This paper explores the tensions and trade-offs incurred throughout the strategic planning process in fragile and conflict-affected settings (FCAS) on a range of engagement principles, including national ownership, prioritisation and sequencing. It mainly uses a technical and methodological approach. It aims to provide a broad concept of key elements of planning and identify key recommendations for engagement as well as policy and capacity gaps in the international community’s support of strategic planning processes.
Evidence from the field, as captured in recent literature and the country reviews undertaken for this report, demonstrates that the strategic planning process brings into sharp focus a number of characteristics of FCAS, a reality that presents both significant challenges and interesting opportunities, including the opportunity to strengthen the legitimacy of the state and improve partnerships with the international community.
To manage those challenges and capitalise on those opportunities, the overarching message that emerges from the report is that strategic planning cannot be left to strategic planners. As a fundamentally political exercise, it requires strong leadership engagement and support, especially in FCAS when the stakes are so high and difficult choices about priorities and resource allocations need to be made. Strategic planning processes can help stakeholders better understand, and therefore better manage, risks, yet despite their bureaucratic dimensions, notably through the use of results-based management (RBM) techniques, they cannot remove all uncertainty that is inherent to fragile and conflict-affected environments.
Key Findings:
- Strategic planning processes often produce more difficult questions than definitive answers but can yield multiple benefits, including strengthened state-society relationships, greater clarity on organisational contributions to priorities and division of labour, effective expectations management, lower transaction costs, and increased integrity of accountability claims.
- Leadership engagement is key, yet uneven.
- Both national and international actors suffer from limited capacity and skills to carry out effective strategic planning processes, including in the areas of assessment, coordination and political acumen.
- Donor agendas and institutional imperatives continue to drive planning decisions related to timeframe, duration, priority setting and sequencing. A corollary finding is that plans are not adjusted to or reflective of changing conditions on the ground. This is further exacerbated by weak information-gathering systems, which feed planning decisions.
- Insufficient attention is placed on stakeholder engagement, comparative-advantage analysis, and proactive communication, when all three dimensions provide useful reality checks in contexts of political uncertainty, security volatility, overwhelming needs and limited resources.
- Inevitable trade-offs often go unacknowledged (or unreported). Politically more expedient decisions to ignore or paper over such trade-offs undermine the legitimacy of the process and of the actors involved.
- Planning remains too one-dimensional, with little coherent integration of political, security, and socio-economic approaches and analysis into common strategic planning products.
- Monitoring and Evaluation remains one of the weakest links in the process, due in part to the complexity of the issues, but also to limited staff capacity, political constraints and the lack of sensitive tools and techniques that meaningfully inform discussions on organisational performance.
Recommendations:
- Strategic planning processes rarely make or break peace consolidation efforts, but their relevance to fragility and conflict factors calls for five key policy messages:
- Early investment of time, resources and leadership in planning exercises is effective peacebuilding work.
- Enhanced training in planning skills, including political acumen and coordination, is required for both national and international organisations.
- To be effective in FCAS, planning cycles and processes must be flexible.
- Recent efforts at integrated planning (whole of government, UN integration) must stay the course and receive increased political, financial and technical support.
- While the plethora of plans is at times inevitable given the need for differentiated approaches in most FCAS, an immediate priority should be to strengthen and harmonise common early warning systems that provide reliable information on a range of risk factors and unaddressed needs to inform those plans.
