We visualise the approach to policy formulation, as we understand the concepts of cooperation planning and strategy, the importance of research, baseline and benchmarking, and are introduced to the concepts of working groups, consultations, documentation. This chapter is part of a series on Hierarchical Spatial Planning Framework

Governments primarily use spatial and land use plans and environmental and building code regulations to affect land use. These instruments function by restricting usage of land but cannot influence how individuals and businesses would like to use land. Many other policies or schemes and planning procedures, which are not causally related to land use planning systems, create incentives to use land in certain specific ways. It is not necessary that such policies correspond to the objectives of land use planning systems.

Hence, the process for formulation of a good public policy on land use planning should consider linkages to sectoral tax incentives, fiscal systems and schemes, demographic and economic trends, sectoral integration to overcome silos & convergence of resources etc.

A good ‘Land Use Planning Policy’ would serve as a spatial governance tool that balances considerations to all sectors at all levels of governance.

Formulation of such a policy would necessitates that all departments cooperate, and relevant information is made available to guide decision making and policy formulation.

Sensitising various stakeholders and sector departments to come together, bridge the sectoral silos and cooperate would require extensive levels of research, innovativeness, patience and consensus building and management skills in a multi-disciplinary environment with panels of experts and rooms full of people with grey and white hair as well as administrative authorities at very high levels of government. It can be a long process. One should be prepared for placing substantial efforts in terms of relooking and redoing things right from scratch (sensitisation, information collection, consultations, documentation etc.). Especially, if there is a tendency of frequent transfers of decision makers in the government.

The approach to policy formulation may comprise of following key steps:

• Co-operation Planning and Strategy
• Research and Baseline
• Working groups and steering structures for multi-sectoral consultations and integration
• Documentation and expert inputs and whitepapers
• Consensus building and Preparation of Draft Policy and State Spatial Strategy Maps

The process and timelines adopted in the GIZ pilot project is indicated in the image below:

Cooperation Planning and Strategy

Globally, cooperation is the basis of social development. People create societies through cooperation and no single stakeholder can manage this process on their own. However, organisations participate in cooperation systems, and allow themselves to become dependent on others, only if they find the objectives attractive and cannot achieve them on their own.

It is that with the extensive potential for interaction and impact of land use planning on multiple sectors and vice versa, a cooperation system needs to be established for achieving the same. It will be through cooperation only, that a successful land use planning policy can be framed.

For a cooperation to succeed, the following factors would play a crucial role:

Strategy: All the cooperation partners need to agree on a joint strategy to achieve the negotiated common objectives.

Cooperation: Mutual trust, clarity of roles and negotiation of appropriate forms of cooperation create the foundation to a successful cooperation

Steering Structure: the actors (stakeholders) come together to jointly prepare and take guiding decisions affecting them.

Processes: clarity and effectiveness of delivering outputs by establishing new processes or modifying exiting processes.

Learning and Innovation: Create an enabling environment for innovation by boosting the learning capacities of actors involved.

It is important to look the cooperation system and strategy as an organism with dynamic needs to evolve and adapt to new situations rather than being stagnant with rigid attitudes. For this purpose, the cooperation partners may switch back and forth between observing and analysing their settings and implementing actions.

Each cooperation partner is an organisation. Each organisation is driven by its own logic, rationale, objectives, ecosystem for setting goals, making decisions and steering the process to reach them, which all work within a boundary. The output process in an organisation tend to be well defined wherein the leadership sets up a hierarchical system that resolves conflicts and enables decisions.

For a successful cooperation system each organisation must adapt and evolve capacities for negotiating joint objectives, implementation processes and decisions. For pursuing these joint objectives, each organisation must partially waive their autonomy. As each organisation might be tempted to force its own logic into the cooperation system, the negotiations can become sensitive when specific structures, processes, rules and rituals within an organisation are required to be modified.

The following image shows the map of two logics as shown in the book ‘Cooperation Management for Practitioners – Manging Social Change with Capacity Works by GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH’ published by Springer-Gabler. (ISBN 978-3-658-07904-0 and ISBN 978-3-658-07905-5 (eBook)

Steering decisions in cooperation structures requires discussions and negotiations. As each partner remains autonomous in deciding the extent they wish to cooperate or not, they make their own contributions to the steering of the cooperation system. Hence, each partner can be an ‘Influencer’, which depends on their actions and communication and performance of specific activities. However, acceptance of their inputs into the system is not in their control.

