In national policy in Norway there has over the last decades, been an increasing demand for "user- participation" in all areas of interface between public services and people affected. The Norwegian Planning and building act states that "Affected individual persons and groups shall be given an opportunity to participate actively in the planning process", in order to increase peoples power and influence on their own lives, on policies, on their local communities and their environments.

Now, ideologically, it seems difficult to disagree with the overall aims of "user-participation", it seems like a natural development of shared social democratic values.

Still, the degree of practicing user-participation in plan processes is quite various. In complex organisations and time-consuming everyday work we experience that the user-participation in plan processes is reduced to a minimum, within the framework of the legal system. That is informing through announcements in the press and leaving it to the individual to seek out the information.

We have seen the need of being more progressive in involving users in plan-processes at different planning levels, and have tried to develop practical ways of achieving more user-participation.

We will focus on an example of introducing "Participatory Learning and Action" (PLA, see e.g. Blackburn &Holland 1998, Chambers 1994, Pretty et. al. 1995) workshops into the field of environmental planning in Oslo, Norway.

In this process, an outsider experienced in PLA facilitation and participatory research (within the fields of health, education and intercultural communication) is working together with insiders in the planning bureaucracy to develop practical ways to include peoples views in different steps of the plan process.

The work is in progress this spring (2004), and we would like to present some experiences from this work. The focus will be on practical participatory methodologies, with a focus on expert agendas into participatory processes.