Strategic planning in relation to forests has the following characteristics:
· It is a means to visualize actions to increase the social, cultural, economic, and environmental benefits from trees and forests;· It has a strong management orientation, since a strategy should state specific goals, specific activities, and specific people;
· It is much more than a short-term operational plan, since a strategy begins by reviewing missions and goals;
· It is much more than a set of projects, although projects can be one type of instrument for achieving certain goals;
· It often leads to questions about institutional capacity (and how to increase it); and
· It is an iterative process of testing, evaluating, and learning from some actions that succeed and others that fail.
Almost anyone is a "planner" when he or she engages in planning activity. This is the situation of most people in planning teams. However, only a smaller set of individuals are "professional" planners. In either case, the role of a planner is defined in the same way (Box 4).
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Box 4: The Role of a Planner Is..................... |
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1. TO FACILITATE: support the planning process with reports, statistics, fact finding, interviews, meetings, media events, and other inputs. 2. TO COORDINATE: insure that everyone who should be participating in the planning is able to do so and is kept informed about changing circumstances, new information, and other events affecting the work. 3. TO NEGOTIATE: engage in the difficult task of resolving disagreements among individuals and interest groups who may give conflicting answers to "Trees and forests for whom and for what?" A good planner is fair and realistic - and does not impose his or her viewpoints on others. For many members of a planning team, this personal dimension is a greater asset than any amount of technical knowledge. |
A plan is not always a document. And the writing of a plan is not the central purpose of planning. Rather, a plan indicates that a group of people is proposing positive actions to help a country use and protect its forests. Which group of people? And what is "progress"? Every country decides these matters, and often more implicitly than explicitly.
Many old ideas about planning are being discarded. Traditional planning has been too ambitious, utopian, and inflexible. Traditional planning has attempted to control, but has done little to empower. In principle, the new emphasis is on planning as a means for empowerment. The exercise in Worksheet 1 will help you decide whether your organization is moving in this new direction.
