The Essential Tension: Patsy Healey’s Conception of Democracy in Planning and Public Policy

Patsy Healey was a major democratic theorist. Although often implicit, it is easy to discern in her work a normative-empirical theory of democracy that is characterized by a focus on improving state institutions and leveraging the experiential knowledge of affected citizens with the issue at hand. Two features distinguish Patsy’s approach to democratic governance. Her refusal to vacate the essential tension between an institutional and a participatory, practice-oriented approach to democracy. And a steadfast pragmatist approach to collective problem solving that valorizes the effectiveness of experiential knowledge. This orientation impelled her to grasp democracy governance through the micro-politics of planning and public policy and suffuse her work with a spirit of hope.