Learning from groundwater: Pragmatic compromise planning common goods

Planners often struggle with the ethical ambiguity of compromise in the preparation of development plans. The plans they make face the resistance and criticism of powerful economic and political interests competing for status, resources, and authority. What help can planning scholarship offer to practitioners seeking reassurance and guidance for their efforts to make plans serving a public good? In this essay, we take a pragmatic approach that avoids the effort to secure a theoretical foundation for moral judgment; and looks instead to the practical arts of compromise seeking common ground. Instead of pursuing ideal rules or principles to guide judgment, we argue that practitioners should look to the ways in which people make plans to bridge the political challenge between economic competition and social cooperation. Distinguishing the relevance and value of moral goods along a continuum from private to public with the middle ground tied to common goods frames the analysis. Four episodes of groundwater use in northwest India exemplify both the importance of compromise for reconciling the competing moral claims and the significance of pragmatic planning for making better development plans.