How Participatory Is Your Project? Arnstein's Ladder and Other Participation Typologies
Almost every research project now claims to "engage" or "involve" the public. Those words can mean anything from a leaflet to shared control of the budget. Participation typologies, starting with Sherry Arnstein's famous ladder of 1969, give research teams a vocabulary for saying how much power they actually share, and for noticing when a project slides down the ladder.
Sherry Arnstein's ladder
Sherry R. Arnstein published "A Ladder of Citizen Participation" in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners in July 1969. She had worked as an adviser on citizen participation in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, at a time when federal anti-poverty and urban renewal programmes required the "maximum feasible participation" of residents. Her article argued that participation without redistribution of power is "an empty and frustrating process for the powerless". The ladder classifies participation by how much power citizens actually hold.
| Level | Rung | What it looks like in a research project |
|---|---|---|
| Non-participation | 1. Manipulation | Community members are placed on a board to endorse decisions already taken. |
| 2. Therapy | Participation is framed as fixing participants' attitudes rather than addressing their concerns. | |
| Tokenism | 3. Informing | Results are communicated to the community, one way, after the study. |
| 4. Consultation | People are surveyed or invited to a meeting, with no guarantee their views will change anything. | |
| 5. Placation | A few hand-picked community members advise, but researchers keep the right to decide. | |
| Citizen power | 6. Partnership | Planning and decisions are shared through agreed structures, such as a joint steering group. |
| 7. Delegated power | Community members hold a majority or a veto over key decisions. | |
| 8. Citizen control | The community runs the project and commissions researchers to help. |
Arnstein acknowledged that the ladder simplifies: real programmes may have many more rungs, and neither "the powerful" nor "the have-nots" are homogeneous blocs. Her point was that the label "participation" hides very different arrangements.
Why the ladder still matters for research
Research projects tend to cluster around the middle rungs. Advisory groups, consultation events and lay members on steering committees are common; shared budgets and community vetoes are rare. The ladder is useful because it forces a team to locate itself honestly. A project can do valuable work at the "consultation" level, provided it does not describe itself as a partnership. Projects built on participatory action research or on the principles of community-based participatory research aim for the top half of the ladder, at least for the decisions that matter most to participants.
Other typologies researchers use
Hart's ladder of children's participation
Roger Hart adapted Arnstein's model in Children's Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship, an essay published by the UNICEF International Child Development Centre in Florence in 1992. His ladder runs from manipulation, decoration and tokenism up to projects initiated by children and shared with adults. It is widely used in youth research and in schools.
Biggs' four modes
Writing about agricultural research in 1989, Stephen Biggs distinguished contract, consultative, collaborative and collegiate participation of farmers in research. The model is simple and maps well onto research partnerships today.
The IAP2 spectrum
The International Association for Public Participation's Spectrum of Public Participation sets out five levels (inform, consult, involve, collaborate and empower), each with a "promise to the public". Many local authorities and agencies use it to plan consultations. Unlike Arnstein, the spectrum does not present the lower levels as illegitimate, only as different promises.
Citizen science models
In citizen science, a framework published in 2012 by Jennifer Shirk and colleagues in Ecology and Society distinguishes contractual, contributory, collaborative, co-created and collegial projects, depending on how many stages of the research the public takes part in. Muki Haklay proposed a related set of levels in 2013, from crowdsourcing to "extreme citizen science". Our introduction to citizen science explains these models.
Cornwall's critique
Andrea Cornwall's 2008 article "Unpacking 'participation': models, meanings and practices" in the Community Development Journal warns against treating any ladder as a simple scale where higher is always better. Some people may prefer to be consulted rather than to sit on committees; participation can be imposed as well as won; and the same project can be very participatory for some groups and closed to others.
Using a typology honestly: a short exercise
A practical way to use these models is to list the main decisions in a project and record, for each one, who actually decides:
- choosing the research question;
- designing the methods and instruments;
- recruiting participants;
- collecting the data;
- analysing and interpreting it;
- writing and publishing the results;
- deciding what action to take;
- allocating the budget.
Most projects will find a mixed picture: high participation in data collection, low participation in the budget. That is normal. The point of the exercise is to make the picture visible, discuss it openly with community partners, and agree which decisions could realistically move up a rung.
Sources
- Sherry R. Arnstein, "A Ladder of Citizen Participation", Journal of the American Institute of Planners, vol. 35, no. 4, 1969, pp. 216-224.
- Roger A. Hart, Children's Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship, Innocenti Essays no. 4, UNICEF International Child Development Centre, Florence, 1992.
- Stephen D. Biggs, Resource-Poor Farmer Participation in Research: A Synthesis of Experiences from Nine National Agricultural Research Systems, OFCOR Comparative Study Paper no. 3, ISNAR, The Hague, 1989.
- Jennifer L. Shirk et al., "Public participation in scientific research: a framework for deliberate design", Ecology and Society, vol. 17, no. 2, 2012, art. 29.
- Andrea Cornwall, "Unpacking 'participation': models, meanings and practices", Community Development Journal, vol. 43, no. 3, 2008, pp. 269-283.
- International Association for Public Participation, IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation.
MethodsParticipatory action research, step by step
From Kurt Lewin and Orlando Fals-Borda to today's community projects: the PAR cycle, team roles and the traps to avoid.
MethodsThe principles of community-based participatory research
The nine principles behind CBPR, what they ask of researchers and community partners, and how to tell real partnership from research that is merely located in a community.
Citizen science & dataWhat is citizen science?
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