Integrated Strategic Planning and Public-Private Partnerships

Short title

Aim

<p>This initiative aims to build the capacity of municipal authorities’ staff in planning the provision and maintenance of basic infrastructure using integrated strategic planning methods and involving the private sector in the process.</p>

Description

The project is directly related to the Metropolis strategy for engaging with Indian cities and the challenges they face in meeting the increased demand for physical and social services, and raising the quality of life for over 300 million people who live below the poverty line, and mostly concentrated in urban areas.

Integrated strategic planning requires both general protocols between governments and a capacity to respond to local expectations. Working with staff in Indian municipal authorities and state government agencies, the project will develop a model for integrated strategic planning designed to assist Indian cities in tackling urgent infrastructure needs. The model will address appropriate governance processes and the role of public-private partnerships in providing and maintaining essential infrastructure.

Objectives

The main goal is to develop an integrated strategic-planning model as a tool for decision-making and monitoring that links general protocols to an applied process which can be variously adapted to local frameworks and oriented towards infrastructure development. As part of this exercise it is intended to:

Develop a working model in conjunction with one or two cities that might be extended to other Indian cities, and then possibly to other cities in the Metropolis membership.
Orient the planning model around public-private partnerships; including with reference to the ‘Melbourne Model’ of tripartite partnerships used by the Cities Programme: namely, partnerships between local government, business and civil society.
Assess the suitability or otherwise of the UN Global Compact Cities Programme approach ‘Circles of Sustainability’ for providing the locality-sensitive general protocols for decision-making on infrastructure development.
Link the planning model to the development of social indicators, taking forward work that was previously done by Metropolis, and integrating it within the ‘Circles of Sustainability’ approach

The beneficiaries are layered from the local to the global and from the immediate to the potential:

Local officials in participating Indian cities seeking an integrated planning model;
Cities in India beyond the immediate partner cities, responding to complex planning problems;
Metropolis and the Victorian Government forging stronger partnerships in India;
Local researchers in Melbourne seeking to operationalize an approach that they have been developing;
Other Metropolis member cities and partners.

Activities

Research on existing literature on protocols and indicators for integrated planning.
Workshops in India to develop engagement processes, protocols and indicators.
Workshops in India to integrate local understandings of the major issues with developed protocols.
Operationalization of the agreed model taking into account local variations.
Monitoring and evaluation (including, potentially through a second round of workshops).
Reporting.

Calendar

Date	Duration	Phase / action
Jan –Feb 2012	6-8 weeks	Working group set up, Terms of Reference and critical path confirmed
Mar-Jun 2012	3 months	Research on background protocols and indicators for integrated planning
April 2012	2 days	Inaugural stakeholders meeting (New Delhi)
July-Sept 2012	3 months, intermittent	Alignment of global protocols and local needs
Oct-Nov 2012	3 days in two cities	Workshop
Nov-Dec 2012	2 months	First-stage evaluation of program
Jan-Feb 2013	2-8 weeks	Development of new round of training workshops, subject to evaluation of above program
Feb-March 2013		Details of new workshops to be advised
April-December 2013	9 months, intermittent	Writing up major report on outcomes, including recommendations and proposals for the extension of the method to other cities.

Results

A working model of integrated planning that: Brings together general protocols that allows for sensitivity to local variations and draws upon local knowledge; Is ready for trialling in other Indian cities and beyond; Integrates decision-making with an indicator-selection process for monitoring and evaluation, and reporting, on major urban projects.

Partners