Introduction

Summary

People plan. To do so is little more than the exercise of human rationality. It is a means by which we try to exert control over our daily lives, making decisions about how we should behave. Insofar as we are dealing with a future which is always uncertain, planning is a hazardous activity. Although much of it concerns matters of routine, it still requires a good deal of imagination. We plan for immediate tasks like providing a meal, but we are also engaged in longer-term enterprises, like building a house or choosing a career. Some of our planning is personal and some of it is concerned with collective activities. If the former is a matter of ‘making up our own minds’, the latter involves groups of people in decisionmaking, and is very much a political activity.

Although we all plan, we are not all engaged in planning ‘development’, if by this we mean the organisation of our collective progress and welfare. Still fewer of us are involved in national development planning, a recent and very specialised variant of the broader human activity which, nevertheless, has a pervasive influence on the daily lives of most people in most countries. In the 1980s, national planning has the appearance of a sprawling and amorphous mass of schemes and projects, competing doctrines and policies, ramifying national and international bureaucracies, occasional successes and many failures.