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ON THE CONCEPT OF ‘INTEGRATED RURAL DEVELOPMENT PLANNING’ IN LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES

Ian Livingstone University of East Anglia

The emphasis in development economics, for many years on industrial development of the LDC‘s, is now clearly on the agricultural sector, and on rural development generally. Within this there is widespread enthusiasm among academics and operating development agencies alike for what are known as ‘integrated rural development plans’. These are based on a con- cept, however, which is seldom closely defined and which deserves rather more critical attention than it has received so far, despite one ‘sceptical’ view expressed not long ago by Ruttan (1975). One reason for caution is that the term ‘integrated’ bears some similarity to other terms which have emerged in the literature of development economics in having an intrinsic appeal. ‘Balanced growth’, ‘take-off’ and ‘self-sustained growth’ are of the same genre. Just as balance was by definition desirable (until Hirschman ex- pressed a preference for unbalanced growth), so integrated rural development planning appears preferable to ‘non-integrated‘ planning. In fact there are different ways in which the term ‘integrated’ rural development planning has been used and might usefully be used, and it will be useful to explore these alternative senses.

Rural development plans are frequently described as being integrated when ‘comprehensive’ would be a much more accurate and consistent description. Such plans for particular areas are comprehensive in the sense of providing complete coverage of the area’s economy, in a number of ways. They cover the whole area, spatially. They cover all productive activities in the area, crop and livestock possibilities, for example, but also non-agricultural rural activities. And they include provision for infrastructure, both productive infrastructure such as roads and social infrastructure such as schools and hospitals. The plans are in effect multi-sectoral within the boundaries of the areas concerned. ‘Integrated’ here may therefore really mean multi-sectoral or comprehensive.

Since integrated rural development planning (IRDP) is simply one form of area planning, it is worth first considering the latter in more detail. A useful division here is between (1) primary-level planning, which refers to macro- economic planning or economy-wide plans; (2) secondary-level planning below that level, which may be separated into (a) area planning and (b) sectoral planning, according to whether the economy is divided spatially or by sector; and (3) tertiary-level planning which refers to project planning and implementation. Area planning includes both regional and district planning (depending on the size of the area), in which the boundaries are given by

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administrative units,* and for example river basin development, in which the area is defined geographically.

The primary feature of area planning is naturally its area focus or spatial element. A second feature is the deliberate establishment of planning machinery at the local fcvel. Compared to the vertical or hierarchical system of national planning, this is characterised by a horizontal organisation involv- ing a degree of co-operation between ministries at the local level, is a much more continuous process compared to the discontinuous process of macro- economic plan preparation, and has a greater emphasis on implementation, being one stage nearer to the tertiary level of project planning. The third feature, going beyond simple project identification, is that area plans generally attempt more or less comprehensive resource assessment, that is, to present a comprehensive, integrated view of the area’s development possibilities, given its agricultural and natural resource base. This feature of comprehensive re- source assessment does mean that the ‘plan’ may not be phased in the strict manner of a national four- or five-year plan, in which only those projects which are proposed for implementation during the limited plan period are included. In an area development plan the time-scale for exploitation of the resource identified may be considered to be an independent matter, and left open. The plan may therefore be comprehensive in covering the entire re- source base and not simply projects for immediate implementation. Finally, the multi-sectord nature of the plan, and the ingredient of comprehensive resource assessment, generally implies a fourth feature, that plan formulation has to be a multidisciplinary exercise, involving not only general and agri- cultural economists, but engineers, agronomists, soil scientists, and others, while plan implementation similarly involves a multi-agency effort.

Plans may be comprehensive or multi-sectoral in the ways described above, however, without being ‘integrated’. The point in having an ‘integrated’ plan exists, first of all, if there is some advantage in combining several activities or components: where there is incomplete divisibility in the sense that parti- cular activities cannot be carried out efficiently independently of each other. An area plan which is comprehensive in the senses described already could still be quite divisible, with separate segments quite capable of independent implementation.

