Planningconsultantsinfluenceonlocalcomprehensiveplans.pdf

Journal of Planning Education and Research
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DOI: 10.1177/0739456X14566868
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Research-Based Article

Introduction

As local public planning processes have become more
sophisticated, and local government planning budgets have
become leaner, public officials and planners have come to
rely heavily on planning consultants to increase capacity,
both in terms of time and expertise (Sokolow 1997; McCann
2001; Norton 2005; Grijzen 2010). Yet there have been few
studies of planning processes that have analyzed the role of
consultants. As far as we know, none have addressed directly
the influence of consultants on the policy content of local
plans or on the corresponding legitimacy of the local plan-
ning endeavor (i.e., in terms of whether the plan genuinely
reflects the policy preferences of the community). To the
extent that researchers have addressed the use of consultants,
they have tended either to exclude consultants explicitly
from studies of planning practice (Garde 2008) or to lump
them together with staff planners (Howe, Abbott, and Adler
2004; Deyle and Schively Slotterback 2009). Given this lack
of attention, we do not have a good understanding of the
nature of consultants’ impact on the plans they help produce.
While we do have some evidence that planners in public
agencies and planners in private practice in fact have very
similar professional values (Loh and Norton 2013), we are
also intrigued by anecdotal evidence suggesting that the use
of planning consultants may question the legitimacy of the
local planning endeavor by affecting the policy content of
local plans in systematic ways. Focusing on the goal-setting
function of the local planning endeavor, we ask in this article
whether the involvement of planning consultants produces a
demonstrable effect on the policy focus of local comprehen-
sive plans, and if so, whether consultants promote a particu-
lar policy focus of their own rather than merely helping
localities achieve their own policy goals.

Building on the limited work that has been conducted in
the planning literature on planning consultants, and adapting
principal–agent theory as developed more prominently in the
political science and public policy literatures, we investigate
these questions employing data from a 2010 national survey
of local government officials. We first test for the effect of
consultant involvement on plan content. For those localities
engaging consultants, we then ask questions about local offi-
cials’ own level of commitment to selected policy goals and
their consultants’ commitment to those same goals, the local-
ity’s criteria for selecting consultants, the degree to which
the local official believes he or she and the community’s con-
sultants are committed to contemporary best plan-making
practices, and the policy content of the locality’s comprehen-
sive plan. We find that consultant involvement—along with
professional planning staff capacity and officials’ commit-
ment to planning—does appear to have a significant effect
on the policy focus of plans, primarily by prompting local
officials to adopt more strongly developed smart growth–
oriented plans than they likely would have adopted other-
wise. We conclude by discussing the implications of these
findings in terms of the policy-setting function of planning
and the tensions they highlight with regard to tenets of the
planning profession and community goal setting.

Initial submission, August 2013; revised submissions, March and October
2014; final acceptance, November 2014
1Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA
2University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:
Carolyn G. Loh, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Wayne State
University, 3198 FAB, 656 W. Kirby, Detroit, MI 48202, USA.
Email: [email protected]

Planning Consultants’ Influence on Local
Comprehensive Plans

Carolyn G. Loh1 and Richard K. Norton2

Abstract
Many planners work at private consulting firms, and many local governments use their services, but we have little idea of how
consultant involvement affects plans. Analyzing data from a survey of local officials who engage planning consultants, we find
that while engaging consultants does not appear to nudge local officials in a policy direction different from their preferences,
it does appear to yield plans with a policy focus more oriented toward smart growth. This raises questions about the kind
and degree of consultants’ impact on the legitimacy of the planning process.

Keywords
governance, growth management, land use, public administration, ethics

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2 Journal of Planning Education and Research

Background and Conceptual
Framework

Conceptualizing the Potential Effects of Planning
Consultants on Planning and Plans

While a few studies mention the presence of consultants in
passing (e.g., Birch 1980; Canan and Hennessy 1985; Punter
2003; Schively 2007, 86; Reardon et al. 2009, 393), the plan-
ning literature offers only a few hints here and there of the
significance of the consultant’s role and hypotheses about
how consultants might influence planning processes and out-
comes. Some, for example, find that consultants increase
local government capacity, extending and supplementing
staff expertise (Moe 1984; Sokolow 1997; Norton 2005).
This is an important finding since increased capacity in gen-
eral is known to lead to higher quality plans from a technical
or standards-based perspective, as well as higher levels of
implementation and effectiveness (Burby and Dalton 1994;
Brody, Carrasco, and Highfield 2006; Brody, Kang, and
Bernhardt 2010).

