Journal of Planning Education and Research, Ahead of Print.
A central contribution of institutionalist approaches to planning has been to illustrate how planners’ constraints can also present opportunities for creative action. Through an ethnographic case analysis of a successful land title regularization project on the South Texas-Mexico border, this paper identifies two critical factors not reducible to institutional features: groups’ perceptions of shared needs (vulnerabilities) and the range of actions that groups recognize as legible and valid for addressing these needs (repertoires). These additional factors reveal how planners can dissolve apparent “wicked” problems by allowing disparate group perspectives to transform the means and ends of planning intervention.