Land use planning and development in Honduras is an ongoing process. Since the 70's we have been making efforts in the direction of knowing our territory, analyzing it from different perspectives and trying to take advantage of its potentialities in order to improve the living conditions of our compatriots.
We carried out, for a little more than a decade, National Planning attempts from the Higher Council for Economic Planning CONSUPLANE and the Secretary of Planning SECPLAN, which constituted important efforts by Honduran Technicians, specialists in various disciplines related to development, concerned with having an integral vision of our territory and its natural, economic and social resources to build from this platform coherent and articulated proposals for the sustainable use of our national attributes.
Protected by theories and fashions in vogue in the 90s, the current rulers resolved to close these central planning instances, assuming that the invisible market forces would be in charge of guiding and defining the strategic axes of national development.
From this moment on, it begins to be planned by the different ministries or secretaries of state, thus generating a number of proposals and interventions of public and private order, which, because they are typically sector-oriented, cannot articulate or generate a sustained impact on the different territorial units of the country. In this process, we have found planning and development programs and projects in basins, sub-basins, departments, municipalities, and villages that have failed to take root as sustained options for regional or local development.
The absence of a governing entity for planning in Honduras enabled this multitude of institutional, public and private and some international programs and projects to approach the subject of planning and territorial development from their particular point of view, generating various methodologies and instruments that to date, they have led us to a particular state of over planning that has generated waste of resources, position and duplication of functions, exhaustion of the actors, as well as multiple and confusing territorial management tools for the authorities and other local actors.
The present administration of the Ministry of the Interior and Justice (SGJ), in its capacity as normative entity and leader of the processes of decentralization, governance and development in the national territory, and concerned with generating sustainable models of planning, ordering and local development, has carried out a study of the different planning models, both institutional and those proposed by different territorial management programs, finding that among all of them there are processes, products and tools with a high index of similarity and consistency.
As a result of this study and its various moments of socialization and consultation, the proposal for a model of land use and territorial development presented here has been reached, which takes as its main platform the so-called "NEW REGULATION" for the preparation and updating of Plans Municipal Development (PDM), product of the comprehensive and proactive work of local governments, international cooperation agencies, government institutions, non-governmental organizations, planning specialists, Directorate for Citizen Participation and Local Development, among others. (See annex 5)
Based on the new regulations for municipal strategic planning and based on the need to create a “model that unifies” the different planning processes that have been running at the municipal level in an uncontrolled and to a certain extent anarchic manner, the General Directorate of Territorial Planning (DGOT) presents the methodological and instrumental proposal for the elaboration of "Municipal Development Plans with a Territorial Planning approach" (PDM - OT). This document should be considered as a general proposal resulting from the institutional effort (Ministry of the Interior and Justice –SGJ-), and must go through an interactive, proactive, participatory and consensus process that will allow validating or refuting the proposed critical path and instrument box.
Therefore, we call on the local government, international cooperation, government institutions, non-governmental organizations and planning specialists to evaluate this proposal and provide feedback in order to approach a consensual model where the main beneficiary is the set of public and private actors that interact in the process of promoting sustainable development in our territories.
Arch. Luis Manuel Maier Cáceres General Director of Territorial Planning (DGOT) Ministry of the Interior and Justice (SGJ)
The proposed methodological framework for the elaboration of the Municipal Development Plans with a Territorial Planning approach (PDM-OT) has been the product of a research, processing, analysis, creativity, proposal and development work carried out by the technical team of the General Directorate Territorial Planning (DGOT), with the conceptual and operational maxim of unifying management efforts in “municipal” territories (without excluding community, joint, departmental and regional territories) in a single territorial planning model. The proposed methodology coherently seeks to unify the two great models of territorial planning: the Strategic Municipal Development Plans (PEDM) and the Municipal Territorial Planning Plans (PMOT).Integrating the following approaches as transversal axes
