Strategic management of development programmes [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION A wide variety of development programmes operate in the Third World today. Governments and international donor agencies have spent considerable amounts of money on them and are concerned about the viability and performance of many of them. Increasingly, it is being said that their planning and implementation leave much to be desired. Even those with the right technologies and enough funds seem to perform poorly. It is not surprising, therefore, that "management" has been identified as a neglected factor. The realisation that technology, capital and management are complementary is an important step forward in understanding development programmes. Unfortunately, little knowledge exists on how to organise and manage development programmes. Traditionally, the focus has been on the technology and economics of programmes, not on their management. The bureaucrats and managers of programmes were left to improvise and muddle through. Invariably, they ended up adopting the systems, practices and administrative processes common in government. No doubt, specialised techniques and tools were sometimes borrowed to improve decision making. Thus budgetary reform or new systems for recruitment were sometimes introduced. But no over-all framework exists for thinking about and planning for the management of development programmes. This book is a modest attempt towards filling this important gap. It presents an approach to the "strategic management" of development programmes. The concept of strategic management developed here draws upon the current