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DPMF Publications: |
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Crafting Africa’s
Futures: National Long Term Perspective Studies (UNDP/African Futures Programme) |
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Introduction
Since independence, countries in Africa have pursued various unsustainable paths to development. Preoccupied with crises, relief and drought management, most African governments have not succeeded in meeting the aspirations of their pre- and post- independence generations. In addition, the central planning and structural adjustment programs they adopted have failed to promote development management and achieve their stated objectives. Consequently, discontent with the performance of past approaches to development has grown. It has also become obvious that sustainable development can not be effected without productive partnership between the government, private sector, and civil society organizations. Moreover, in addressing macro-economic considerations, it has become clear that the development processes would benefit from adopting a long term planning perspective, giving proper consideration to social, demographic and cultural variables.
These issues were debated in Maastricht at a high level conference on Africa organized in 1990 by the Dutch government. A consensus emerged recognizing the need to adopt long term perspectives as an appropriate framework for promoting sustainable development in Africa. Parties to the consensus included the World Bank (ADB), the African Development Bank, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Subsequently, the donor community requested that UNDP channel international support to those countries in Africa wishing to create a long term vision for development. In order to accomplish this mission, UNDP established the African Futures/National Long Term Perspective Studies (NLTPS) program in 1992.
The objectives of African Futures are threefold:
• To promote the institutionalization of the long term perspectives approach to development management in Africa by facilitating the completion of national long term perspective studies, and providing the necessary support for operationalisation of the resulting visions through policy reforms.
• To build and strengthen national capacity in Africa for long term strategic management of the development process in such areas as futures studies, strategic management and planning, and policy analysis and forecasting.
• To develop regional and sub-regional long term studies for Africa, covering a wide range of strategic issues, including governance, population, regional integration, economic development, food and water security, health, technological capacity, communications and information, peace, security and changes in the global environment.
This paper intends to highlight the various aspects of the standard NLTPS methodology and to examine the ways in which a few countries went about carrying out their NLTPS. It also points out some of the major lessons to be learnt from the country experiences and proposes some elements of the way forward.
The NLTPS Process
African Futures has developed
a methodology for carrying out NLTPS. It is an interactive approach which focuses
on providing consistent long term development strategies and it is designed to
provide answers to the following questions for each nation participating in the
programme:
Ø What are the long term aspirations and goals of the society? (i.e. what kind of a nation would the people like their country to be in the future, say in 25 years?)
Ø What are the characteristics of the society and the issues facing it which could affect the ability of the country to create that desired future? (i. e. what are the main trends, uncertainties, future-bearing events, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within the internal and external environment of the society that are important for the future?)
Ø What are the alternative future scenarios? (i. e. given the issues and factors identified above, in what kind of environment would the society be expected to function in the future?)
Ø Given the scenarios identified above, what should be the vision of the society? (i. e. what kind of a society should the nation be striving to create in the future given foreseeable possibilities and constraints?)
Ø What are the strategic issues and challenges that must be confronted if the society is to achieve its vision? What are the strategic options available to address these strategic issues?
Ø What are the appropriate development strategies for the nation and how should it proceed with development?
In seeking to answer these questions, the NLTPS process proceeds in five broad interactive phases:
1. Issue Identification - consists of the identification of national aspirations as well as issues and themes that will be the focus of the NLTPS exercise;
2. Basic Studies (Constructing the Base) phase - includes the identification of critical trends and dynamics in society, key variables and factors, analyses of actors and their roles, of future-bearing events2 and of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the country as it tries to create a desired future;
3. The phase of Scenario Construction - includes the identification of assumptions and mapping out alternative scenarios for the future, as well as the creation of a holistic vision of the future based on the collective aspirations of the people, and guided by the possibilities and constraints;
4. The Strategy
Formulation phase - focuses on the development of broad strategies and
policies for managing the development process based on the analysis of the
country situation, as revealed in the previous steps;
5. The Development Planning phase involves the preparation of medium– and short–term plans and programs by government planning agencies to achieve the desired future, in successive phases.
In its ideal form, NLTPS is a people-centered learning process toward a shared national vision. It is arrived at by consensus, and should therefore prove to be reasonably implementable.
Lessons of Experience
African Futures has
undertaken a comprehensive review of the African development management
experience of the past three decades and concluded that any relevant
development strategy must recognize the importance of a shared national vision,
long term thinking and a stable policy environment for development. A truly
shared vision, developed through national dialogue, is a key element of NLTPS.
The vision must provide the people with a sense of direction and discovery, and
should serve as the guiding framework for national development action. Leaders
must think and act strategically, and ensure that the policy environment is
stable.
Thus far, African Futures has assisted 14 countries in Africa to undertake NLTPS: Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Sao Tome and Principe, Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe. Lessons of experience are derived from case studies of seven national long term perspective studies, whose reports were presented at a workshop in Entebbe, in September 19983 . The workshop participants deliberated on the various problems and difficulties which each NLTPS encountered, how they were resolved, what methodological adaptations were made, and the general features of the NLTPS exercise.
