Many of the global developments of 2026 weren’t on my bingo card. Then again, it can feel as though each year is as unpredictable as the last. These shifting sands are not just rare unfortunate surprises. The rules, institutions and assumptions that development and international relations have long relied on are themselves in flux.
For decades, development institutions have relied on multi-year strategies, forecasts, ‘trajectories’, and carefully sequenced reforms. But in these turbulent times, some are beginning to wonder whether these planning models are still fit for purpose— or whether they simply offer the comforting illusion of control in a world determined to behave otherwise.
Others argue the opposite: that long-term thinking matters more than ever. In their view, reactive policymaking weakens resilience to shocks, while good planning is not about predicting the future perfectly, but preparing for uncertainty, managing risk and staying oriented towards long-term goals even as conditions shift.
So, this week for The Intel, we asked three experts: Is long-term planning still a viable strategy for development— or just a comfort blanket?
The most effective approaches we’ve seen at UNDP, working with partners in more than 100 countries, don’t produce a perfect plan but build optionality– continually expanding the surface of possibilities. Three lessons stand out.
First, rather than setting an objective and working toward it, partners develop ‘strategic intent’—a shared direction that drives alignment across partners. They pivot from 'we will create X number of jobs for youth' (a plan) to ' we address dynamics that prevent youth from pursuing opportunities' (an intention). Consequently, we see perspectives align over time and local action grow, maintaining social legitimacy as contexts shift. This process isn’t politically neutral, though. It hinges on naming who benefits from the status quo.
Second, shared intent allows communities to experiment with different approaches, respond to different conditions and leverage different strengths—all the while connected to a common purpose. Coherence emerges not from control, but a shared direction that shapes how different institutions interpret and respond to uncertainty. This builds a system that knows how to act, where signals trigger decisions rather than accumulate into reports. Yuen Yuen Ang calls this directed improvisation: a fixed direction, but a constantly adjusted 'how.'
Third, shared direction with loosely aligned interventions leads to plans that accommodate multiple time horizons. Short-term actions build momentum; medium-term efforts seed new capabilities and ways of working; long-term interventions nurture transformations that can't be rushed—think cultural norms around the role of youth. This allows 'long-term planning' to accommodate different tempos without political liabilities or loss of social legitimacy. Countries and cities we’ve seen move toward this type of planning tend to face transitions and crises with more choices that have better local traction and political feasibility.
Millie Begovic is Deputy Director of UNDP's Digital, AI and Innovation Hub, where she leads the global team on systems transformation and innovation. With over 20 years of experience across academia, the public sector, and international development, she has worked with governments & cities across 100+ countries, leveraging innovation for tackling complex policy challenges. At the Lab, we love Millie’s focus on complexity and the energy she brings to her all commitments… including the occasional triathlon.
“The best laid plans”, Robert Burns famously wrote, “often go awry”. He’s right. From picnics to sprawling multiyear development projects, nothing goes to plan. This isn’t new though: Burns was writing in 1785.
It’s true that we’re living in tumultuous times. But wars, disasters, autocrats and pandemics have been ruining people’s plans since the dawn of time. Yet we keep planning.
There’s a reason for this. Things won’t go as planned. But the point of planning isn’t to find the perfect path from A to B: it’s to think things through. What are you doing? Where? What might go wrong? What will you do if it does? You won’t get everything right. But at least you’ll be thinking about it. Thinking things through is better than making leaps of faith.
You might think this is all about to change because our plans will soon be concocted in conversations between Claude and ChatGPT. Artificial Intelligence will certainly change planning and will very likely make some of the more mechanical parts of aid logistics easier. But AI’s never going to eliminate the need for human planning in aid work. Artificial intelligence is no substitute for emotional intelligence. People will always be integral to a process that involves people helping people. And as long as aid involves human beings, we’ll need to think carefully about what we’re going to do. We’ll need a plan in other words. That’s not going to change.
Terence Wood is a Fellow at the Development Policy Centre in the Crawford School of Public Policy at ANU. A favourite analyst of many in the development community, Terence’s brings expertise on Melanesian politics, aid policy and effectiveness, and the impact of public opinion on the aid policy process. At The Lab, we love Terence's knack for making complex data palatable, his evidence-based blogs are a favourite read.
Long-term planning has long guided development in the Global South. Countries such as China, South Korea, and Malaysia have used it to guide their industrialisation and economic development. But its record is mixed at best.
In practice, traditional government-wide plans often fail. Most are disconnected from annual budgets. This alone reduces them to aspirational documents rather than operational tools. Even when governments attempt tight alignment—as with Brazil in 2000—rigid frameworks can unravel under fiscal pressures and shifting priorities.
The result is familiar: plans that signal intent but deliver little, functioning more as bureaucratic “comfort blankets” than actionable strategies. Rising economic and geopolitical uncertainty only reinforces this problem. Take, for example, the European Green Deal, launched in 2019 with the goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. It assumed a steady supply of gas from Russia to smooth the energy transition. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nullified this assumption literally overnight.
Yet abandoning long-term planning altogether would be a mistake. It remains indispensable for structural, cross-cutting policy challenges such as population ageing and climate change that unfold over decades and require sustained coordination that short-term policymaking cannot provide.
The policy implication is clear: Governments should retain issue-specific plans for such structural challenges, while moving away from rigid, all-encompassing planning of the traditional kind. To manage the uncertainties in the global environment, those issue-specific plans should be informed by rigorous scenario-based calibrations
Yasuhiko Matsuda brings nearly three decades of experience across development, governance, and political economy, including senior leadership roles with the World Bank in Asia and the Pacific. His work has spanned fragile-state governance, institutional reform, social protection, and human development, with postings from Afghanistan to Latin America and now, Malaysia with the Asia Foundation. At the Lab, we love how Yasuhiko combines deep regional expertise with a calm, thoughtful approach to some of development’s most politically complex challenges.
