Selection of major planning issues

A feature of government departments is the continuous stream of policy issues which arise and require some response. Lindblom's Science of Muddling Through provides one way of dealing with this situation but has often been criticized as too limiting. Yet experience with more comprehensive approaches has not been encouraging. Research has been undertaken, with particular reference to health services, to develop another approach to planning and policy making; a key feature in this approach is that issues must be filtered so that those which require an analytical rather than an administrative approach can be identified and their relative importance decided. Thus, issues of major importance can be selected for detailed planning attention and the inevitably limited planning skills that are available used to best effect. This paper puts forward proposals for this process of selection; it describes a set of criteria for selection and demonstrates how these can be used in a procedure which is systematic yet retains political realism.