Others raise concerns, however, that consultants may
undermine the legitimacy of the local planning endeavor by
prompting plans that advance a consultant’s goals, or com-
munity leaders’ goals, rather than the goals or policy prefer-
ences of the larger community. Consultants may offer a
“cookie cutter” product that is easily produced but insuffi-
ciently tailored to individual clients, for example (Silver
1996, 79; Norton 2005, 61; Carr and Servon 2009). Or local
officials may choose consultants based on the consultants’
reputation for producing a particular type of product to sat-
isfy political goals other than engaging in “best-practice”
local planning, such as complying nominally with state-
mandated planning goals (Norton 2005). Or consultants may
bring a technocratic bias to the planning process, emphasiz-
ing expertise and efficiency over collaborative approaches,
thus allowing local decision makers to cloak unpopular polit-
ical decisions in “objective” analysis (Dalton 1986, p. 149).
McCann (2001) expresses concerns that the privatization of
so many formerly public planning functions leaves them
more vulnerable to domination by elites, while Grijzen
(2010) goes so far as to question the validity of planning car-
ried out by private actors, since planning’s legitimacy ulti-
mately comes from the state. In addition, over time, the use
of consultants might undermine the social learning or local
capacity-building benefits of engaging in a community plan-
ning effort (e.g., Friedmann 1987; Innes and Booher 2010;
Margerum 2011), for example, to the extent that the consul-
tants do all of the work and accrue all of the benefits, result-
ing in a plan that is disconnected from its constituents. For
this study, though, we focus on the potential for the use of
consultants to threaten the legitimacy of the comprehensive
planning process by inappropriately influencing plan goals.

We evaluate the potential for the use of consultants to
influence plan goals using a principal–agent framework.

While not employed much in the planning literature,
researchers in public policy and political science have
explored extensively the principal–agent model, where one
party, the principal, “seeks to fulfill specific policy goals
through the actions of his or her agents” (Stein 1990). The
primary benefit of establishing a principal–agent relationship
is generally taken to be the increased capacity that the agent
provides for the purpose of advancing the principal’s goals.
The greatest potential drawback to the relationship is the risk
that the principal’s and agent’s interests—particularly regard-
ing the appropriate level of effort to be engaged—are not
aligned, leading to opportunities for moral hazard and shirk-
ing on the part of the agent (Holmstrom 1979).

Originally, most of the work on principal–agent relation-
ships dealt exclusively with government bureaucracies in
which supervisors (principals) needed their subordinates
(agents) to complete particular tasks. More recently, govern-
ment agencies have increasingly relied on outsourcing
arrangements with contractors to complete tasks agency staff
would once have performed (Saint-Martin 1998), as “policy-
makers have often embraced [indirect government] in a
belief, often unsupported, that nongovernmental actors can
deliver public services more efficiently than government
agencies ever can” (Kettl 2002, 491). In either case, princi-
pal–agent models have typically assumed a situation of
information asymmetry, where the agent has more informa-
tion about what he or she is doing than the principal does
(Waterman and Meier 1998, 173), and those models have
been employed mostly to evaluate the potential for the agent
to shirk (Brehm and Gates 1997, 19).

In this study, we employ principal–agent theory to evalu-
ate a different, but related, attribute of the principal–agent
relationship that has not been addressed much in the political
science or public policy literatures: the potential for the
involvement of planning consultants to undermine the legiti-
macy of the community goal-setting function that planning
provides in terms of the development of public policies to be
adopted through a local comprehensive plan—specifically
by promoting the adoption of policies or goals the consultant
holds but that do not comport with the larger community’s
goals. Specifically, given that public principals no longer
have as much direct control over planning processes or out-
comes when engaging “indirect” government through the
use of consultants, this practice exacerbates issues of
accountability, which “involves the means by which public
agencies and their workers manage the diverse expectations
generated within and outside the organization” (Romzek and
Dubnick 1987, 228). As Forsyth explains, “This problem of
accountability and representation is part of a wider scenario
in which experts are simultaneously trained to have a
sophisticated view of issues and of the voting and nonvot-
ing publics affected by those issues, yet are removed from
direct oversight by the voting public” (1999, 9). While not
specifically commenting on consultants, she is concerned
that any structure or process that “lengthens the chain of

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Loh and Norton 3

accountability to the general public . . . undermines democ-
racy,” presumably by allowing the agent-consultant to
advance her own goals rather than those truly held by the
principal-community (Forsyth 1999, 9).

