British Embassy - Public Engagement in Strategic Planning and Policy Making

 

Completed project (August 2010 - March 2012)

Origin of funding: British Embassy

According to Turkey 2009 Progress Report, Turkish government’s priority is to establish the principles and procedures for the administration to deliver better public services to citizens. However, a number of key challenges remain, such as administrative procedures, enhancing transparency and improving policy-making and coordination systems. In this context, strategy development units, which are pillars of financial management and policy-making, need to be strengthened.

The Public Financial Management and Control (PFMC) Law states that public administrations will prepare their budgets based on strategic plans that must be prepared in a participatory way. Even though most of the institutions’ plans show some participatory approach, the level of stakeholder involvement is still very limited.

The main objective of the project is to enhance the guiding capacity of the Ministry of Development and implementation capacity of public institutions for a better stakeholder engagement and citizen orientation in the strategic planning process.

The basic outcome of this project is guiding documents that will be used by all public institutions in development of participatory strategic plans. Moreover, the Ministry of Development, having an authority to approve strategic plans prepared by the public organizations, will be able extract from the guiding documents necessary metrics to evaluate the quality of participation in strategic plans.

Within the scope of the project, the following services have been provided:

• Preparation of an assessment report on evaluation of the central governments’ strategic planning and policy making practices in terms of quality of stakeholder participation,
• Online survey on stakeholder engagement with strategic planning units,
• Study visit to public administrations in UK on their experience with stakeholder engagement,
• Organization of a workshop with relevant institutions to share `know how` and develop ideas,
• Training of trainers on participatory planning and methodologies,
• In depth participation course,
• Engagement roadmap development workshop,
• Participation methods toolkit,
• Developing a common model on survey development and implementation,
• Interactive website on strategic management in central government,
• Training course on internal stakeholder engagement,
• International panel on engagement,
• Production of a framework for evaluating stakeholder engagement and public participation in strategic planning and policy making.