In a good cooperation system, different partners provide many steering inputs, the process eventually takes on a momentum of its own, the system begins to steer itself dynamically.

Results Framework Model

A cooperation system must emerge and develop to achieve mutually accepted objectives and results between the cooperation partners. For this purpose, a strategy in the form of results framework model becomes essential.

Look at the image above.

If ‘Improved Integrated Land Use Planning and Management’ is the ultimate objective, then it is important that an Integrated Land Use Plan (ILUP) exists. For an ILUP to exist, it is necessary that a robust institutional mechanism is in place and functional along with supporting legislations. Furthermore, the state institutions should have willingness to apply the instruments of Land Use Planning and other key actors need to be sensitised.

For the institutional mechanism to be robust, there must be a binding cooperation mechanism, identification and capacitating of a nodal state department and standard operational mechanism (which in turn needs guidelines and standards and standard operating procedures.

For capacitating the nodal department, there must be a competent team and individuals, clarity of mandate and structure and a strategy/plan for capacity development.

The catch is we as an actor can only influence and intervene at certain points. The boxes covered in blue bubble in the image above can be influenced to a large extent. The partially covered boxes indicate limited influence capacity. And the excluded boxes indicate no influencing capacity at all.

With this kind of deliberation, the approach to formulating the policy needs to be finalised and further steps can be undertaken on case to case basis.

Research and Baseline

Each stakeholder in the project must be sensitised for a cooperation model to be successful. Any change in stance by one stakeholder can result in ripple effects across the entire system.

Extensiveness, thoroughness and comprehensiveness of research is the key here.

For sensitising the stakeholders, we need to get in their shoes to understand their mandate, perspectives, strengths, challenges, and threats. And at the same time bring to their knowledge, the similar aspects about other stakeholders and their impacts on each other. This necessitates that relevant information is made available to guide decision making and policy formulation.

This includes:

• Role of various sectoral departments and their mandates
• Land use categorisation
• Existing scenario and land use statistics
• Interaction between land uses and role of each department
• Key features of sectoral policies (future scenarios)

Department Roles/Mandate

The national government of India has 50 ministries, whereas in a state government in India there can be 30 to 50 departments (depending on size of state) looking into various aspects of governance and multiple sectors. Some of these national ministries and/or state departments tend to look after same sector but different aspects. Further, each of these ministries and departments tend to have multiple divisions, schemes, autonomous institutes, PSUs and boards etc. Hence it is extremely important to understand the roles, scope, mandate, functions and activities undertaken by each of these departments to understand if they are linked to land use planning.

Land Use Categorisation

The Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India has for long been maintaining land use statistics under a nine fold classification, five of which are related to agriculture, one for forests, grazing & pasture lands, one for wasteland and one for all other non-agricultural land uses. Further, under multiple schemes of development as well as National Urban Information System (NUIS) GIS platform, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (Erstwhile Ministry of Urban Development) has recommended multiple land uses based on scales of planning for urban land use planning purposes.

Further complications arise when we note that the definition of forests, eco-sensitive zones, wastelands, waterbodies, wetlands etc. are not standard across different departments/ministries. Also, waterbodies, industries, infrastructure, grasslands, etc. do not find a separate mention in terms of land use at regional level.

In view of above, it is considered extremely important that a comprehensive but standardised set of land use categories is considered for representation at state/regional level, which can be conveniently broken into subcategories depending on scale of planning.

Land Use Statistics

Various departments maintain information on existing land use statistics for their own planning purposes. It is important to understand how these statistics look together at various levels of governance. Such a collation of land use statistics and envisaged/proposed plans is expected to give interesting insights into the land use scenario as well as the challenges ahead.

Sectoral Policies – Key Features

The presence of complex governance systems with multiple sectoral departments, means that each of these departments is in-charge of various development measures. It is highly likely that the departments have specific policies or other forms of guiding documents for planning interventions. Some of these policies/guiding documents are expected to directly have an impact on land use, whereas some of them would result in planning processes that affect eventual land use (indirect impact on land use). As most of the departments have such policies in force and decisions are made abiding by these documents, it is important to understand and consider them during the formulation of the land use planning policy for the state.

