ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the extent to which ideas about collaborative and communicative planning and about governance transformation – ideas conceived in a European/western planning context – were helpful in this completely different cultural context. It discusses why and how we decided to go about this particular kind of intervention, drawing on the collaborative and communicative planning literature and concerns around process design that have all been central features of Healey's work. The chapter focuses on how Healey's conceptual framework for analysing transformative governance might help to understand the achievements and limitations of our therapeutic approach. The shift from municipal colonialism to something approaching a more collaborative form of governance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups in the Village of Burns Lake constitutes progress, even 'transformation', in the conceptualization of western planning theory. Proving that any planning intervention has achieved such a deep sense of transformation is challenging, if not impossible, in the short term.
