ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the nature of the five approaches—the rational, incremental, mixed-scanning, general systems, and learning-adaptive—in terms of their origins, major characteristics, major advocates, and cross-criticisms. Both the urban and national economic planners regarded planning as a central, coordinative and rational process and as a comprehensive and consistent process of grand design in holistic terms. Planning plays a key role in Yehezkel Dror's concept of the policy sciences since he believes planning to be the most structured and professionalized mode of policy making. Comprehensive planning, to Dror, is the most ambitious social effort to direct human fate through conscious decision making, and it is therefore of intense interest to the policy sciences. Interwoven planning approaches, however, experiment with new organizations and techniques of contextuating societal control to link control more closely to consensus formation and to changes in the organization of societal decision making.