The nuts and bolts of preparing a local or regional development strategy - a new series

From time to time I get asked about the best way of preparing a local or regional development development strategy.

Most of these strategies, and especially Government funded ones, fail. They generate a report but no action. The reasons Government funded ones especially fail is that the terms of the grant usually focus on the report, whereas effective planning is all about process.

Peter Drucker, the management guru who did so much to define strategic planning, described it as the futurity of current decisions. By this, he meant simply that planning was effective to the degree that it influenced what we did now, taking the future into account.

Over the next few posts I propose to provide a nuts and bolts guide to the whole process, drawing from my previous writing and experience.    

Need for a new approach to regional development in Australia

I try to avoid overt campaigning or political comment on this blog because it risks detracting from the blog's primary purpose, the promotion of the joy and variety of life outside the metros. However, I now feel obliged to make an exception to this rule.

The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics population projections suggest a continued drift to the metros. At 30 June 2007, 64% of Australians lived in a capital city. By 2056 this proportion is projected to increase to 67%.

I think that this is absurd. We have many areas of Australia that can not only absorb new people, but need them.

The metro drift has deep historical roots. The process has always been reinforcing. To those that have shall be given.

We need to break this cycle. Yet our capacity to do so seems always limited, condemned to a bitsy, ad hoc approach.

Just at present the current global economic crisis has led to calls for new infrastructure spending, something that I support. However, there is a very real risk that this increased spend will end up dominated by metro needs.

This holds even where spend itself is outside metro areas. An example is coastal highways linking metro centres.

Most people who visit this blog come because they have particular information needs. This means that the number of repeat visitors (the type of people who usually comment) is small. Still, I would be very interested in ideas as to what might be done to turn things round.

I would be especially interested in ideas at local or regional level. What do you need to improve your local situation?

Climate change and Australia's coastal vulnerabilities

Like many Australians, I get a little confused with all the discussions about climate change. Again like many Australians, I wonder what it means in general and for me in particular. I also wonder in the discussion what is normal climatic variability, what climate is due to climate change.

In all this, I was struck by a recent suggestion (I cannot find the link) that 270,000 houses in NSW alone were at risk because of projected rises in sea levels.

Australians love of the coast is well known. But is the numbers and time horizons are right, a lot more Australians should now be thinking about the possibility of moving inland. Yes, some inland areas have their own problems with drought. But there are a lot of inland areas that in fact have enough water and reasonable facilities.

Adopting a medium term time horizon, if current prognositications are in any way right, these areas could well experience significant growth as people relocate.

Italy - the lessons for Australia's regions

Graphic: Italy 1796.

David Anderson had a rather good post, Understanding Italy - Nobility, wines, food and jeans, on his View Italy blog, drawing out the sometimes chaotic nature of Italian history and the way that had affected Italian life and culture, creating still treasured regional variations.

To David, these variations are to be savoured and enjoyed.

There is a lesson in this for Australia's regions, one that I have referred to before, the failure of many of our regions to properly capture and present their own regional stories.

I am not sure why this should be so, but it is. I remember chairing a session at which a mayor spoke of his town. He was, understandably, proud of its achievements. But the presentation failed because he could not get beyond municipal bounds.

This town has a great life style story when couched in broader terms, bringing out its history and regional place. All this was lost in a narrow focus on roads, bridges and parks. The sizzle was gone. Even the steak was partly missing.

Perhaps part of the problem lies in the fact that too many town and regions try to compete with the metros, defining themselves in comparison, instead of focusing on their own unique stories.