Judith Innes holds a PhD from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and an undergraduate degree in English from Harvard University. She has done research on the processes of planning and decision-making across a wide range of substantive topics, including land use and environmental policy, water management, growth management, transportation, human rights, environmental justice and social policy. Her recent interests have focused on collaborative policy making and action at the state and regional levels, particularly in environmental and growth policy.

She is currently writing a book on the theory and practice of collaborative decision making with David Booher. She maintains a continuing interest in the use of information in planning and public policy and in how to improve this. She has taught planning theory for many years and developed many of the ideas and research to build an understanding of communicative planning. She believes that the next agenda for planning thought and planning practice must be about how to address contemporary challenges to the traditional institutions and practices of decision-making and how to develop new concepts of governance to deal with collaboration and with the many voices and competing versions of reality that confront planners today.

Professor Innes’ teaching has spanned courses in land use and environmental policy, urban social structure and processes in the multiethnic city, research methods for masters students and for doctoral students, introduction to planning practice, organizational behavior in government agencies, land use studios, indicators for policy and planning, contemporary theory of planning, and methods of negotiation and collaboration. She will begin teaching metropolitan governance and planning in fall 2006.

From 1993 through 2003, Dr. Innes was the Director of the Institute of Urban & Regional Development. As Director, she also directed the Community Partnerships Office (formerly the University-Oakland Metropolitan Forum) and was involved in managing a variety of community development efforts, action research, and community-based learning projects in partnership with localities, foundations and NGOs. She is author, editor or coauthor of more than 50 articles and book chapters, three books and two major monographs. Her articles have been translated into Chinese, French, Italian, and Korean. She has given presentations on her research in countries around the world.