Conspiracy-fueled Challenges to Expertise and the State: How Professional Planners Respond to Unruly Publics

• In Event: 50667 - Challenging epistemic institutions: Unruly knowledge, outlaw technology, and fringe-mainstream relations

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, political mobilizations fueled by conspiracy theorizing have directly confronted professionals working in and for government. This paper examines how, in the 2010s, land-use planners faced disruptive confrontations led by a Tea Party spin-off movement that cast local sustainability planning as a global “U.N. Agenda 21” social engineering plot. In at least 75 U.S. communities, rural and suburban property owners showed up at government meetings and used other public forums to claim that land-use plans would violate their individual property rights, eliminate national sovereignty, and institute totalitarian rule. Our study draws on a medium-N data set of 77 cases of anti-Agenda 21 community mobilization along with the local, regional and national response of planning professionals, based on organizational documents, government records, and news coverage. Our analysis brings together literature on a “crisis of expertise” with far-right attempts to dismantle the administrative state. The unruly publics that mobilized around Agenda 21 raised serious tensions for the planning profession’s ethos of community collaboration and value neutrality. Their response provides an instructive case for considering how professions manage epistemic and political challenges that are rooted in conspiratorial claims. Our findings identify three general strategies that professional planners used to manage the confrontations: 1) scoping processes aimed at making sense of the opposition, 2) provisioning practices that provided resources and advice to practitioners on effective responses to unruly publics, and 3) self-reflection that engendered an internal debate on the profession’s politicization and the appropriate forms of civil engagement.

Authors

• Steve G. Hoffman, University of Toronto

• Ellen Berrey, University of Toronto