the blue print for taking action termed as
resource
objective
target
plan
Answers
The dominant approach to rural development planning of the early growth-oriented national development strategies became known as the ‘blueprint’ approach to reflect its emphasis on the project preparation process as they key to successful intervention. According to Gittinger’s 1982 text on agricultural project planning:
“Perhaps the most difficult single problem confronting agricultural administrators in developing countries is implementing development programmes. Much of this can be traced to poor project preparation” (Gittinger 1982, 3).
Moris has likened this preparation to an architect preparing his blueprint, to “generate specifications for components and to map their points of linkage into a common structure” (Moris 1990, 28). Once the blueprint is accepted, producers of the various components are expected make their respective contributions accordingly, the plan serving effectively as a substitute for management. As the focus of national development strategies shifted in the 1970s to redistribution and rural poverty alleviation, this blueprint approach was identified as an impediment to effective rural development, and contrasted with an alternative ‘process’ approach that was found to be characteristic of more effective interventions. Sweet and Weisel first drew this distinction in their 1979 study of a 1973 review of 36 field programmes (Moris 1990, 27).
Korten has characterized the blueprint approach by inter alia its emphasis on careful and detailed pre-planning, and its conceptual and actual separation of planning from implementation. He underlines the inappropriateness of such an approach to the task of rural development:
“Where knowledge is nearly non-existent, the blueprint approach calls for behaving as if knowledge were nearly perfect… Where the need is for a close integration of knowledge building, decision-making and action-taking roles, it sharply differentiates the functions and even the institutional locations of the researcher, the planner and the administrator” (Korten 1980, 497).
Rondinelli has also underlined the inappropriateness of the assumptions of the blueprint approach that exhaustive analysis will aid the understanding of complex problems, and that there will be a direct relationship between government policy, action and outcomes (Rondinelli 1993, 3). In fact, according to Long and Van der Ploeg, a major source of the uncertainty inherent in the development process is the human agency of the various social actors involved. They have described the mechanistic assumptions of causality inherent in the blueprint model as:
“a gross over-simplification of a much more complicated set of processes which involves the reinterpretation or transformation of policy during the implementation process” (Long & Van der Ploeg 1989, 227).
Thus, the assumption of the blueprint approach that uncertainty can be reduced by gathering more data and expanding the project design phase fails to recognize, as Rondinelli observes, that many constraints remain hidden until implementation (Rondinelli 1993, 17).
Answer:
the blue print for taking action is termed as resources