PORTUS
26
The Online Magazine of RETE
November
2013
Year XIII
ISSN 2282-5789
Focus
The role of Public Participation
in sustainable port planning
Authors
Matteo Ignaccolo
Professor of transport planning.
University of Catania, Department of
Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Giuseppe Inturri
Assistant Professor of Transport.
University of Catania, Department of
Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Malecón de Maracaibo y Centro Histórico (2007). (Foto: Maracaibo Cenital)
Michela Le Pira
Transport infrastructures are complex systems for the many actors
involved, their conflicting interests and for the procedural issues,
particularly when a choice has to be taken among different alternative plans or projects.
When the decision making process is not well managed, the dilation
of times among the phases of planning, designing, tendering and
building new transport infrastructures and systems is a main risk. In
the worst case the “do-nothing” alternative may be the most probable outcome.
The main decision-maker in transport planning is the Public Administration which is supposed to interpret the collective preferences
of the represented community, usually assisted by expert planners.
The results of the decisions, in the form of a transport plan, affect in
a direct way the so-called “stakeholders” and in an indirect way the
social, economic and environmental dimensions of the whole community living in the reference area.
Port Planning
In the context of maritime transports, ports play a strategic role in
the development of domestic and international trade and have a
strong impact on the liveability of the local community hosting the
port as well.
PhD student.
University of Catania, Department of
Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Keywords
Public
participation,
Community
involvement, Stakeholders engagement, Sustainability, Port planning,
Port-City relationships
Abstract
Ports play a strategic role in the
development of domestic and international trade and have a strong
impact on the liveability of the local
community hosting the port as well.
They face many problems related
to the multitude of actors directly
and indirectly involved and the
variety of interests they represent.
For these reasons port planning
requires appropriate skills and procedures to be successful.
One of the biggest issue is the need
of Public Participation (also referred
as Community Involvement or Public Engagement) into the decisionmaking process, in order to make
the planning practice effective and
PORTUS The Online Magazine of RETE
Port-city Relationship and Urban Waterfront Redevelopment
www.portusonline.org
1
PORTUS
26
The Online Magazine of RETE
November
2013
Year XIII
ISSN 2282-5789
Focus
Matteo Ignaccolo
Giuseppe Inturri
Michela Le Pira
“The role of Public Participation
in sustainable port planning”
The objectives of a port are highly dependent on the mission statement, the regional market and the institutional context. They can
be very different: from maximizing throughput, to maximizing net
profit, operating at least cost, reaching financial autonomy, maximizing employment, or promoting regional economic development,
maximize quality of service to shippers, just to give a few examples.
Port planning is a decision-making process based on the forecasting
of transport demand and supply, as shown in. It is mostly a publicoriented activity, based on the evaluation of alternative options
according to different criteria (economic, financial, environmental,
social, functional) and to the assessment of priorities. The long term
strategic equilibrium of the port activity is largely affected by the
institutional framework (Port Ownership Model), by the Stakeholder
Relationship Management (SRM) able to take into proper consideration the opinion of all actors involved in the port community.
The success of a port and its competitiveness depend largely on
the way the port manager succeeds in directing the interactions
between different stakeholders.
(cost) efficient. What is important is
to engage all the stakeholders from
the very beginning of the planning
process with different levels of
involvement during all the relevant
phases. Taking into consideration
the stakeholders’ needs and concerns it will be easier to find the
most shared solutions pursuing port
sustainability.
Copyright © 2013 RETE - All rights reserved
Transport infrastructures construction times by cost range
and implementation steps. (Source: TEH – Ambrosetti,
2012)
Public Participation
There can be different types of barriers to the decision-making process as described by Cascetta (2011):
- barriers of context, which in turn can be institutional (i.e. who is
responsible for what), legal (i.e. what is allowed by the law) and
financial (i.e. lack of resources);
Port planning framework. (Gaur, 2005)
- barriers of the decision-making process due to the traditional approach of the decision-maker DAD (Decide – Announce – Defend)
and the frequent consequence of contrasting new projects, also
known as NIMBY syndrome (“Not In My BackYard”), or the more extremeBANANA (“Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone”).
The NIMBY syndrome is so widespread in Italy, that a web forum has
been set up to monitor the phenomenon (http://www.nimbyforum.
it): in 2012 more than 300 NIMBY-syndrome-affected public works
which caused protests and resistance from local communities has
been recorded.