Planners have long viewed the legitimacy of planning as
coming from the direct engagement of the public in the plan-
ning process for the purpose of promoting the public interest,
rather than through the mediating participation of public offi-
cials alone (e.g., Alterman and MacRae 1983). Yet, while not
expressly referencing principal–agent theory, planners have
also long recognized the principal–agent relationships that
exist between these actors (i.e., elected public officials acting
as agent to the public as principal, planners acting as agent to
elected public officials as principal), as well as the corre-
sponding need for planners to be responsive to those public
decision makers (Alterman and MacRae 1983, 208). Beyond
Dalton’s concerns that planners may undermine planning’s
legitimacy by imbuing a technocratic-rationalistic bias into
public policy decision making, McCann’s and Grijzen’s con-
cerns appear to be that the use of consultants further threat-
ens the legitimacy of that public policy-making function
because their participation inserts yet another principal–
agent relationship into the mix, further reducing the transpar-
ency of the decisions being made, further extending the
“chain of accountability” between decision maker and the
public, and potentially further facilitating advancement of
the consultant’s rather than the community’s goals.

Conceptualizing the Policy Focus of Contemporary
Local Comprehensive Plans

Representative democracy is not perfect, and the policy pref-
erences of elected or appointed public decision makers may
not entirely reflect the policy preferences of the general pub-
lic. Nonetheless, we accept the proposition that the account-
ability those officials have to their constituents (the public)
serves to align their preferences with public preferences as
closely as possible in a representative government. Given
that proposition, one way to test whether the use of planning
consultants somehow systematically threatens the legitimacy
of the community’s policy-making or goal-setting efforts
through planning is to ask whether local comprehensive
plans produced by less-accountable planning consultants
systematically differ in terms of policy focus from plans pro-
duced by more-accountable public officials alone (i.e., with-
out the use of consultants). We set out to evaluate, therefore,
the influence of using planning consultants on the policy
focus of local comprehensive plans. To do that, it was first
necessary to establish a reasonable way to characterize the
policy focus of a contemporary local comprehensive plan.

In the last decade or so, the principles of smart growth
have become a widely accepted plan policy orientation, both
by academics and practitioners, departing from a conven-
tional twentieth-century policy focus on a more single-use,
separated, buffered, and auto-dependent landscape vision.
Smart growth has also become a frequent metric in studies of

plan quality (Brody, Carrasco, and Highfield 2006; Berke
and Godschalk 2009; Lyles and Stevens 2014). We under-
stand that smart growth principles, as a set of planning goals,
represent but one potential ideal for the planning endeavor,
and that they are incomplete, especially in regard to address-
ing potential exclusionary effects from a reduced supply of
buildable land (Danielsen, Lang, and Fulton 1999) and incor-
porating resiliency to natural hazards (Berke and Campanella
2006). Nonetheless, we view them as a widely understood
array of policies that can reasonably be used to characterize
plan policy focus, conceptualizing that substantive dimen-
sion of the plan as distinguishable from its analytical quality
(Norton 2008). Therefore, we use the conventionally
accepted set of smart growth principles taken together,
described more below, as a proxy of plan policy focus for our
analysis.

How planning consultants might influence local
plan policy focus outcomes

Planning outcomes, including plan policy focus, depend on
officials’ awareness of issues, commitment to dealing with
them, and capacity to do so (Norton 2008; Berke and
Godschalk 2009; Laurian et al. 2010). We reason that given
that the pace of implementation of smart growth ideas has
been slow (Talen and Knaap 2003; Downs 2005), actual
adoption of such a policy focus in a local plan would require
commitment and some professional expertise on the part of
the locality; that is, the default is to not have a smart growth–
oriented plan absent some knowledge, commitment, and
capacity on the part of the locality to advance such a plan.
We further reason that the involvement of planning consul-
tants may increase awareness of issues, such as those encom-
passed by smart growth, among their clients, and, through
their expertise, add capacity to advance those principles.

If consultant-written plans systematically reflect a policy
focus in terms of smart growth principles different from
plans written without the use of consultants—especially if
consultant-written plans reflect a stronger smart growth
focus given the reasoning noted above—this may prelimi-
narily indicate that consultants are able to “nudge” their cli-
ents in that particular policy direction and produce official
plans with a policy focus that diverges from the policy pref-
erences of the local officials, thereby weakening the link
between constituent goals and policy outcomes. If, on the
other hand, the smart growth orientation of the plans is not
systematically related to the involvement of consultants, this
would suggest that consultants are having little if any dis-
cernable influence on their clients’ plan policy making, at
least in terms of changing the substantive policy focus of the
plans being adopted in the context of smart growth.

