Planning from the people. A vision of increasing complexity

Abstract

The purpose of this article focused on analyzing the theoretical and epistemological foundations of planning from the people, considering the growing complexity of the environment. It was based on the thesis that planning implies two important conjunctions: on the one hand, planning with the people by involving citizen participation, dialogue and commitment of the intervening actors as guiding principles of the plan; on the other hand, planning from the people, which represents a change in the directionality of planning processes, i.e., preferring horizontality and relational transversality to verticality. The research was approached with a qualitative approach and hermeneutics as a method of understanding to establish the epistemic sense of planning from 3 key informants who constituted the unit of analysis of the study. The results obtained indicate that planning with and from the people is a participatory process, emerging from reality, which assumes dialogue as communication mechanisms to achieve citizen participation in decision making, design and execution of the plan, in order to manage the growing complexity and generate collective actions that favor development. It is concluded that the task of this new planning encompasses understanding, managing and controlling; assuming controlling as a capacity and disposition of the individuals who participate in planning.