Legal and institutional framework
"Law for the Establishment of a Country Vision and the Adoption of a National Plan for Honduras", which institutionalizes the planning process of the economic, social and political development of the country, established in art. 329 of the Constitution of the Republic, based on inclusive and participatory strategic planning. (taken from www.seplan.gob.hn).
What is planning
“Planning encompasses the definition of the goals of a territory, the establishment of a general strategy to achieve those goals and the development of a broad hierarchy of plans to integrate and coordinate activities. It is related, therefore, with the ends (what should be done) as well as with the means (how it should be done) ”.
The purpose of planning
The territory
The territory is a geographical area delimited by a set of social and economic relations between actors and institutions, which have specific, shared, own and acquired capacities and knowledge, and interact based on a common tradition, norms and values, on which they encode and decode all exchanges. AR (2006)
The territory
In the same sense, the territory can be understood as “a concept that encompasses much more than the notion of a geographically delimited and homogeneous space. They are precisely the social fabrics with complex interactions between the social actors united not only by the fact of sharing the same place of residence but also by a common cultural base, the local circuits of exchange of goods and services, transversal to the different economic sectors, as well as the structure of the labor market, those factors that give rise to a certain territory ”.
The Territory
Associated with this way of understanding the territory, three main ideas emerge:
a) The different territories are recognized, built and transformed, based on the intervention of those who inhabit them. There, social networks are generated that make possible collaboration between people, cultural exchange and facilities to access goods and services.
b) In the territories, the notion of citizenship takes on real meaning and, through the social networks that give them identity and form, the possibility of finding collective answers to the problems of people and their environment increases.
c) As a corollary, decentralization and the transfer of decision-making capacity to citizens are processes that require recognition of social and territorial diversity.
Regional Planning
"Regional planning is that activity aimed at projecting a desired future and the effective way to carry it out, and one of the results of which is the" regional plan. " Regional planning includes several stages, which are the planning, negotiation, execution, control and evaluation of the plans. Regional planning can be centralized or decentralized; participatory, imperative or indicative; strategic, comprehensive or sectoral; prospective or conjunctural municipal, regional or national; in a context of contingent equilibrium (disorders).
Regional Planning
Planning considers the stages of diagnosis, negotiation, execution, control and evaluation of the plans. The plans established in regional planning are sectoral plans, which need to be concrete and detailed in physical, social and economic aspects, and these in turn are part of a continuous and intersecting process.
Regional Planning
In another vein, it has also been said -by different authors- that planning is an important dimension of the capacity to govern, particularly valid when it is required to deploy permanent efforts to achieve long-term objectives.
Regional Planning
In sum, planning must be understood as a working instrument that seeks to anticipate economic and social events to try to channel them in a certain direction. It is, therefore, a form of intervention on reality based on systematized information, institutional coordination procedures and activation of participation channels, whose main purpose is to achieve objectives that interest the whole of society or a part of it.
Regional Planning
The concept of territorial planning is often misinterpreted as a reference to the geographic context in which regional problems manifest themselves, limited to the description of some phenomena of spatial distribution, accessibility, the degree of concentration or dispersion of the population, size and role of urban centers and / or the identification of vulnerable areas.
Regional Planning
In reality, regional and local development, conceived as the possibility of articulating social and economic initiatives on a fabric of urban centers, companies, social organizations, infrastructure and natural resources, merits a different reflection from the traditional one.
For example, if there is something that should be characteristic of any development proposal, it is its express reference to the limitations and / or advantages that the current territorial configuration presents for the achievement of strategic objectives.
Regional Planning
The possibilities of adapting the population center system to make it more functional for
development purposes;
The territorial configuration necessary to establish the social protection network;
The desirable transformations of the infrastructure networks based on the foreseeable productive development;
The evaluation of the impacts on the territory of the economic restructuring processes and the protection measures;
Location criteria for the installation of new productive activities;
Because planning the region
Faced with this fairly common dilemma, it is necessary to take into account the following warning: “If planning means a formalized procedure to produce articulated results on coordinated decision systems, then I think one thing is clear: planning is not a means to create strategies but to make operational the strategies created by other means.