Hypotheses

While we are interested in the full range of ways in which the
planning client–consultant relationship might affect local

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4 Journal of Planning Education and Research

plan-making activities and outputs, we focus here primarily
on the ways in which the use of planning consultants (acting
as agents) affects the policy choices made by localities (their
principals), as reflected through the policy focus of the plans
produced. Building on the above, we present two hypotheses
about the effects that consultant involvement might have on
the policy focus of local comprehensive plans, along with a
third hypothesis speaking to the relationship between com-
mitment to best plan-making practice and the policy orienta-
tion of the plan.

First, we hypothesize that the mere involvement of a plan-
ning consultant increases the plan’s policy orientation toward
smart growth. Consultants have the potential to increase a
plan’s orientation toward smart growth by disseminating cur-
rent planning ideas and best practices among the citizens and
officials of a given client community (in which case consul-
tants’ and officials’ policy preferences would be aligned).
For example, many rural communities do not have profes-
sional planners on staff, so consultants are responsible for
bringing innovation in planning into the community. It is
also possible, however, that the consultant’s effect on plan
orientation is negligible, and that other client-locality quali-
ties are more predictive.

Second, we hypothesize that a plan produced in a com-
munity that chooses consultants known for providing objec-
tive and independent analysis (i.e., “independent” planning
consultants), rather than choosing consultants known for
focusing primarily on satisfying a client’s plan-making and
political goals (i.e., “responsive” planning consultants), is
more likely to have a policy focus aligned with smart growth
principles. Certain communities may choose a consultant
known for providing objective analysis, conducted within
the framework of current thinking on the most appropriate
policies to advance (i.e., “best planning practice” with regard
to best planning policy). Other communities may choose
consultants for other reasons, such as selecting consultants
known for writing plans that are politically expedient for
nominally satisfying non-local goals like state planning man-
dates (see Norton 2005, 61). Here we posit that the typical
consultant subscribes to the idea that smart growth principles
should be incorporated into plans, since by and large consul-
tants are professionals with formal planning education, and,
as we note above, smart growth has become a widely
accepted paradigm in planning. Communities selecting con-
sultants known to advance objective and independent local
planning analysis—which we label “independent consul-
tants,” are thus more likely to systematically produce plans
that have a stronger smart growth focus than communities
selecting consultants known primarily for being especially
responsive to officials’ more politically oriented goals, which
we label “responsive consultants.”

Finally, we hypothesize that local officials’ commitment
to the use of contemporary best plan-making processes (i.e.,
“best planning practice” in terms of plan-making) tends to
increase the policy focus of the plans produced toward smart

growth, presuming a coherence in contemporary theories
linking plan-making practice and planning outcomes (Talen
and Knaap 2003; Kelly 2004; Porter 2007), where engaging
in “best planning practice” refers to the use of public partici-
pation and high-quality data, for example (discussed in terms
of concept measurement below). We similarly hypothesize
that the consultants’ commitment to best planning practices
tends to increase the smart growth orientation of the plan,
although we have no a priori basis to expect that effect to be
greater or lesser than the effect of local officials’
commitment.

Methodology

Survey

The survey for this study was one of a pair we conducted in
late 2010 and early 2011. We sent the survey to local govern-
ment planners and officials—people who are likely to hire
and work with planning consultants. We drew our sample
from two APA Division email lists, the City Planning and
Management Division and the Small Town and Rural
Planning Division. We also sent the survey via email to the
top appointed official, top elected official, and planning
director (or planner/zoning administrator if there was no
planning director) of each municipality in Michigan,
Maryland, and Oregon. We chose these states to vary the
regulatory environment and level of state leadership around
planning. According to Burby and May (1997, 9), and con-
ventional wisdom, Oregon has particularly strong state lead-
ership and a strong regulatory environment around land use
planning, Michigan is particularly weak on both counts, and
Maryland is somewhere in between. This two-pronged sam-
pling approach assured us some geographic and institutional
diversity in our sample, as well as some depth in the posi-
tions of local public official respondents (i.e., not just
planners).

