Planning for development in the 60 years of ILPES

Planning has emerged as a key instrument and discipline for development management in Latin America and the Caribbean, and as an essential means for formulating and implementing inclusive national sustainable development strategies that converge with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Approved in the framework of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015, the 2030 Agenda establishes a collectively agreed upon roadmap to achieve a balanced and integrated sustainable development in its three dimensions --economic, social, and environmental--. From this frame of reference, the objective of planning is to contribute to how development is cultivated and advanced. Development in this sense emerges from the collective ideal of what humanity aims for and envisions for the future, as well as the visions of its diverse organized groups.  

Since 2015, ILPES has focused its work on the role of planning in development governance and the management challenges posed by increasingly complex and dynamic planning systems. Within the following framework of planning and management challenges, ILPES continues to provide support to country governments in the region through research, technical cooperation, capacity building and peer-to-peer exchange and learning: 

• The inter-temporal dilemma arising from multiple planning horizons --long, medium, and short run-- and the mechanisms that reconcile them.  

• The problem of multi-scale coordination concerning the definition of different territorial development planning scales (local, sub-national, national, and global) and their integration. 

• The difficulty of reconciling sector-based and integral-based planning perspectives, while still maximizing their individual contributions. 

• The challenge of integrating multiple and diverse social actors and agents in planning processes. 

• The need to articulate planning and implementation processes and to mainstream learning through evaluation and monitoring systems and as a mechanism for dialogue and feedback. 

The territory in its various scales (global, regional, national, and subnational) continues to accompany the Institute's actions as a key element for generating new consensus and policies, as it exposes the diversity of contexts and actors involved in development, and the variety of strategies required to adequately respond to the specificity of development situations and problems.