ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at experience with multisectoral, holistic planning in integrated rural development, river basin management, and multisectoral approaches to nutrition, national food security, and poverty reduction. The Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF)—and its implementation through Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers—emphasizes a long-term, holistic, and strategic approach that is also participatory, flexible, and carefully sequenced. Field identified several lessons for multisectoral nutrition planning. Lessons from the past provide pointers that governments and others can use to help make the CDF work. The pretensions of planning to objectivity and impartiality have long been questioned. The conventional wisdom privileges the market over the state and disparages the jobs that planners do, like setting targets, allocating resources. History is important where there is a legacy of failures with river basin planning approaches, planners may be better off with another system rather than attempting to reform deeply discredited river basin planning institutions.
