The role of Planning Support Systems in national policy transfer and policy translation in secondary cities

ABSTRACT

Rwanda has developed a National Urbanization Policy (NUP) that identifies six secondary citieswhere efforts to promote urbanization and economic growth should focus. To implement it, a Spatial Development Framework (SDF) was developed, that makes use of Planning Support Systems (PSS) to communicate the goals to the local level. PSS present opportunities for stakeholders to understand and translate national policies to their local planning contexts. This paper questions how the SDF’s PSS tools can be used in the NUP’s transfer and translation to the local level. It focuses on potential users of the SDF. Results suggest that SDF’s PSS tools and outcomes can promote better spatial understanding, and communicate planning needs, strengthening regional competition andeconomic development among the secondary cities and in line with NUP. We conclude that the national government can use vertical transfer and horizontal translation to transfer the SDF’S PSS tools and outcomes to secondary cities.

KEYWORDS:

• National Urbanization Policy
• Rwanda
• Planning Support Systems
• policy translation
• policy transfer

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the helpful comments of two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Rwanda has two tiers of government: national and local. The national government directs activities across the country through several ministries and agencies. The ministry of local government (MINALOC) oversees the activities of local governments. The local governments (commonly referred to as Districts), are further subdivided into Sectors, Cells and Villages. In this paper we will use the local concepts when referring to local levels of government, i.e. Districts, Sectors, Cells and Villages.

2. The word methodology is used here to mean the formulation of SDF as formal guideline in implement Rwanda NUP. The SDF methodology includes SDF tools, outcomes and reports which were used in designing the research methods in this study.