ABSTRACT
There has been growing interest in recent years in what might be termed “community dialogues,” or techniques for engaging broad-based discussions of issues within particular communities. The purpose of this article is to survey and assess this movement based on prior research. We first contrast traditional citizen involvement in public planning as a method of pursuing community dialogues with the newer, collaborative public decision-making approaches. The article then examines the benefits of community dialogues and the tensions that arise from their pursuit. We conclude by offering an assessment of how we might think about these techniques in the future.