Though EU policy already promotes Public Participation (PP)
whenever plans and programmes have an impact on the environment (Aarhus convention (1998), Directive 2003/35/EC, Agenda 21,
Directive 2001/42/EC on the Strategic Evaluation Assessment), only
17% of ports involved local communities and stakeholders in port
development plans (Brooke, 2002 cited in Henesey et al., 2003).
Example of NIMBY syndrome: Gioia Tauro, despite the
protest, the Port Committee gives go-ahead to the regasiication terminal. (Source: www.contropiano.org/ambiente/
item/14982)
PORTUS The Online Magazine of RETE
Port-city Relationship and Urban Waterfront Redevelopment
www.portusonline.org
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PORTUS
26
The Online Magazine of RETE
Matteo Ignaccolo
Giuseppe Inturri
Michela Le Pira
November
2013
Year XIII
ISSN 2282-5789
Focus
“The role of Public Participation
in sustainable port planning”
Nowadays, because of globalisation of production and consumption
which induced structural changes in the inter-port/intra-port relations, the success of a port and its competitiveness depend more
and more on the way the port manager succeeds in directing the
interactions between different stakeholders and the concept of
stakeholders has become a key term in any port management strategy (Henesey et al., 2003;Winkelmans and Notteboom, 2007). Involving all stakeholders from the beginning and during all the planning
phases assures a transparent and (probably) shared decision-making
process. Moreover, a greater focus on external stakeholders may
increase the port activities’ legitimacy at the city and regional levels,
and may also contribute to sustainable development (Dooms et al.,
2004).
Shit from DAD to EDD approach. (Walker, 2009)
Public Participation (PP) is the formal procedure aimed to involve
citizens and stakeholders into the decision-making process.
It should favour a shift from the traditional planning approach,
where the decision-maker with the experts makes the decision and
then announces (and defends) it to the community (the abovementioned DAD), to a deliberative approach, with the engagement
of the interested parties at the beginning of the process, which leads
to a deliberation (and a decision) and finally to the implementation
of the decision, following an approach called EDD: Engage – Deliberate – Decide (Walker, 2009).
he participation pyramid. (Holstein, 2010)
Taking properly into account the ‘strategic intent’ of different stakeholder categories by assuring a public participatory process, can
facilitate the convergence to a shared solution, avoid waste of time
and money, help the inclusion of the sustainability principles in the
port mission, raise the responsibility of local communities towards
projects, enlarge the coalitions on the choices, give to planners a
clearer awareness of needs and constraints, help to find more effective solutions, provide a better understanding of the potentiality of
the plan and its possible economic opportunities.
Building the participation process
There are different levels of participation, as stated by Arnstein (1969)
in the so called “ladder of citizen participation” which shows the different types of participation and “nonparticipation” dividing them
into eight different rungs. “Civil Society” and “Citizen Control” are the
highest levels of involvement, where citizens are responsible for the
implementation of plans. It is necessary to choose the appropriate
type of involvement related to the plan and the background, avoiding the lowest levels which correspond to the “Nonparticipation”,
making the participation process useless and time (and money) wasting. The “participation pyramid” is derived from the previous ladder
and represents the different levels of participation (Holstein, 2010).
According to Holstein choosing the appropriate level of involvement
is the first step in order to “guarantee a proper connection between
PORTUS The Online Magazine of RETE
Port-city Relationship and Urban Waterfront Redevelopment
www.portusonline.org
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PORTUS
26
The Online Magazine of RETE
November
2013
Year XIII
ISSN 2282-5789
Focus
Matteo Ignaccolo
Giuseppe Inturri
Michela Le Pira
“The role of Public Participation
in sustainable port planning”
participation as a process, the input and proposals of all participants
in this process, and the final decision stage”.
Cascetta and Pagliara (2011) propose to include PP in all the basic
phases of a transport planning process, according to five levels of
participation:
- stakeholder identification, at the early stage of decision-making
context assessment;
- listening, during the analysis of the present situation and the identification of plan objectives;
- information giving and consultation, while formulating and evaluating the alternative systems’ projects;
- participation in the final choice.
Stakeholder identification in port planning
Thanks to the specific functions that are located inside the port it is
possible to identify stakeholders and categorize them according to
three main categories:
- Institutions and authorities (public sector), which in turn can be:
- internal stakeholders
- public policy stakeholders
- Companies and operators (private sector), which can be:
- considered as internal stakeholders
- Local communities (or community stakeholders), which can be
considered as external stakeholders
Typical stakeholders involved in port management and
planning.
The categorization proposed is inspired to the four categories described in Henesey et al. (2003), where the internal stakeholders are
part of the comprehensive port authority organization, while the
external stakeholders are the in situ and ex situ economic players.
