Vision Dissonance: Conflicting Conceptions of Bus Sariri

This article discusses how communication in planning processes can be disrupted by dissonance between stakeholders' Visions, or mental models of a policy situation. The Vision dissonance framework is used to analyze how frames, paradigms, and theorizations act in concert to shape a stakeholder's problem definition and problem-solving processes. I examine how Vision dissonance between planners and community stakeholders in El Alto, Bolivia, contributed to the failure of an attempt to introduce high-quality bus service. Because the municipality declined to include meaningful opportunities for public participation, incompatibility between Visions remained submerged until it was too late to reconcile them.