2 - Structures and processes

Summary

In this chapter we describe and analyse the major twentieth-century institution of national development planning. Portraying its distinctive structures and processes, we explain how these have become routinised as part of the apparatus of the modern state, and how this has in turn made popular participation one of the central issues in planned development. Using specific examples, we describe how plans are made. Analysing them as symbolic systems we show how they seek to organise time, resources, people and ideas for ‘progressive’ purposes; and how efforts to turn ideas into reality are so often fraught with failure. This anthropological view helps us to pose with greater clarity the key question: why do we have these planning institutions rather than some other? And how might we conceive of better ways of organising development?

Introduction

The poor countries can adopt one of the most modern techniques of all, national planning – the formulation and interrelation of societys's goals and the systematic determination of the various ways and extent to which these goals can be attained. For ideological, intellectual and computational reasons, planning is a technique that the industrialized nations lacked during their initial stages of rapid growth. The poor countries of today need not be so handicapped. For them, national independence, institutional reform and economic planning form a powerful combination which can help to overcome the inheritance of poverty and accelerate the pace of progress.

(Griffin & Enos 1970: 19)

For the growth of the planning profession nothing has succeeded like failure.

(van Arkadie 1979: 572)