Tools for the Public Participation
Traditional tools to support a participatory process are meetings,
focus groups and interviews with the relevant stakeholders. They
are sometimes regarded as compulsory moments of the decisionmaking process, time and money consuming, often depriving participation from its effectiveness. Whatever the approach chosen, it
is fundamental to deliver a clear identification of the stakeholders
to be involved, the role they have in the decision-making process,
the nature of their relationships, building a real network, where
each node is a stakeholder and each link represents the relation
between two nodes. To this aim Social Network Analysis (SNA) can
PORTUS The Online Magazine of RETE
Port-city Relationship and Urban Waterfront Redevelopment
www.portusonline.org
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PORTUS
26
The Online Magazine of RETE
Matteo Ignaccolo
Giuseppe Inturri
Michela Le Pira
November
2013
Year XIII
ISSN 2282-5789
Focus
“The role of Public Participation
in sustainable port planning”
be used (Dempwolf and Lyles, 2010), with different techniques such
as interviews with the stakeholders (Kazmierczak, 2012; Pitt, 2008)
or the snowballing technique (e.g. with automated software such as
StakeNet, StakeSource (Lim et al., 2011). Then adequate centrality
indicators can be calculated to measure the importance of the actors
in the network, to identify the stakeholders who are the most critical
for an effective participatory process.
For example, in the network of image the stakeholder C has a degree
centrality of 4 because it is connected to 4 nodes; the stakeholder E
has a high betweenness centrality, as it lies on the paths connecting most of the nodes; at last stakeholder F has a high eigenvector
centrality because it is connected to the most nodes that are also
highly connected.
Centrality indexes in a stakeholders’ network.
To this network, lying in the space of stakeholders’ relationships, it
is possible to associate another stakeholders’ network, in the space
of opinions. This enables the interaction process to be reproduced
through simulation models of the opinion dynamics on the network, able to investigate how the information exchange among
stakeholders endowed with different opinions. Le Pira et al. (2013)
built a multi-agent based simulation model to investigate to what
extent the interaction among the stakeholders and the exchange of
information can affect the majority’s opinion, as a function of the
topology of the network, the initial distribution of opinions and the
relative influence of stakeholders.
Public Participation in a Port Action Plan
Stakeholders’ network NetLogo, http://ccl.northwestern.
edu/netlogo/. (Le Pira et al., 2013)
The University of Catania, as partner of the PORTA project (www.
porta-project.eu) supported by the European Regional Development Fund within the MED Programme, experimented the relevance
of public participation of the diverse stakeholders involved in the
preparation of a Port Action Plan and in particular the relationships
between Port Authority and city/citizens. According to the proposed
planning model, based on the Deming cycle PDCA (Plan-Do-CheckAct), a Port Action Plan should consider the community involvement
in all the phases. The five levels of involvement below described can
be coupled with the different phases of the PDCA cycle:
Opinions’ plot using NetLogo, http://ccl.northwestern.edu/
netlogo/. (Le Pira et al., 2013)
PORTUS The Online Magazine of RETE
Port-city Relationship and Urban Waterfront Redevelopment
www.portusonline.org
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PORTUS
26
The Online Magazine of RETE
Matteo Ignaccolo
Giuseppe Inturri
Michela Le Pira
November
2013
Year XIII
ISSN 2282-5789
Focus
“The role of Public Participation
in sustainable port planning”
Conclusions
Community Involvement can contribute substantially to the acceptance of long term strategies in port planning. It is an integral part of
the plan and adequate resources have to be devoted to it. It must be
performed following a procedure along the entire decision making
process.
Suitable tools have to be developed to assure the decision making
process will be effective, efficient, transparent and flexible.
Stakeholder network analysis and opinion dynamics modelling have
proofed to be promising tools to assist who is in charge to lead the
participatory process.
References
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PORTUS
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The Online Magazine of RETE
Matteo Ignaccolo
Giuseppe Inturri
Michela Le Pira
November
2013
Year XIII
ISSN 2282-5789
Focus
“The role of Public Participation
in sustainable port planning”
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Article Reference for citation:
Ignaccolo Matteo, Inturri Giuseppe, Michela Le Pira, “The role of Public Participation in sustainable port planning”,
PORTUS: the online magazine of RETE, n.26, November 2013, Year XIII, Venice,
RETE Publisher, ISSN 2282-5789
URL: http://www.portusonline.org/the-role-of-public-participation-in-sustainable-port-planning/
PORTUS The Online Magazine of RETE
Port-city Relationship and Urban Waterfront Redevelopment
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