Some potholes in the road ahead for the new National Planning Commission

Written by Derek Powell Friday, 29 May 2009 10:06

The first is a formidable public service. The state must have strong technical capacity to formulate a long term plan and translate it into credible departmental spending plans to implement it. There are pockets of excellence in our public service, but it is not `a cutting-edge juggernaut for the developmental state,’ according to the chairperson of the Public Service Commission. Recruiting, training, and retaining highly skilled public managers are thus crucial priorities for the new government if the planning commission is to succeed.

Secondly, the public service must be governed by formal rules that check self-interested behaviour on the part of public servants. On this score South Africa does better. The Constitution and legislation regulating the public service and financial management provide a comprehensive set of rules to promote what Chibber calls `bureaucratic rationality.’

Alone, these two conditions are not enough. The third, essential, factor, is a cohesive state – the state must function as a corporate entity not as a collection of separate agencies. And this is where the National Planning Commission will run into problems. According to Chibber, the creation of a planning agency in itself will not lead to effective state-wide economic planning. The crucial question is the distribution of power between the planning body and other state agencies that have their own mandates. Two kinds of relationship are possible. One sees the planning agency grafted onto existing state structures in a coordinating role. In the other, government functions are restructured around the mandate of the planning commission so that it can trump the authority of other state agencies. India went the first route, South Korea the second, with very different results.

The Indian commission failed because it was reliant on the willingness of other agencies to share data and information and adjust their activities to its mandate, without having the authority to `extract cooperation’ them. In time, the planning commission became irrelevant, because ministries used the rules of bureaucracy to protect their turf, withheld information, or simply worked around the commission to establish their own relationship with firms. The South Korean body on the other hand was effective precisely because it controlled all the key levers needed to enforce its authority on other agencies. This meant it could achieve the essential goals of planning commissions – mobilizing massive resources, overcoming resistance and securing selectivity in state intervention.

The details about how the commission will function are unclear, but the new cabinet suggests it is closer to the Indian coordinating model. Economic policy, planning, industrial incentives and budgeting are dispersed between several ministries, unlike in South Korea where these functions were subsumed into the planning agency. The record of coordinating planning across mandates is patchy at best: The clusters didn’t work because they superimposed collective responsibilities over a system of public accountability based on the legal mandates of individual state organs. The National Spatial Development Perspective briefly held sway but appears to have fallen away. In the early years, the safety and security cluster was held out as a model of integration, then in 2008 government said the criminal justice system was dysfunctional. Poor coordination in energy planning also lay at the heart of the electricity crisis. 

Extending the remit of the ministers committee on the budget to include planning, and consolidating the technical capacity of the Treasury and Presidency, might have been a better next step. Ironically, a super-planning ministry might also have been preferable to a planning commission with only coordinating powers. There is an additional factor. How will government make a national plan stick in a system of decentralized government? Experience in the education sector shows how difficult it is to coordinate planning and service delivery when spheres of government have concurrent powers. This is not solely an issue of efficiency, but about the character of democratic government. At the very least, Government should consider legislating the planning commission to build national consensus on its role and create certainty about its relationship to provincial and local governments. South Africa is not India or South Korea, but their experiences with this type of institution are worth considering.