Module 3: Regional and district development planning process (Notes)
Planner’s role: Managing the planning process. Inter sectorial knowledge and Planning skills
- Natural resource planning
- Social and economic planning
- Physical and infrastructure planning
Major Planning phases
- Regional analysis
- Development prospects
- Planning and programming
- Implementation design, monitoring &evaluation
Regional and District planner is not only technically skilled planner but
As a change agent
As a non formal educator
As Coordinator of services
As mobiliser of resources
As negotiator
As moderator and evaluator
As a Regional or District planner
Identify regional development problems, resources and economic needs analyse development trends, constraints, forecast demographic and economic development
Formulate regional development goals and objectives
- Develop strategies and policy alternatives and design regional alternative plans and programmes
- Transmit and link District plans with regional and national plans and policies
- Advocate consideration of local needs in national policies
- Assess the possible social, economic and ecological impacts of plans and programmes
- Organise the decision-making process and related participatory events on different levels
- Identify and formulate individual projects and assess their feasibility for implementation
- Develop and use instruments for implementation, enforcement and control of plans and programme
- Monitor and evaluate projects, plans and programmes or re-plan according to changing conditions
Planning Process Organisation and management
> Legal regulations
> Planning procedure
> Management techniques
Operational problems requiring appropriate planning methods
Organizational problems tackled through institutional setting and clear procedures and guidelines
Operational problems
How to identify problems express preferences, analyze development trends, assess alternative courses of action and deal with latent uncertainties
Organizational problems
How to assemble the authority for guidance of planning process, obtain sufficient information, establish effective mechanism of coordination, provide democratic guidance to allow all to participate in planning process and induce sufficient motivation among planning stakeholders
Regional and District agency: Tasks
- Announce the start of planning and organizational procedure to all stakeholders
- Collect information from the sectors (district state of development)
- Compile data into a regional profile
- Facilitate bottom up flow of planning proposal
- Analyze state of problems, potentials and trends and common development issues for discussion
- Define desired state of development and formulate district development policy statement
- Negotiate and agree on priorities for development activities
- Forward decisions that are political to district council
- Design implementation schedule and coordinate implementing agencies
- Monitor progress, implementation and evaluation
Roles of sector agencies
Analyzing their sector, (e.g. agriculture, transport, industries etc.) for inclusion into regional profile
Spell out their own objectives, strategies
Secure necessary funds for allocation
Implement sector project according to development policy
District council as a political decision body
Support planning process by taking decisions on the course of action to be pursued within the development strategy
Respond to needs of the district population
Represent district interests at the regional and national level
Methods of District or Regional profile analysis
Procedures of Regional and District
Profile Analysis
- Narrative description of the district’s situation (existing information)
- Analysis of problems constellation and identification of causes and effect of a core problem
- Determine areas for focused investigation
Analysis of objectives
- Establishing the goal framework to tackle the problem
- Review of existing information
- Planner defines the context in which planning will take place
- Describes on going phenomena in the fields of environmental conditions and physical development, agriculture, economic, social relationships, and institution arrangement
- Collection of (existing) Qualitative and Qualitative data
- Relate sectorial assessments not in isolation to the context of the district
- Narrative summary of current state of development.
- Major determinants and assumed future directions or tendencies
- State constraints to change/potentials or positive forces; unused resources or skills
Scope of information
- Environmental and Physical setting
- Demography and Social Setting
- Economic setting
- Institutional setting
Environmental and Physical setting
Source, government maps or aerial photo; selected field visits and discussion, illustration, sketch maps
- Topography; Climate and rainfall; Land uses
- Soil Characteristics; Water and mineral deposits,
- The distribution of human settlements and distance from villages
- Existing infrastructure schools, hospitals, community facilities, technical utilities (water systems both for drinking and irrigation and electric station
- Quality of roads and bridges
- Linkages to neighbouring regions
Demography and social setting
- Demographic profile: information to assess available human resources and to determine need of infrastructure facilities
- Trends
- Relate to physical environment features
- Environment capacity to support population
- Demographics or demographic data are the characteristics of a human population.
- Data used widely in sociology, public policy, and marketing.
- Commonly used demographics include gender, race, age, income, disabilities, mobility (in terms of travel time to work or number of vehicles available), educational attainment, home ownership, employment status, and even location.
- Demographic trends describe the changes in demographics in a population over time (for example, the average age of a population may increase or decrease over time).
- Both distributions and trends of values within a demographic variable are of interest.
Economic setting or economic base
- What are the existing economic activities
- Inter linkage of economic activities
- Kinds of grown crops? Export or subsistence and internal market?
- Dominant farm sizes? How owned? Inequality in land ownership?
- What kind of other existing resources and potential?
- What other extractive, industrial or commercial job opportunities are existing?
- How much unemployment and underemployment is there
- How are marketing channels organized for specific kinds of local products?
- Which competition from external products do local manufacturers have to face
- Do existing industries rely on imported or local raw materials;
- Do they use locally available technology?
Institutional settings
- Reviewing the political and administrative institutional set up on the national as well as the district level
- Analysis of development policies and decentralization concepts on national level which influence the planning efforts in the District
- Existence of functions of nongovernmental and grass roots organizations, their structural integration into the district’s physical, social and economic setting
Who these organizations (NGOs) are what are the sources of their authority, power or influence
- Their probable effect on the direction of development plans and development
- A list of projects implemented by government, NGOs and private organizations
- Availability of financial means for development activities
- The sources of district revenue potentials for generating or increasing the District’s own budget
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