Skip to section navigation
Skip to page content

Participatory Planning

Research and Commentary

Today’s most pressing policy challenges require expert analysis to address. But public participation can also be essential to the decisionmaking process. The Pardee Center advances the state of the art in analytic facilitation of participatory processes.

Browse recent RAND content about research that aims to shape the future using participatory methods. Looking for something specific? Try searching all RAND published research.

Essay
An Early Warning System for Landslides Protects Sitka, Alaska
A 2015 landslide that killed three people in Sitka, Alaska, changed how residents looked at the steep hills all around them. The community worked with researchers to develop a warning system to prevent such tragedies in the future.
Mar 14, 2023
Commentary
Had We Planned Better for a Pandemic, We Might Be More Free Today
The COVID-19 pandemic has made Americans less free, confining us to our homes, and separating us from the people we love and things we value doing. This COVID-19 experience may help people to learn the importance of planning to preserving and expanding freedom in an interconnected and complex world.
Sep 4, 2020
Journal Article
Engaging Multiple Worldviews With Quantitative Decision Support
Many of today's pressing policy challenges—such as climate change and inequality—are characterized as wicked problems. How might decision making under deep uncertainty be used to demonstrate methods that may help resolve the tension between differing approaches for addressing these problems?
Aug 25, 2020
Report
Implementing a New Mobility Vision in a Fast-Changing World
Culver City's booming local economy contributes to significant traffic congestion. Its Transit Oriented Development (TOD) plan aims to reduce the reliance on cars by reshaping the urban landscape. An implementation plan for the Rancho Higuera neighborhood can help the city realize its TOD vision.
Jan 3, 2020
Journal Article
Sacramento Area Council of Governments Peer Review
The Southern California Association of Governments held a peer review to promote information exchange in the transportation planning and modeling community. The primary objective of the peer review was to help agencies understand the use of models to better manage uncertainties in long-range planning.
Sep 25, 2019
Report
A World-Building Workshop on the Future of Artificial Intelligence
How might artificial intelligence (AI) be used to shape a new world? A workshop engaged a group of innovative thinkers in an approach called large-scale speculative design to sketch desirable, AI-enabled future worlds.
Jun 21, 2019
Journal Article
Bezos World Or Levelers: Can We Choose Our Scenario?
Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning algorithms now meet or surpass capabilities once regarded as uniquely human and will grow more capable over time. How might AI be used to enable fundamentally different future worlds?
Mar 28, 2019
Announcement
RAND Wins $2.1 Million Grant to Improve Landslide Prediction
A RAND-led team that includes the University of Southern California, the University of Oregon, the Sitka Sound Science Center, and the Sitka Tribe of Alaska will design a novel landslide risk warning system for Sitka, Alaska, a coastal town of 9,000 near the landslide-prone slopes of the Tongass National Forest.
Oct 10, 2018
Commentary
A Better Way to Think About Scooters
Unleashed in Santa Monica, California, last September, Bird and its competitors are now in 30 American cities and counting. Cities are responding to the scooter takeover with new regulations and increased law enforcement. But if officials rely only on 20th-century tools to integrate these 21st-century scooters into their cities, they will miss a big opportunity.
Aug 28, 2018