The concept of citizen planning

General
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In a recent article by Aaron Benanav, he points out that to fight off the logic of capitalism, we need to embrace multicriteria, which interiorizes different goals and priorities in the decision-making process, as an alternative to the single-oriented goal of economic efficiency. In a time with increasing inequality, budget cuts that impoverish welfare state, deliberate decisions to stop financing the ecological transition, more and more voices are claiming for a system that puts democratic collective decisions over market forces: a democratic planning of our economies.

This is the initial paragraph of an article I am writing. But how can we translate planning into practical purposes at the grassroots level? I was recently ruminating about the concept of citizen planning, as the conscious effort to provide insights and develop methods that help expand or scale up the dimension of the social and solidarity economy. If I consider the organizations in that sphere as prefigurative expressions of a multicriteria economy, we need to think seriously about how to make those organizations to flourish, not in terms of making them bigger and bigger but in terms of providing social and economic infrastructures that enable those organizations to be replicated.

Which form would this citizen planning take? The chilean economist Carlos Matus, conceived planning as the universal capacity of thinking before acting. The urban planner John Friedmann argued that planning should not only be the task of a government or big corporate sector, planning must emerge from civil society specially because citizens are usually better prepared to address the issues they should face. Citizen planning can be imagined as the planning endeavour that do the necessary research (collect already existing knowledge and produce new synthesis) to be applied in organizations and economic units (like cooperatives) that need support in order to fight better in an environment full of profit-seeking actors.

I would like to open this discussion about this still work in progress concept.

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Hi Yaku,

I hadn’t come across multicriteria before, but it sounds like it could have some really interesting applications for democratic planning.

A couple of thoughts:
I wouldn’t necessarily consider efficiency as a principle to set aside. In capitalism, firms compete in terms of profitability and appropriation of surplus value. Some can still be profitable even while being wasteful. At the same time, efficiency is a principle of sustainability, avoiding the waste of energy, natural resources, time, effort, etc.

On the question of scaling. I understand this being a concern, especially given the risk of a large entity or organization becoming despotic or corrupt. But scaling up a project can also mean creating a plan, program, initiative, service, or institution that is broad and reaches a large population. This is why I think scaling and pursuing bigger projects should be considered together with efficiency in citizen planning, so I wouldn’t necessarily rule these out.

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“Planning” is a loose, catch-all term for a large swath of different processes that apply to different problems/goals. In what decision-making contexts do you see the applicability of citizen planning? I’ve thought deeply on this as well, and want to see what you think when bringing the concept into sharper focus.