During the last decade, many Latin American and Caribbean countries have developed different programs and public policies with medium- and long-term objectives aimed at bringing about structural change. According toECLAC, this trend has been stronger in South America, but some Central American nations have also started to incorporate this agenda.
In the context of renewed interest in planning in the region, the Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES) of ECLAC is developing the Planning Digital Repository (PDR), which will be launched in the second half of 2014 and will serve as a center for information, comparison, study and analysis of planning strategies in Latin American and Caribbean countries.
The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) presented a video on the pilot of this project last November, during the XIV Meeting of the Regional Council on Planning in Brasilia, with the participation of regional authorities who design public policies to foster development. (Watch video)
In the pilot, ILPES included information from 75 agendas, plans, strategies, and national, regional and sector-based programs, in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador and Mexico.
With the repository, ECLAC aims to harness the benefits of information systems and information and communication technologies (ICT) and group in one place public documents issued by the region's governments-such as development plans, blueprints for the future, and evaluations of results from different public administrations-that were isolated before in each one of the government's institutions.
The information available in the PDR will include planning and development programs and plans from the region's countries, categorized by their duration (medium- and long-term) and their characteristics (global, subnational and by sector) and covering issues such as the economy, education, health and productivity.
It will also include information about different laws and judicial rules that affect planning, a list of the regional planning ministries and secretariats, and some programs and plans from countries that are not part of the region but are useful for analysis. Depending on the countries, the repository could provide details on follow-up indicators and monitoring of the plans and programs, as well as guidelines to measure their scope and relationship to the goals of the post-2015 global development agenda, which will be unveiled soon.
ILPES poses the challenge of offering-via the repository-tools for analysis, both for regional authorities and general users. To achieve this objective, it will seek to analyze the characteristics of planning in a qualitative and quantitative way and include studies about its evaluation, impact and coordination, as well as instruments for follow-up and monitoring.
In the medium term, the PDR will evolve to become a planning observatory that can be used as a resource for experts and authorities to exchange ideas that contribute to the development of Latin American and Caribbean countries.
