COUNTRY POLICY PAPERS
(W/42
The preparation of Country Policy Papers is regarded ar a tedious and low-priority chore of very little value by the vast majority of geographical Departments. They entail a tremendous amount of work and are usually months, if not years, out of date. I have very considerable sympathy for their attitude. Certainly, as far as the Geographical Division economists are concerned, they put in a great amount of work with very little benefit, as all too often by the time they are ready to be put forward by geographical desks they are out of date and have to be re-written. Since my Division does most of the work, this is a matter of some concern to me.
2. However, the production of CPPs is of importance and they could be of greater value. They are of value for two reasons:
3.
a) They assist to get clearance in Whitehall on such issues as to whether aid should be diminishing, increasing, or remain stable, what form the aid should take, and on what terms it should be offered.
b) They are important for public relations purposes outside of ODM (and
I am sure you will agree that public relations are important if we are to gain support for our programme).
The current CPPs are weakest when they set out the policies which we intend to pursue in the recipient country. Generally these consist of a series of general propositions which could apply to most countries. I believe that they should be made much more specific and that they should contain a programme for action over the next one to two years. (This was in fact included in the earlier procedure for presentation of CPPS but was unfortunately removed).
A. Since I have been involved over the years in assisting Organisation Department to prepare CPPs, I am fairly confident that the principai reasons for the lack of effectiveness of the present system springs from the following:
5.
a) Excessively lengthy papers (despite an instruction to restrict them to 10 pages). This inevitably leads to interminable detailed arguments which cause immense delay and a great deal of burdensome work for Desk Officers.
Since almost
b) Excessively wide circulation, particularly within ODM.
every Adviser seems to be involved and since the reports are long, this adds very considerably to the burden of work of Desk Officers.
c) The artificial division of work between the economists who are responsible
for diagnosing the problem and the Desk Officers who are supposed to propose the policy solutions. What in fact occurs is that the economists usually go into far too much detail in diagnosing the problem and the paper is out of balance. The Desk Officers in practice usually rely on the economists to supply the policy solutions. Very often, however, since some Desk Officers feel that they must comply with office procedure and do the section themselves the reports are held up for months while they deal with work which they regard as of higher priority.
Since we are continually revising Office Procedure for CPPs, and since we only did this a couple of years ago, I suspect that new proposals will not be greeted with great enthusiasm, but since our attempts at simplifying them have not achieved any significant increase in outpat, I think that we should reconsider the situation and devise a simpler and more useful system.
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