The closest form of interdependence is where two projects depend directly on one another, as when, say, the exploitation of iron ore requires the exploitation of an adjacent source of coal. There is also interdependence (by definition) between the production base as a whole and supporting productive infrastructure, but this is generally much weaker. It is stronger where the opening up of a new region ‘requires’ the building of a major trunk road into the area or where expansion of agricultural production ‘requires’ the pro- vision of additional feeder roads to facilitate the marketing of the produce. But there may be considerable choice regarding the degree of improvement in communi.cations required, in the quality of the trunk road, for instance, or mileage of feeder roads. Thirdly, integrated plans usually include provision for additional social services such as health and education, if only to maintain the level of social service expenditure per head if population is expected to expand along with the expansion of production: and indeed the goal of increasing the level of economic welfare in an area would require increasing expenditure on social services more than in proportion to population. But this

* ‘Region’ here is used to refer to an administrative unit within a country. Region and regional planning are. of course, used sometimes to refer to a wide area embracing several countries.

ON m CONCEPT OF ‘INTEGRATED RURAL DEVELOPMENT PLANNING’ 51

interdependence between production plans and supporting social infra- structure may be even less strong, since the extra social spending is a desirable concomitant rather than required condition for increased output; this is indicated by the fact that spending on social services in the national plan for the country as a whole will necessarily be below the level which would be desired, due to the low level of income and taxable capacity, and is clearly the subject of choice.

If we use ‘integrated’ to mean ‘interdependent’, i t means that national macroeconomic plans are ‘integrated’ to an important extent, in that com- ponents of the plan are highly interdependent. Thus public sector plans will depend on adequate government revenue being raised from taxation, this in turn depending on the expansion of the public sector; consumption and in- vestment plans will depend on the availabiIity of foreign exchange, and there- fore on the accuracy of foreign exchange projections, and so on. This is most obvious in a multi-sector plan based upon input-output analysis, but applies also to one based on a simple aggregate growth model incorporating the main aggregates, C, I, G, X and M. An area rural development plan may actually be less integrated, in fact, if the area is small and fairly homogeneous, such as an area specialising in the production of a single cash crop for export, say coffee. Here the main activity of coffee-growing would’depend much more on external factors, particularly the coffee price, than on other activities in the area.

The term ‘integrated’ may usefully be used in a number of other senses, as well as that involving interdependent activities and sectors. It may be used to indicate, related to the area focus of the plan, that the plan incorporates a diagnosis or analysis of the area’s development problems and prospects. This need not involve a major integrated rural development planning exercise or the production of a mammoth ‘master plan’, which may even serve to obscure the essentials of the development requirements of the area.

Related to this, an area plan is more likely than a national plan to cover all the peopZe and categories of person in the area. This springs in part from a comprehensive approach, which implies taking account of all groups in the area, as well as all sectors and activities. It is also ‘integrated’, however, in that it may take account of the interdependence between the activities and development of one group and those of, others. Thus, Ruttan (1975) specifi- cally mentions that ‘The concern today with integrated rural development in the developing world represents, in part, a reaction against the distortions pro- duced by the production-oriented (“Green Revolution”) rural development efforts of the 1960s’. Thus a seed-fertiliser programme or tractor loan service could help progressive farmers while reducing the incomes of smaller farmers or increasing the number of landless. Again, large ‘integrated’ rural development plans in practice may or may not deal with such inter- dependencies, and frequently do not.

As mentioned already, sub-national area planning with a more or less com- prehensive resource assessment component will be interdisciplinary to the extent that it involves the co-operation of different kinds of experts (soil scientists, agronomists, water engineers, agricultural economists, etc.). The contributed efforts of all of these could then be said to form an ‘integrated’ plan For the area. In part this greater degree of integration of different aspects is associated with the focus on (natural) resource assessment, but in part also it arises because of the more detailed and specific nature of local area planning involving, for instance, the determination of precise locations for agricultural and other schemes and projects. How far this is planning, in the most im- portant sense, rather than implementation, is another matter. It must be

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realised, also, that obtaining a comprehensive inventory of resources, how- ever desirable, is not costless, and may be attainable for some areas of the country only at the expense of studies elsewhere.

