Global Forces Require New Thinking about Planning

Last week, I related how large scale globally significant forces are influencing protected areas and our ability to provide careful stewardship of them. I did not include two other forces that occasionally have affects on protected areas: (1) human disease; and (2) natural and human caused disasters. In both cases, these are serious issues demanding our both immediate and long-term attention. Diseases, such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malaria impact various regions of the world, and particularly affect the capacity of individuals to engage in their work, and in some cases have major affects on a conservation agency’s ability to meet its objectives. Likewise, disasters occur throughout the world, if we have learned anything, is that we need to build resilience into our systems at various scales, household, community, nation, in order to cope with the disaster and its immediate after affects.


As serious as these two things are, they play out on the landscape in a relatively patchy pattern, with varying intensities and causes. They are very dissimilar in their effects compared to the forces I mentioned in the previous blog. While we need to attend to them, and be prepared for them, we can do this best through attending these other processes which change the way in which we think, frame issues, and respond to them.

So to return to the discussion of last time. Let’s start about thinking about why we plan. The basic purpose of planning is to change the future. Briefly, planners must do three distinctive tasks: (1) frame the problem or issue they are confronted with; (2) develop and assess responses to these problems; and (3) implement actions. Conventional planning is simply no longer adequate for these three tasks . In terms of framing problems, conventional planning often views problems and issues as isolated events, when in actuality they derive from underlying trends, structures or even paradigms. In terms of developing and assessing responses to contemporary challenges, we often find that planning processes assume there is scientific agreement on relationships between causes and effects and assuming society agrees on goals. If such assumptions are true, then problems are tame. Unfortunately, as described last week, the world is complex, dynamic, contentious and changing; science often harbors disagreements about the relationships between causes and effects, and society, even for protected areas, frequently disagrees over goals, leading to wicked problems and messy situations. Planning processes appropriate for tame problems are not so for messy situations.

Finally, conventional planning views building plans and implementing them as distinctly separate activities performed by different actors. Essentially, conventional planning has separated thinking from action, knowledge from deeds, and assessment from performance. Compartmentalization cannot work in this new world.

Bardwell (1991) notes that often contemporary natural resource problems are defined in such a manner that they cannot be solved, solve the wrong problem, solve solutions, or define the problem in such a way it cannot be solved. Indeed, natural resource problems are so wicked and messy that describing and framing the problem at hand requires a substantial amount of resources and effort to understand them prior to taking any action, a difficult task in a society that values immediacy, sound bites, and instant gratification. Recognizing that many of these problems are wicked and messy is a first step in framing problems.

There have been numerous responses to the failures of plans and planning: increased public engagement has been a hallmark of many such responses; legislating procedures and environmental assessments have been others. But many of these responses, applied in planning’s second wave, were viewed and used as simply “add ons” to planning processes that were fatally flawed to begin with. Adding more check boxes to these processes did not necessarily make them better, more effective or even efficient; in fact, often they were viewed as procedures that simply made planning more labor intensive, cumbersome, time-consuming, and expensive. The capacity of the planners themselves to conduct these new processes was often limited because of their backgrounds.

So what we need is a dramatic change in how we conceive of planning. We will discuss that next time.