Editorial: PLA Notes 49 Decentralisation and community-based planning

This issue on decentralisation and community-based planning draws on the four-country CBP Project, the action-research study in Africa. This project is outlined in article two, and articles three to six give experiences from the four countries – South Africa, Uganda, Ghana, and Zimbabwe. The issue also includes other examples, outside of the four-country CBP Project, from francophone Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

What is community-based planning? It is defined in the overview as ‘planning by communities, for their communities, which is not isolated from but links into the local and or national government planning systems’. Given increasing decentralisation in many countries, this theme is timely. CBP attempts to be more responsive to local people’s needs, through participatory planning and resource allocation, by improving the quality of services, and by deepening democracy through promoting community action and involvement at a local level.