Orchestrated Planning

= concept used by Henry Mintzberg in the context of the role of the public sector in climate change

Description

Henry Mintzberg:

"In the public sector, especially in large national governments (compared with municipal ones, closer to local concerns), we find an inclination to favor orchestrated planning. Government climate change initiatives tend to be centrally conceived, analytically driven, and strategically deliberate. Because governments often need to legislate before acting—in other words, to formulate before implementing—their policy-making processes are inclined to be deliberate, explicit, and prospective.

Orchestrated planning is thus usually enacted in government in top-down fashion: to pledge, plan, and police, from the political leadership to the civil service, and then sometimes out to the broader society, as in the example of carbon pricing. This may rely on imposed controls of one kind or another—mandates, constraints, regulations, decrees—or else on incentives to encourage desired behaviors. Among our four government initiatives are state regulations and multilateral agreements as well as the decree concerning the forest cover of Bhutan.

Given the immensity of the climate change problem, it is not surprising that many concerned people call for this kind of orchestrated planning. As inspiring examples, they can perhaps point to the 1961-72 Apollo project, which landed human beings on the Moon for the first time, and the Marshall Plan, that gave American economic assistance to Europe after World War II. But Leviathan societies are not currently favored, at least in Western contexts, and the experience of the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997 and subsequently ignored by most of the world, illustrates the obstacles facing state planners.

Yet some efforts related to the global climate have succeeded, even beyond expectations, albeit with a narrower scope. The 1989 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer called for industrialized nations to stabilize and then reduce the chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) production and consumption that was causing the problem. Although it is now widely and justifiably heralded as a breakthrough, in 1989 scientists and many signatories knew that its initial provisions were insufficient. Thus the treaty was designed to be flexible, to allow more ambitious targets as new science came to light. In other words, here, and perhaps more often than is widely recognized, the Protocol facilitated emergent learning alongside the centralized planning of the public sector.

In this case, however, the political and economic stakes were lower and the ideological differences less stark than they are for climate change today. The Kyoto Protocol attempted to address this problem in one fell swoop, with a comprehensive accord—a deliberate strategy, immaculately conceived. Its failure suggests that relying on governments alone to take the lead in combating climate change may be wishful thinking. The world is a rather messy place for those who believe that problems can be worked out by clever analysis in sterile offices." (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2246/bc715c531f724b404a4fcdd53f25504ee9b6.pdf)

Source

• Mintzberg, H., Etzion, D. & Mantere, S. Worldly strategy for the global climate. Stanford Social

Innovation Review, 16(4): 42-47.