Re-imagining visions as shared societal statements– empirical insights from Indian cities

Visions in Indian cities lack commitment from actors and possess low normative power. To address these concerns, we take up the task of examining vision-making with a focus on institutional settings across 31 million-plus populated cities. Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework and ADICO grammar tool are used for analysis. We ask how rules-in-use within the vision-making settings are organized and geared towards collective action, and how they affect outcomes, i.e., visions. The analysis underscores three commonalities that hinder collective action, i.e., bureaucratic hegemony and allegiance to sectoral mandates, fragmented actor constellation and weak regulatory power of visions. Within visioning settings, facilitators serve as key agents for ensuring a level playing field. We found that when facilitators are external (i.e., consultants), stakeholder coverage is wider and documentation is exhaustive. In large metropolises and megacities, the visioning process acknowledges stakeholder consultation responsibly. Perhaps fair information exchange and informal monitoring of visions by civil society actors contribute to the politicisation of vision-making. In institutional terms, visions are closer to being a strategy and less to norm-setting. The paper argues that participatory discussions in diverse and heterogeneous settings with the scope of repeat interactions will build homophily and address concerns of structural fragmentation.