The transversal approaches of regional planning
Local Economic Development
Gender
Citizen Participation
Risk Management and Adaptation to Climate
Change
Sustainable development
Regional Development Strategy
Its obligatory reference to a long-term vision, within the framework of the guidelines that emanate from the political authority;
Its integrating purpose, which seeks to harmonize and enhance multiple proposals;
Its flexibility and versatility to adapt to changes in the social, political and economic environment;
Its character as an instrument of negotiation with the different social agents.
Regional Development Strategy
In general, a strategic proposal is intended to reconcile interests and wills, creating the minimum conditions necessary for public and private actors to be able to: identify opportunities, calculate risks, promote alliances, estimate the results that could be derived from their decisions, overcome deficiencies in all kinds and prevent adverse situations that threaten the achievement of the proposed objectives.
The Regional Plan as a platform for the regional development strategy
As a global proposal, it favors the coordination of initiatives of different social actors to achieve objectives that are common to them, leaving open the possibility of variations motivated by unpredictable situational changes.
As a management instrument, a strategic proposal makes it possible to project those initiatives or sets of initiatives of greater significance, valuing the contributions and contributions of the actors involved.
The definition of clear and precise programmatic objectives and guidelines contributes to adequately profile both the Regional Plans and the Sectorial and Community Plans, providing an irreplaceable frame of reference for short and medium-term decision-making.
Dimension of the regional development strategy within the framework of the Plan
One of the most frequent criticisms of Regional Strategies is that their general postulates do not give a clear idea of their meaning in the territory, that is, they do not incorporate the advantages, opportunities, restrictions or conditions that arise from the geographical environment and social networks and economic that are established there.
Dimension of the regional development strategy within the framework of the Plan
Simultaneously with the identification of the major regional issues and the definition of objectives, it will be necessary to determine the territorial expression that the strategy will have (by provinces, by territories, by subsystems polarized by the main cities or others). For this purpose, a method is required that allows a systemic appreciation of the phenomena that contribute to the configuration of the territory, showing the interrelationships that exist between them. From this perspective, the desirable analytical line would be one that recognizes the network of relationships on which the main territorial dynamics are based.
Evaluation of the Government's capacity for action
The government's possibilities of action are not only determined by the powers and functions assigned to it by legal regulations or by the availability of financial resources. It is not uncommon for other factors to intervene such as the lack of information to make adequate decisions, some momentary crisis that diverts attention from permanent concerns and priorities, political conflicts that paralyze initiatives, etc. Or, in a positive sense, a particular harmony of interests that enhances the actions undertaken beyond the original expectations; any major project that modifies the expected scenario; a favorable change in markets for local products, etc.
Regional Planning should include
Structure and operation of economic activities in the territory.
Territorial structure for the attention of social needs.
Flows and networks of goods, people and services.
Demographic growth and modalities of occupation of the territory.
System of urban centers.
Territorial restrictions.
The need to identify the critical nodes in the region
Identify the “critical nodes” or key problems that affect the region and its inhabitants. Thus, problems in terms of infrastructure for production, social equipment, connectivity, social vulnerability, quality of life and others can be detected, all of them referring to specific places, territories and population centers.
Needless to say, this way of interpreting reality is very different from the traditional approach of analysis "by sectors", where the issues of health, education, road infrastructure, agriculture, are examined separately and for the entire region. fishing, etc.
The need to identify the critical nodes of the region
The territory is the place where all the activities of human life occur and are located; in it, most of the actions, plans and projects, individual and collective, are developed and materialized. In other words, it can be affirmed that the territory has a specific and manageable nature for the population, allowing the integration of the different elements or systems that concur in a given space.
