Martin Westin
Biographic Data
| ID | 6538793 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Martin Westin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Martin |
| FAMILY NAME | Westin |
| SIGNATURE | WESTIN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3887-1517 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Collaboration in Times of Crises
Collaboration is considered essential for addressing social and environmental crises. This article revisits Judith Innes and David Booher’s engagement with complexity science to advance a systemic strand of communicative planning theory and assess its relevance for understanding collaboration during crises. Drawing on practitioners’ experiences in five Swedish municipalities during the Syrian and Ukrainian refugee mass migrations, we show how the…
Grappling with post-truth politics - facilitation strategies for policy-making in troubled times
Navigating swift and slow planning
Pressing sustainability challenges and increased influence of neoliberal ideas in planning have resulted in strong demands to 'speed up', and increase efficiency in, planning processes. Meanwhile, the reported risks that such emphasis on speed have for participatory decision-making and continuous calls for increased deliberation in planning, following the ideas of communicative planning theory, suggest that planning processes ought to 'slow down'…
Between authority and argumentation
Facilitators of collaborative governance structure communication between stakeholders. They influence the process and, in some instances, also the outcome of collaborative governance. Even so, facilitators are, in the literature and in practice, most often reduced to being neutral or seen merely as power sharers. This reductive understanding obscures facilititators’ use of power. The purpose of this paper is to outline a nuanced understanding of …
Storytelling to save the planet
In the last decade, storytelling has been popularised as a method for societal sustainability transformations.With this growing popularity, there has also been a rapid increase in those identifying as storytellers.Perhaps because storytelling for sustainability has an innocent ring to it, it has not yet been studied from a power perspective.However, as it is fast-spreading and has explicit change purposes, it is important to clarify assumptions a…
Negotiating Authority in Facilitation Practice – A Conceptual Framework to Describe Facilitators’ Use of Power in Collaborative Governance
The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework to describe facilitators' use of power in facilitation practice. Facilitators are mainly, in theory as well as in practice, described as neutral power sharers. This reductive understanding of the role of facilitators is problematic as it hides the influence that these practitioners have over the process and outcome of collaborative governance. Analyzing two Swedish collaborative gover…
Public Planner – A Deliberative Authority
Beyond merely mediating between particular interests, deliberative planners are in need of a firmer agency in shaping attention to common good concerns. However, locating such agency legitimately in the context of deliberative ideals is difficult, and not well supported by theory. A key problem is the weak conceptualization of legitimate forms of power-over, regarding the deliberative planners’ agency. To address this theoretical challenge, the a…
Whose Knowledge Counts in the Planning of Urban Sustainability? – Investigating Handbooks for Nudging and Participation
When planning sustainable districts, planners mediate between the knowledge claims of citizens and experts. The planning strategies nudging and participation provide contradictory ideas about how planners can perform this mediation. We analyse handbooks for the two strategies, guided by the question: whose knowledge counts? These handbooks provide citizens, experts and planners with varying degrees of authority. While nudging positions behavioura…
The framing of power in communicative planning theory
In this paper, I analyse the framing of power in streams of communicative planning influenced by American pragmatism, sociological institutionalism and alternative dispute resolution. While scholars have heavily debated Habermasian communicative planning theory, the broader conception of power across these linked, but distinct, streams of the theory remains to be explicated. Through analysis of 40 years’ of publishing by John Forester, Patsy Heal…
Critical, Engaged and Change-oriented Scholarship in Environmental Communication. Six Methodological Dilemmas to Think With
While calls for critical, engaged and change-oriented scholarship in environmental communication (EC) abound, few articles discuss what this may practically entail. With this article, we aim to contribute to a discussion in EC about the methodological implications of such scholarship. Based on our combined experience in EC research and drawing from a variety of academic fields, we describe six methodological dilemmas that we encounter in our rese…
The framing of power in communicative planning theory
In this paper, I analyse the framing of power in streams of communicative planning influenced by American pragmatism, sociological institutionalism and alternative dispute resolution. While scholars have heavily debated Habermasian communicative planning theory, the broader conception of power across these linked, but distinct, streams of the theory remains to be explicated. Through analysis of 40 years’ of publishing by John Forester, Patsy Heal…
