Development Planning In Local Governments
The Idea Is Gaining Ground

By Mukti Rijal

PERSPECTIVE planning has been an oft-talked subject at local governments. This bodes well for democracy and development. At a time when central government itself lacks vision and proper perspective for development, it is good to hear the local institutions talking about the rationale of periodic planning. The subject of perspective planning has been introduced and being gradually grasped at the local government level following the enactment of the local self governance act and the rules for two years now.

Attention

The District Development Committees (DDCs) have riveted their attention to periodic planning and some of them have even carried out exercises intended to formulate district perspective planning. Many DDCs have targeted to complete the periodic planning exercise and base their annual planning on the long-term development perspectives. Donor funded programmes and line agencies have extended their helping hand to DDCs in designing long-term plans while in one or two DDCs line agencies were reportedly not keen to assist DDCs in the process. This happened reportedly in the Ramechhap district where the office chiefs attached to the major line agencies failed to turn up to participate in the exercise held under the auspices of DDC.

District level planning exercise is a multi-sectoral activity for which participation of all the sectoral offices and line agencies is not only important but also a prerequisite. Without data and information relating to the respective sectors no district plans can be formulated nor they can be implemented. DDCs are the nodal points to coordinate and provide democratic legitimacy to development planning and implementation process at the local level. But it is the line agencies for now at the district that carry mandates to implement the development projects. Line agencies are the extended arms of the central governments at the district level and acquire resources and support from the centre to implement development targets. But the bottom-up planning process enshrined in the Local Self Governance act intends to reverse the centralised planning and entrust that the local governments are final arbiter of the development process. The line agencies need to work with the local governments, as the latter, in course of time, will have to be ceded to the DDCs. However, in some districts, coordination between DDC and line agencies has been a difficult process and horizontal communication and collaboration has become hard to achieve.

Planning is realistically impossible without sufficient data and information of the concerned DDCs and VDCs. Data inventories need to be created comprising areas as agriculture, animal husbandry, irrigation, forest and environment, industries, transport, post and telecommunication, education, health, nutrition, drinking water etc.

Moreover, capacity and expertise relating to resource analysis, gender analysis and environmental analysis is an imperative to provide sound standing and basis to the planning process.

Going a little closer to the implementation level, project appraisal and feasibility analysis is an important aspect for which local governments need to acquire a minimum level of capacity and support. In fact, the local self-governance act and rules have required the local governments to create a strong data and statistical inventory for periodic and annual planning exercises. Moreover, the law requires that the local governments observe participatory development planning process as well.

Accordingly, some of the DDCs have developed data inventory for which they have found support from the UNDP aided programmes like PDDP and LGP. UNICEF funded DPCP and other donor-funded projects have come to the aid of the local governments to build database and initiate periodic planning process. Some DDCs like Palpa DDC have produced a comprehensive social and economic information document providing detailed data on different sectors of district development. Moreover, in Palpa some VDCs have carried out exercises relating to periodic plan preparation with support from Local Initiative Support Programme (LISP). It is a welcome development. This is a step forward in implementing the provisions of new legal framework based on decentralised development philosophy.

Right Track

The local governments are thus staying on the right track. They are becoming responsive to local people. Despite the fact that they are lacking in capacity-technical and institutional-, they seem induced by the democratic needs of popular accountability. However, one aspect is very important, that is, coordination of goals and coordination of resources. The government should abandon superseding local governments in the subjects relating to local development by creating contractory goals and resource funneling agencies. This will defeat the entire efforts put in enhancing the process of decentralised governance and development in this country.