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

Summary
This 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.

The Strategic Network's research activities will benefit multiple stakeholders. These include:
1. Policy makers and technical analysts within national development planning ministries. Through the detailed case study work we have enlisted the support and co-operation of nine government departments responsible for producing national development plans who will benefit from the Network activities. By using causal process tracing which maximises interaction, the network will co-produce actionable ideas with those most likely to use them.
2. By involving co-investigators from seven of the nine developing country partners, the network will promote local capacity development. Including early career researchers (including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows) as part of country teams, the network will encourage the development of new in-country 'knowledge networks' that bring together government policy makers and local researchers. These can be useful resources in promoting continuous learning among policy makers. Access to external resources (PhD scholarships, post-doctoral awards, philanthropic grants) gives S3NP the ability to promote capacity development well beyond a GCRF financial base.
3. Global institutions (World Bank; UNDP); Donor agencies (DfID; Global Affairs Canada; EU) have all begun to engage with the new national planning at country level. This network will give them a critical sounding board for these new ways of planning with complexity.
4. The Strategic Network consists of academics and practitioners working in Universities, research institutions and government departments. Its activities will influence the way elements of 'planning with complexity' are conceptualised, taught and practised in these institutions. The network's substantial experience of impacting on 'public understanding' of complex development issues/global challenges (especially Hulme) ensures that S3NP's findings will be policy relevant and publicly accessible.
5. The S3NP Network will form an epistemic community that will develop a research agenda based on this initial work. It will actively encourage teaching and research within the academic community.Ultimately the impact of this network pivots on its ability to influence the 'art and science' of making plans that can cope with complexity.

Specific work packages built into the network activities create pathways to impact. The inception network event in Manchester is designed to encourage early engagement by policy makers and planners with the network and to gain their inputs into the core network programme activities. It impacts at both the international and national levels. Establishing a publicly available and searchable database of post-2012 plans from over 100 countries creates a global repository that will stimulate 'no-cost-to-funder' future academic and professional research on this important topic. In country causal process tracing work in seven DAC-aid recipient countries will nurture capacity development in academic and professional communities. The S3NP workshop in Ottawa in October 2017 continues this work, but deepens it by comparing the preliminary results of the case studies. The Ottawa workshop also begins to sharpen messages for future research activity based on these preliminary findings. Given the presence of Anglophone and Francophone countries in the project, the participation of the University of Ottawa, the world's largest bilingual university, is expected to be a major asset to the project overcoming major barriers to comparative analysis.