expertise in understanding the
arcane language of, for example, zoning and taxing alternatives aids this process.
Just as the city or county attorney in the past was able to dismiss a call for change
by saying the proposed change was not legal (and thus forcing the person or group
who wanted change to hire their own lawyer to get an alternate opinion, which
they then had to take to a higher authority), now the city engineer can dismiss any
change in community resource management by saying, ‘It doesn’t fit the plan.’ At
this point, the conflict model of community development becomes appropriate,
for groups may mobilize to seek other experts to support an alternative action. But
most often, the first ‘technical’ judgement goes unquestioned.
Practitioners of self-help community development favour a different version of
the planning process. When conducted in a highly participatory way, planning
not only allows for development of a collective vision of community but also pro-
vides mutually agreed upon signposts to help achieve it. For example, the commit-
ment and incorporation phases of the social action approach are, respectively, the
goal-setting and implementation-design phases of that planning process. But,
unlike in the technical assistance model, they are imbedded within a participatory
approach. Community members who participate in the social action or similar
processes have some role in shaping the goals and means of implementing those
goals (although as was discussed earlier, community opinion leaders may have
already channelled the social action process towards certain problems and away
from others). In most participatory approaches that use the self-help model, there
is broad participation in determining the basic questions to be asked. The down-
side of the self-help approach to planning is that it is clearly more time-consuming
than is the technical assistance approach.
The conflict model of community development involves a very different view
of planning. Since, by definition, the conflict model is used by those who do not
have power, the relationship between goals and means is less obvious than in either
of the other two models. The tactical plan for implementation of goals is heavily
dependent on the response of the powerful opposition to the prior actions of the