These lessons from experience are presented - highlighting their commonalties - in the two annexed matrices. The tools and techniques used by each country - by methodological phase - are summarized in the first matrix, while the institutional arrangements that were set up by each country are summarized in the second. Clearly, experience demonstrates the importance of setting up an institutional framework which is appropriate to the country’s existing social, political and technical structures before the study is implemented. Those activities and stages which experienced the smoothest implementation, benefited from arrangements that minimized the ruptures imposed by the NLTPS stages. Studies that used either the Loop4 or the Sequential approaches had to make accommodations/ adjustments on particular features or aspects of the NLTPS methodology.
Several ruptures are induced during the implementation of NLTPS. These occur most frequently between the study phase and the operational phase. They also occur at the level of the participation of various actors: and new actors, of necessity, emerge at each phase. For example, the team undertaking the study is different from the agencies and entities implementing the strategy, in government, the private sector and civil society. Rupture can also occur at the activities level. As an illustration, phases I - IV are characterized by exploratory activities - those designed to expose the feasible options for the future which the country may face - while phase V involves normative judgment - where choices are made by the planning decision makers.
Many of these ruptures can be traced to fault lines in the institutional mechanisms set up for implementing the NLTPS. These breaks occur when the anticipated planning activities are not implemented and when the high-level support of the teams doing the initial studies, is absent during the latter stages of NLTPS.
In spite of effective institutional mechanisms and structures for securing high-level support for NLTPS, which several countries have successfully put in place, many of the NLTPS studies are only just now reaching the implementation phase. The lessons of experience show that some countries differ with respect to the anticipated objectives of NLTPS. Those countries that have identified achievable objectives, which are not as far-reaching as the NLTPS objectives, often succeed in attaining those objectives. Those countries that really expect to be able to use the NLTPS approach to planning, find the objectives difficult to meet, relative to the final results of the particular NLTPS.
The Way Forward
Some governments and donors
are of the opinion that the NLTPS process should be shortened, and re-framed
into a more pragmatic, coherent framework. In order to minimize or avoid the
rupture that can occur between the study phase and the operationalisation
phase, the
Entebbe meeting observed that:
· Operationalisation cannot be carried out only by government. Actors from the private sector and civil society are critical partners.
· The likelihood of a successful operationalisation of the strategy is greater when activities are undertaken within existing structures and organizations.
· Programs and initiatives that are already under way are frequently not sufficiently considered prior to operationalisation, even when they are referred to during earlier stages of NLTPS.
The scenarios that the NLTPS studies employed were normative in nature. This approach limited the usefulness of scenarios in exposing alternative futures which a country may well face. Some consideration of exploratory scenarios must exist if the NLTPS report is to fulfill its potential for increasing the country’s capacity for strategic planning and development management. Scenarios are useful and essential for portraying a simplified vision of a very complex reality.
Considering the enormous difficulties that the national teams encountered during scenario construction, the following measures for improving the methodology could be considered:
· quantitative methods could be used downstream during the stages leading up to scenario construction, when the basis for scenarios is built. They serve to illustrate the quantitative nature of the resulting scenarios;
· exploratory scenarios should be prepared for the internal consideration of the impact of the external environment, which was not always considered in NLTPS already completed;
· there has to be a way to reconcile the rapid technological, social, and political changes that take place during the life span of NLTPS, with the long term 25 year horizon of NLTPS.
Accordingly the process of scenario construction should be simplified; training in scenario construction must be customized to provide useful results; cross-impact analysis must be fully exploited; the scenario construction process must be rendered adaptable to the different needs of the countries undertaking NLTPS.
Measures that need to be taken to reduce the risk of unattained objectives include:
· ensuring that institutional mechanisms for implementation of the strategy are incorporated into the methodology from the beginning.
· strengthening the efforts to engage political support for the process during the entire process, and not waiting until the study phase is complete.
· involving the research teams, at least in an ad hoc manner, during the implementation of the strategy, as NLTPS is envisioned as a continuous and iterative learning process.
The operationalization difficulties facing the NLTPS are not unique to the study, or ascribable to the methodology. Indeed, many new initiatives require “champions” in the form of institutions, personalities, and marketing strategies, which help to familiarize the entire development community with the NLTPS process. This in turn has a multiplier effect on the national institutions, in government, private sector, and civil society, which share the responsibility for implementing the strategy.
The second phase of the NLTPS project was officially launched in September 1997. During this phase, the project aims to:
• Extend NLTPS from 14 to 30 African countries.
• Develop a framework for the operationalisation of the NLTPS.
• Undertake strategic regional and sub-regional long term perspective studies. (RLTPS)
• Institutionalize the NLTPS approach through the establishment of a network of African centers of excellence and capacities building in the area of strategic planning.
• Create the African Regional Strategic Decision-making Information System (ARSDIS).
Conclusion
The NLTPS process is meant to
be all-inclusive, people-centered and interactive. In its implementation, some
countries have followed its standard sequential approach, while others have
introduced some modifications along the way. The most common methodological
modification has been the loop approach, which has considerably shortened the
time taken to complete phases one to four. The most difficult phase has proved
to be the one of scenarios construction, while the operationalization of the
studies completed thus far into planning and management tools is in its
infancy.
African Futures is addressing
these issues by re-examining its methodologies and approaches, pushing for the operationalization
of the studies, and laying the groundwork for the sustainability of the NLTPS
process by empowering several centers of excellence and the establishment of a
mechanism for strategic development information.