Finally, participation and self-help have often been seen as an important or even key element in integrated rural development planning. Ruttan refers to the community development emphasis in the earlier rural development efforts of the 1950s. Participation and self-reliance were planned to be im- portant features of Kenya’s Special Rural Development Programme,* in which local project identification and implementation via a decentralised, localised planning machinery was emphasised. Participation by the population at large in actual planning efforts was very limited, however, as it has been generally in rural development planning.

Rather different issues from that considered here regarding the precise meaning which can be attached to the concept of integrated rural develop ment planning are raised in the critical article by Ruttan mentioned earlier. Ruttan starts by commenting on the apparent lack of successful programmes of rural development as compared to successful projects. This he puts down to two things. First, ‘there is an absence of any well-defined rural or community development technologies around which professional capacity or resources can be organised or institutionalised’ (p. 16). Referring perhaps to the same sort of enthusiasm for IRDP as we referred to initially, he states (p. 14) even more directly that ‘Integrated rural development can be described, perhaps not too inaccurately, as an ideology in search of a methodology or a tech- nology’. Secondly, he argues that rather than planning techniques, successful rural development has depended on specific stimuli, particularly on urban impact, technical innovations ‘capable of generating substantial new income flows’, or institutional mobilisation and development. Belshaw (1 977), in reply, does not comment on the existence or otherwise of successful case studies of integrated rural development, but does deny strongly the absence of available techniques of rural development planning. He claims (p. 14) that ‘A set of relatively powerful planning techniques have been assembled from diverse fields of application to provide rural development planning with an effective set of “teeth”,’ drawing attention to six different areas ‘each with an accompanying set of techniques’.

Unfortunately the techniques supposedly available under each of the six heads are not sufficiently specified for a convincing case to be sustained. As regards the first head, regional planning techniques, what is available, such as input-output analysis, is more relevant to developed, industrialised countries than to less developed. The second, delimiting rural development planning areas, is necessary, but cannot be described as a technique. The ‘design of village production systems’ and ‘physical planning procedures’ are closer to detailed implementation procedures than to diagnostic forward plan- ning. ‘Sequential planning for rural development’ appears to refer to rolling annual plans at the regional level, not in themselves constituting a technique; and ‘information systems for rural plan management’, while carrying some potential for the improvement of rural development administration, have not yet been fully developed or widely applied. In general, therefore, we cannot say that there is as yet any coherent ‘set’ of planning techniques which could constitute a method of ‘integrated’ rural development planning, and thus justify from the side of methodology and approach the concept discussed here.

* See especially Clayton (1972).

ON THE CONCEPT OF ‘INTEGRATED RURAL DEVELOPMENT PLANNING’ 53

This is not, of course, to say that regional and area planning in less developed countries is not of extreme importance. These generally mean a desirable increase in the volume of planning activity; better coverage of areas, including backward areas frequently neglected in national macro- economic plans; attention to all groups within the areas concerned; more comprehensive resource assessment; much-needed decentralisation in many cases; improvements in planning machinery at the local level and increases in the supply of manpower for local planning and plan implementation.

All this, however, does not mean that what passes under the head of ‘inte- grated rural development planning’ can be usefully so described, or that a ‘science’ of integrated rural development planning has been evolved which can invariably justify substantial and time-consuming ‘master plans’. These could, while providing employment for more expatriate experts, actually obscure a synoptic view of the development possibilities of a region or district.

References Belshaw, D. G. R. (1977). Rural Development Planning: Concepts and Techniques,

Clavton. E. S. (1972). An Overall Evaluation of the Swcial Rural Development Pro- 1. agric. Econ. 28,279-292. - . gramme, Occas. Paper No. 8, Nairobi Institute of Development Studies. *

Int. Dev. Rev. 17 (4), S16. Ruttan, V. W. (1975). Integrated Rural Development Programme: A Skeptical Perspective.