Collaboration and Public Participation for Municipal Growth in Land Economic Development Projects

This study examines the impacts of collaboration and public participation on municipal growth in midsize U.S. municipalities. It specifically looks at the cases of land economic development projects across the nation and how local governments’ population and employment growth are associated with public participation and collaboration. This study employs two methods—a survey of planners and officials and GPT-3 semantic search. Using a survey of planners and elected officials, four individual variables (traditional public participation, online public participation, public service collaboration, and staff regional meetings) related to collaboration and public participation were employed. Additionally, a semantic search approach was used to understand the current trend of public participation methods in real land development cases. The findings show that informal collaboration pushes population and employment growth, but the value of citizen participation is more contentious.