The .Plan

Easterly nails it:

Plans, strategies, and frameworks are favored activities in foreign aid—this is what aid bureaucracy does. Then the bureaucracies “coordinate” their respective strategies with the others. One bureaucracy’s output serves as another bureaucracy’s input, with the output of the second bureaucracy then feeding back as an input into the first bureaucracy’s output.

For example, the World Bank announces that its plan to fight AIDS is to produce more plans. It advocates

… strengthening national HIV/AIDS strategies, to ensure they are truly prioritized and strategic, integrated into development planning…. The World Bank will focus intensively on improving national HIV/AIDS strategies and annual action plans. … Support for a network of country practitioners will be provided to help countries to develop strategic, prioritized national plans…. Enhanced Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) and Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRSP) guidelines and assessment criteria will aim to support better integration of HIV/ AIDS into national development planning and better aligned national AIDS responses…. The Bank will continue to provide financial and technical support…to enhance country capacity and systems to implement national HIV/AIDS plans…[and] work with countries and Bank project teams to further improve planning.[8]

This repetitive exposition on how strategies should be strategic is to be found in the short version, or executive summary, of a seventy-eight-page report. Those who can, act; those who can’t, produce plans.
–William Easterly, “How, and How Not, to Stop AIDS in Africa”, New York Review of Books, August 16, 2007