Strategic Network: New National Planning for Sustainable Development in the Global South

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

SummaryThis initiative addresses a key challenge faced by developing country governments as they seek to achieve the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals agreed in September 2015. Many of these countries are seeking to guide their own development through a set of processes, policies and practices that can usefully be termed the 'new national planning'. Following an era of often ritualistic national planning, the 1980s and 1990s saw the very idea of producing national development plans as discredited. This was partly due to a lack of local ownership and commitment to plans produced, but also due to donors and international financial institutions promoting more market and less state centred ways of achieving development goals. While the 2000s saw the return of something approaching a comprehensive policy framework for development in the form of national Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), there is now evidence that national development planning has firmly come back into vogue. Our initial research shows that over 100 countries, a majority of them in the global south (including many of the largest and fastest growing), have a national development plan or similar document. These are usually very different from the formalistic national development plans of the 1960s and 1970s and involve much greater use of measurement, evidence and modelling. This is a renewed interest and belief in National Planning albeit in a very different globalised context characterised by unpredictability and complexity. The Sustainable Development Goals will be implemented through locally driven plans that take into account this global complexity and uncertainty and yet reflect the priorities and contexts of individual UN member states. Planning approaches cannot therefore be the same as before and indeed our preliminary dataset is showing the emergence of new ways of planning that strive to cope with uncertainty and complexity. This new national planning has attracted little research interest, yet there is growing evidence that it has implications for how countries respond to the global and local challenges confronting them. Little systematic mapping of national planning processes and outcomes has been done and there is limited understanding of the processes shaping the new national planning at the national or global level. Neither the World Bank nor the UN, for example, have assembled comparative studies or datasets. More importantly, some crucial questions are emerging not least related to whether this new national planning produces better national ownership, accountability and ultimately better development outcomes than did either the PRSPs or the previous generations of planning (or non-planning). Our partnership will investigate this topic through a cross-disciplinary research/practitioner network and will strengthen capability for research and innovation across seven ODA recipient countries. We will establish a multi-disciplinary network of scholars, practitioners and policy makers who will analyse and better understand this re-emergence of national development planning in the global south. This strategic network on the 'new national planning' will create a new research and knowledge community that understands how national planning helps governments to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in an era of complexity and uncertainty brought on by combined effects of forces of globalisation and climate change. The network will analyse development plans and create: an analytical framework for comparing plans; a detailed database of this new generation of plans; (at least) seven detailed case studies of the new national planning in ODA countries: and, a comparative analysis of National Planning in the 21st Century. The network will bring together policy makers, researchers and other development actors to identify key areas for future research and actively seek funding to establish a major applied research programme.