Negotiating Authority in Facilitation Practice – A Conceptual Framework to Describe Facilitators’ Use of Power in Collaborative Governance
The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework to describe facilitators' use of power in facilitation practice. Facilitators are mainly, in theory as well as in practice, described as neutral power sharers. This reductive understanding of the role of facilitators is problematic as it hides the influence that these practitioners have over the process and outcome of collaborative governance. Analyzing two Swedish collaborative gover…
Critical, Engaged and Change-oriented Scholarship in Environmental Communication. Six Methodological Dilemmas to Think With
While calls for critical, engaged and change-oriented scholarship in environmental communication (EC) abound, few articles discuss what this may practically entail. With this article, we aim to contribute to a discussion in EC about the methodological implications of such scholarship. Based on our combined experience in EC research and drawing from a variety of academic fields, we describe six methodological dilemmas that we encounter in our rese…
The framing of power in communicative planning theory
In this paper, I analyse the framing of power in streams of communicative planning influenced by American pragmatism, sociological institutionalism and alternative dispute resolution. While scholars have heavily debated Habermasian communicative planning theory, the broader conception of power across these linked, but distinct, streams of the theory remains to be explicated. Through analysis of 40 years’ of publishing by John Forester, Patsy Heal…
Whose Knowledge Counts in the Planning of Urban Sustainability? – Investigating Handbooks for Nudging and Participation
When planning sustainable districts, planners mediate between the knowledge claims of citizens and experts. The planning strategies nudging and participation provide contradictory ideas about how planners can perform this mediation. We analyse handbooks for the two strategies, guided by the question: whose knowledge counts? These handbooks provide citizens, experts and planners with varying degrees of authority. While nudging positions behavioura…
Public Planner – A Deliberative Authority
Beyond merely mediating between particular interests, deliberative planners are in need of a firmer agency in shaping attention to common good concerns. However, locating such agency legitimately in the context of deliberative ideals is difficult, and not well supported by theory. A key problem is the weak conceptualization of legitimate forms of power-over, regarding the deliberative planners’ agency. To address this theoretical challenge, the a…
Navigating swift and slow planning
Pressing sustainability challenges and increased influence of neoliberal ideas in planning have resulted in strong demands to 'speed up', and increase efficiency in, planning processes. Meanwhile, the reported risks that such emphasis on speed have for participatory decision-making and continuous calls for increased deliberation in planning, following the ideas of communicative planning theory, suggest that planning processes ought to 'slow down'…
Between authority and argumentation
Facilitators of collaborative governance structure communication between stakeholders. They influence the process and, in some instances, also the outcome of collaborative governance. Even so, facilitators are, in the literature and in practice, most often reduced to being neutral or seen merely as power sharers. This reductive understanding obscures facilititators’ use of power. The purpose of this paper is to outline a nuanced understanding of …
Storytelling to save the planet
In the last decade, storytelling has been popularised as a method for societal sustainability transformations.With this growing popularity, there has also been a rapid increase in those identifying as storytellers.Perhaps because storytelling for sustainability has an innocent ring to it, it has not yet been studied from a power perspective.However, as it is fast-spreading and has explicit change purposes, it is important to clarify assumptions a…
Negotiating Authority in Facilitation Practice – A Conceptual Framework to Describe Facilitators’ Use of Power in Collaborative Governance
The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework to describe facilitators' use of power in facilitation practice. Facilitators are mainly, in theory as well as in practice, described as neutral power sharers. This reductive understanding of the role of facilitators is problematic as it hides the influence that these practitioners have over the process and outcome of collaborative governance. Analyzing two Swedish collaborative gover…
Grappling with post-truth politics - facilitation strategies for policy-making in troubled times
Collaboration in Times of Crises
Collaboration is considered essential for addressing social and environmental crises. This article revisits Judith Innes and David Booher’s engagement with complexity science to advance a systemic strand of communicative planning theory and assess its relevance for understanding collaboration during crises. Drawing on practitioners’ experiences in five Swedish municipalities during the Syrian and Ukrainian refugee mass migrations, we show how the…
Political science (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Public Administration (5 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (4 works) · Public relations (4 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (4 works) · Business (3 works) · Economics (3 works)