ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the main theoretical issues and debates pertaining to planning in general and health planning specifically. It describes the different ways in which planning is conceived and practised. Planning can be thought of in numerous ways and is applicable to numerous activities. Budget planning is concerned with the allocation of limited and finite financial resources. The planning profession has historically seen the discipline as ‘basically a methodology, a set of procedures applicable to a variety of activities aimed at achieving selected goals by the systematic application of resources in programmed quantities and time sequences designed to alter the projected trends and redirect them toward established objectives’. Planning becomes a process of strategy formulation with concerns focused on power in political systems, consensus versus conflict views of how society functions, and questions about issues such as the role of government, the media, interest groups, political parties and global politics.
