Planning as Anticipation of Resistance

Abstract

This article argues that an inadvertent side effect of the current preoccupation with planning from below has been a lack of attention to public sector planning at the top, which remains a critical institutional mechanism for development. To be effective, however, public sector planners must anticipate institutional resistance to their efforts, particularly from within the state structure, and incorporate this understanding into the formulation and sequencing of planning tasks in unorthodox and counterintuitive ways. Drawing on examples of planning for the provision of housing and employment for the urban poor in newly industrializing nations, the article demonstrates that in effective practice, substantive and procedural theories of planning are not separated, because planning procedures are largely influenced by the particular substantive nature of problems to be addressed. Hence, planning theorists need to better understand the substantive nature of problems in order to provide practicing planners with institutional insights about the type of resistance they are likely to encounter when a problem is formulated in a particular way. This awareness of resistance to planning was absent in development planning's formative years; but the last 50 years of planning experience have generated rich tacit knowledge which, if formalized, can contribute to more effective public sector planning.

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