Planning

The Activity of Planning

Planning is a very common activity. We plan courses of action so that we can achieve goals. However, it is important to distinguish between the concept of decision—the choice between different courses of actions whose consequences it is possible to forecast—and the notion of planning. The latter concept, in fact, encompasses several elements, namely, that

• to reach the goal or purpose of the activity, the decision maker has to take into consideration a set (and possibly a sequence) of different decisions;
• usually there is the need to allocate scarce resources between different goals; and
• central to the notion of planning is the concept of public policy, alternatively defined as the set of actions linked to the solution of a collective problem, a program of action, or a system of goals.

Planning, then, can be defined as the attempt to secure the coherence of a set or a sequence of decisions in relation to a specific problem—that is, a public policy. Therefore, even if we often find a plan or a program—that is, a document spelling out, in more or less detail, the content of the decisions to be taken and/or the procedures to adopt to this end—planning in itself cannot be identified with the decision to approve the said document; rather, it is a continuous activity, a process through which the future actions are organized and described.

The theory and practice of planning affect a plurality of different policy fields. For instance, the first university chair of urban planning was created in Liverpool in the United Kingdom in 1909, thus recognizing the existence of a specific discipline, distinct from architecture, geography, and the social sciences. But the socialist and communist movements in the 1920 to 1940 period gave popularity to the concept and practice of economic planning—that is, the adoption by the political power of a detailed and binding blueprint of the way in which the economic life has to be organized, by prescribing the type and quantity of goods and services to be produced in a given society in a given period of time. In the years following World War II, planning became widespread and was equated with rational and “scientific” decision making. This was also a consequence of the development of new methodologies of analysis (from cost–benefit analysis to operation research and linear programming) holding the promise of being able to inform public decision making. The meteoric rise of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting System (PPBS) in the U.S. federal government in the 1960s (and the subsequent demise of the PPBS program in the U.S. military in the early 1970s) is a good example of the importance of this approach in that period. Even today, planning is sometimes still presented as the true answer to all policy problems, as the “right way” to organize the exercise of political power in public policies.

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