Although we did not gather geographic information from
the APA email list respondents, we did check for state-level
differences in both consultant use and plan orientation among
the 353 respondents for whom we knew their location. One-
way analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests turned up no sig-
nificant differences between the three states in either variable.
We also tested for differences between types of officials
(elected officials, appointed officials, planning directors, and
all others) both in terms of their commitment to best prac-
tices and their view of their locality’s consultants’ commit-
ment to best practices; in neither case were there significant
differences.

In addition, we tested for population size bias in our sur-
vey responses by comparing the reported population size of
the respondent communities in Maryland, Michigan, and
Oregon to the distribution of all county subdivision sizes in
the three states. We found that our sample had more medium-
sized cities (10,001–50,000) and fewer small cities

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Loh and Norton 5

(1,001–10,000) than the universe (see Table 1). The overall
distribution of the categories is similar, however, and does
not show any clear omissions of community types or suggest
significant representational bias. Because of the lack of indi-
cations of sampling bias, and given the small size of the
overall sample, our model does not attempt to make any con-
clusions based on geography or job type.

See Table 2 for a breakdown of the two sample groups and
response rates. The response rate for those we contacted
directly was considerably higher than that for the list servers.
While the overall response rate, 19 percent, was low, it is not
unusual for an exclusively internet-based survey (Kaplowitz,
Hadlock, and Levine 2004).

Because we relied on a single survey of local public offi-
cials to assess a number of key variables (i.e., plan policy
content, local officials’ perspectives on their consultant-
selection criteria, local officials’ perspectives on their own
levels of commitment to plan policies and planning practice,
and local officials’ perspectives on their planning consul-
tants’ commitment to best plan-making practice), we orga-
nized the survey questions to minimize leading respondents
toward giving responses that are cognitively consistent rather
than necessarily accurate. More importantly, we did not ask
respondents to report on their commitment to specific, widely
accepted smart growth policies and then ask for their assess-
ment of the incorporation of those same smart growth poli-
cies within their locality’s plan. Rather, we asked the officials
questions first of their perception of their own commitment
to several selected policies that parallel but are not identical
to smart growth principles, along with their commitment to
selected contemporary best plan-making processes (both
described in more detail below), as well as their perception
of their consultants’ degree of commitment to those same

policies and processes. We then asked for their assessment of
whether their current plans incorporate selected smart
growth–oriented policies. Although independent assessment
of the locality plan policy focus correlated with a survey of
local officials’ perceptions would have yielded a more robust
assessment, we did not undertake that resource-intensive
approach for this research effort.

Analysis

We analyzed the data for purposes here using ordinary least
squares regression analysis. Table 3 details the variable con-
cepts and constructs we used for this analysis. The regression
models attempt to discern the impact of the use of consul-
tants on the policy focus of a locality’s comprehensive plan.

For our dependent variable, plan policy focus, we asked
survey respondents about their plan’s degree of emphasis on
ten smart growth principles, including the following
(Environmental Protection Agency 2011):

•• Mix land uses
•• Take advantage of compact building design
•• Create a range of housing opportunities and choices
•• Create walkable neighborhoods
•• Foster distinctive, attractive communities with a

strong sense of place
•• Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty, and

critical environmental areas
•• Strengthen and direct development towards existing

communities
•• Provide a variety of transportation choices
•• Make development decisions predictable, fair, and

cost effective
•• Encourage community and stakeholder collaboration

in development decisions

Although there are many metrics along which to measure the
policy content of plans, we chose to ask respondents about
their plans’ adherence to the smart growth principles both
because there is a “remarkable consensus” among planners
that plans ought to incorporate these elements (Talen and
Knaap 2003, 345), as discussed above, and because we
thought respondents would be able to accurately answer
these questions in the course of completing the survey given
current attention to this formulation. We constructed the
actual variable, plan policy focus, by recording the number
of smart growth elements that a respondent reported as being
included in his or her locality’s plan (see Table 2 for more
details).

Our measure of consultant involvement was whether the
respondent’s locality currently contracts with a planning firm
for planning services. We included two variables that reflect
respondents’ values when choosing consultants. The first,
responsive consultant, reflects how much the respondent’s
locality tries to choose a consultant known for

Table 1. Population Sizes of Sample Communities versus Total
in Maryland, Michigan, and Oregon.

Population Size Sample (%) All Communities (%)

≤1,000 15.2 18.8
1,001–10,000 49.7 64.1
10,001–50,000 24.3 13.1
50,001–200,000 9.1 3.6
>200,000 1.7 0.4

Table 2. Response Rates.

Sample Responses
Response
Rate (%)