ABSTRACT
A strategy is more likely to be successfully implemented if it concentrates on a few priority issues. These issues should be central to maintaining or improving the well-being of people and ecosystems and to achieving agreed economic objectives. They should be sufficiently high profile or be able to be tackled effectively to generate political support for the strategy. And the strategy should be able to make a clear difference in the way the existing decision-making system deals with the issues.
A few broad but well-defined and measurable objectives are necessary for each issue, to enable monitoring and evaluation of the strategy and ensure it gets results. Participants analyze the issues to reach agreement on the objectives, and the policies and actions required to achieve them. This includes preparing a policy framework as well as specific cross-sectoral and sectoral policies. The policy framework should clearly relate the strategy policy to the other policies of government (and of other participants in the strategy), identifying which policies may override it and the circumstances when they may do so, and which policies are subordinate. The last of the basic elements in planning a strategy is clearly defining the actions needed to put the policies into effect.