Department vs Land Use Matrix

The presence of a complex governance system with multiple sectoral departments and the complex substructure of each indicates that different departments have different mandates, functions and powers as far as land use and utilisation is concerned. Whereas some department may have powers and functions covering financial, planning, influencing land use outcomes, other departments may only be affected by decisions of other departments. Furthermore, the powers and functions vested with a department or the lack thereof, may or may not be restricted to a certain category of land use. Hence, it is important to evaluate the roles of various department’s viz.-a-viz. each category of land use.

Benchmarking

When one embarks onto a new journey (in this case project), It is always a good idea to learn from good practices of other similar journeys (projects) undertaken in the past. Furthermore, India is obsessed with words ‘World Class’ and ‘State of the Art’.

A secondary research on 40 countries was undertaken to understand their spatial planning systems. This proved to be a key game changer in creating an amiable and conducive environment of policy formulation with multiple stakeholders.

The said document was a compendium of excerpts, summaries, understandings derived from various studies undertaken by different agencies, organisations and individuals around the world.  The same was prepared from the point of view of generating an awareness of different practices and experiences in the field of land use planning and governance. Many of the country details were found from detailed studies undertaken by OECD.

(There is no intention to take the credit or plagiarise the immense amounts of efforts undertaken by original authors of various studies and reports. For preparing the said compendium, the sole intension was to present the findings of all those studies in a short quickly readable manner for young students and government officials – Click here to read it)

Working Groups and Consultations

A land use (planning) policy to bridge sectoral gaps needs to bring on board a multi-sectoral approach and ownership. It is important to ensure that underlying themes / essence of various existing policies and guidelines of different sectors are captured and well represented to ensure synergy.

Formulation of such a policy would require close interaction of various sectoral departments and experts. For formulating a land use (planning) policy and related guiding documents, formation of a multi-sectoral working group (involving multiple state sectoral departments) and consultations would be the most crucial steps. It would ensure consensus building with good moderation techniques. As part of the structure, an academic panel of experts (the guys with grey and white hair), is likely to prove crucial in guiding, vetting and conducting researches for the policy.

The process should envisage consultations and close interactions with core as well as extended working group members at common platforms/focussed bilateral meetings. The consultations in our case were structured under the three fundamental themes of sustainability, i.e. Environment, Economy and Society. Detailed terms of reference for each member of the working group was prepared, shared and agreed upon as part of the process.

Documentation, Expert Inputs and Whitepapers

The policy insists on multi-sectoral consensus building. This needs extensive and repeated consultation along with documentation of each consultation. This needs to be supported by expert inputs in the form of studies on overall macro-economic trends, spatial representation of sectoral policies, spatial growth patterns, population forecasts, and possible institutional mechanisms etc. These expert inputs in the form of sanctioned studies, researches, whitepapers etc. should be taken up for discussions, presentations and consultations again. Eventually, this would result in an initial draft of the policy, which needs to be presented and discussed in detail with the core working groups, special invitees and academic experts.

Preparation of Draft Land use (Planning) Policy and State Spatial Strategy Map

All the previously mentioned documents must be collated along with responses and modifications based on comments from sectoral departments and edited to arrive at the policy. A state spatial strategy should ideally be prepared as part of each policy.

The policy may advocate for:

• Strengthening existing hierarchical spatial planning framework (three tier in case of India) in terms of State Spatial Strategy, Framework for Regional Strategic Planning and Framework for Settlement Level Land Use Planning (both urban and rural)
• Prioritising areas for conservation of environment, natural resources and heritage, promotion of economic development (primary, secondary and tertiary sectors) and balancing spatial equities in society
• Formulating a wholistic guided urbanisation strategy
• Evolve and strengthen the institutional, coordination and implementation mechanisms for land use planning and management.

For more details on the draft policies formulated for the pilot states as part of the GIZ project in India, click here.

Let us start with Chapter 07: Stakeholders and Actors – the Department roles and mandates. Click here.