Social learning in planning: Seattle's sustainable development codebooks

This paper investigates the power and potential of studying planning and policy innovations from a social learning standpoint. Social learning is an important but under-investigated feature of planning and policy processes, and a particularly critical goal in the adaptation of innovations. While often cited as part of the desired outcomes of planning and policy processes, social learning is rarely investigated from a process-based perspective able to reveal how and why it occurs to different degrees in different contexts. At the same time, such process-based understanding is precisely what is needed by theorists and practitioners alike in order to improve the impact factor of plan and policy changes, to improve the transferability of ‘best practices,’ and to bolster public support and engagement in public affairs. This kind of research requires a new, comprehensive theory of social learning within planning and policy contexts as well as new analytical tools for studying social learning processes in particular cases.Review of the concept of social learning in this paper begins in the policy literature, where key definitional debates are drawn out. From here, the literature on social learning is examined comparatively at three points along a continuum from the most conservative to the most radical views of the process. At the conservative end of the spectrum, organisational learning theory offers a view of incremental social learning within functional groups in a competitive context. Moving towards a more optimistic view of the transformative potential of social learning, communicative action theory considers social learning within a dialogic context among communities of practice. At the most radical end of the spectrum, the philosophy of pragmatism, often drawn upon in planning and policy theory, offers a thorough argument for the role and value of social learning within democratic society, and its potential to transform individuals, groups and practices. These different approaches to social learning represent a field of debate in need of greater engagement and testing in order to be specified and resolved.Integrating insights from the different perspectives on social learning, a methodology is developed to guide case study research into the processes and outcomes of social learning in policy and planning innovations. The proposed methodology includes four necessary steps of investigation: identify the community of inquirers as unit of analysis; investigate tacit knowledge by studying group routines; study processes of change within communities and knowledge codebooks; and search for the diffusion of knowledge to a system of policy practice. The utility of this methodology is exemplified in the case of an innovation in Seattle, Washington – the civic network Sustainable Seattle's sustainable community indicators project.The outcomes of this case study as well as directions from the literature are taken to recommend further investigation and application of social learning research methodology. The role of judgment and power in the diffusion and adoption of new directions in planning and policy are also considered, both for the challenges that they pose to a social learning focus and for the complementarity of their effects on change processes in real-world contexts. The uptake and endurance of innovations in planning and policy depend not only on their rational wisdom or utility, but on contingencies in interpretation and understanding of how and why the innovation works and for whom, passed in both explicit and tacit forms within and between different policy actor communities. Evidence of social learning in communities working on innovations can be found through the investigation of each community's knowledge codebook over time. This new way of thinking about planning and policy innovations opens up a range of new research questions, considered at the end of this paper.