bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1989), pp. 16–18
Although it is commonly agreed by diplomats and their academic watchdogs that every foreign office requires a strategic policy planning unit, there remains considerable disagreement in both circles on its mandate and position. Policy planning has multiple facets, the most important are designed to develop and test a range of options in order to determine those most suitable for implementation in a given or anticipated situation. This involves the clarification of policy options, the development of possible solutions to anticipated or current problems and the analysis of alternative courses of action. Strategic, as opposed to tactical planning, is specifically oriented towards the development of new policies through the identification of trends and opportunities that would call into question or buttress the organization’s basic objectives and goals.
Where in a foreign office such a function should be carried out varies according to traditions that are usually rooted in who initiated the unit in the first place. In the Kennan-Marshall tradition of the State Department, the planning unit reports directly to the Secretary of State and, as his “think-tank”, ’, remains somewhat independent of the operations of the department. We, however, have placed our Policy Development Bureau more firmly in the bureaucracy by having it report to the Associate Under Secretary. While there are merits in both reporting relationships, the continuity of the unit and its work are more assured within the bureaucratic stream.
Regardless of whom they work for, foreign policy planners have the common problem of getting their work taken seriously. In the State Department, the Policy Planning Staff has flourished under the leadership of such well known figures as George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Walt Rostow, and Winston Lord without necessarily having a corresponding amount of influence on policy formulation. As in other offices, when the planners’ function was not properly understood, they were not always successful in competing for knowledgeable input with the specialists who are on top of the issues and are normally in control of implementing policies. Moreover, as Brock University political scientist Dan Madar has pointed out in his study of planning units, there is an endemic bureaucratic framework built on parochialism, rigidity, territoriality and authority, and rooted in specialization, which weighs heavily against any sucessful planning operation. Even Kennan, according to his Memoirs’, considered his efforts to have failed.
In foreign offices, there is a certain inherent bias that weighs in favour of the intuitive skills of the practicing diplomats when dealing with international events which are essentially regarded as unpredictable. This is especially true in a middle power like Canada whose policies must of necessity be largely reactive to international developments over which it has very little control, thereby militating against predicting events and planning courses of action with any degree of certainty or specificity. Yet, at the same time, it would be short sighted in the extreme to forgo altogether the making of projections on future developments which of necessity require as much forethought as possible if a country is to assume an active foreign policy in the mold of constructive internationalism.
Too often the weight given to the planner’s work ultimately depends upon the delegated authority for influencing policy formulation. This is unfortunate since executive authority soon wears thin if policy substance is missing in the planner’s work and the specialists come to see themselves as in competition with the planners for the ears of senior management. Both have distinctive and necessary functions that are neither mutually exclusive nor necessarily competitive in the formulation of policy if both understand and respect the other’s functions and the interrelationship between them.
The idea of a policy planning unit for the Department emerged from various suggestions made in the 1960’s to make the department a more effective and modern instrument of government. While most senior managers in the Department at that time believed that more long range planning of foreign policy was desirable, it was the Privy Council Office that suggested that it should no longer be left to the line officers within existing geographical and functional divisions to carry it out.
When the Policy Analysis Group was set up in 1969, it was supposed to assist the Under-Secretary, to whom it reported, in the determination, development and analysis of major policy objectives, priorities, and alternatives. It was also to have a somewhat ambiguous policy coordination function. More attention was given, however, to what it was to do than to how these responsibilities were to be carried out in relation to current operations of the Department. Being starved from the outset of adequate personnel in a period of fiscal retrenchment, it did not get off to a very auspicious start.
The really important overview and forward looking policy planning studies continued to be pre-empted by the specialists in the geographical and functional bureaus or contracted to academics without much regard for the unit’s mandate. While objective setting was much in vogue among Ottawa’s mandarins following the shock of the oil embargo in 1973, the Group found that it took so many months to secure, if at all, ministerial approval for a statement of what were supposed to be the Government’s priorities in foreign policy, that it was outdated or discarded as irrelevant or too vague and academic by the specialist-operators who, in any case, thought that their greater familiarity with the issues automatically gave them an exclusive priority in suggesting what should be done. Moreover, since strategic policy objectives were always having to be modified as the international environment evolved, desk officers did not like the notion of having their activities measured against a moving target, least of all against objectives being set by seemingly meddlesome planners. Except for the Third Option Paper which Klaus Goldschlag wrote and the Group produced, little support was forthcoming from senior management which not only ignored the Group’s work, but in its formative years frequently saw its main value as a personnel reservoir for meeting short term operational needs.
The more recent higher profile phase of the unit’s work began in 1977 when the Under-Secretary redesigned it as a means of assisting the department in regaining its “central agency” or paramount role in the giving of interdepartmentally coordinated advice on foreign policy to the Government. The unit was renamed the Policy Planning Secretariat as his secretariat for spearheading this process.
The new Secretariat won its spurs by conceptualizing policy in a manner that was easily understood and succinctly transmitted. Beyond its strictly policy planning function, it came to be the source of alternative policy advice, which it drew from its own analysis of current situations. Within the Department, it was also recognized as the place where overview work should be coordinated and written.
Instead of generating its own agenda, in the way the Group had been forced to do in its first years of operation, and which got it into trouble with line authorities, almost all of the Secretariat’s work was assigned by the Under-Secretary himself or flowed from the discussions of the Under-Secretarial Group. Through the delivery of consistently high quality policy statements, often to the Prime Minister’s Office, the Secretariat became virtually indispensible to External Affair’s senior management. But, at the same time, such seminal pieces as “the strategy for suffocation” continued to flow from the pens of other gifted writers and thinkers who worked apart from the Secretariat.
Subsequent changes in the Secretariat have been more on the structural than the functional side with several name changes and the addition of an economic and trade component after integration. At a critical period in the Department’s evolution, the new Secretariat developed the potential for becoming a unifying force for meeting the Government’s wish for building an economic dimension into Canadian foreign policy. This would have made the Policy Development Secretariat unique among foreign offices in the western world and should have enabled it to play a key role in preparing the Government for the broad range of subjects being discussed by the G-7 Economic Summits. For several reasons, that potential has yet to be fully realized.
Although for administrative and functional reasons the current Policy Development Bureau has worked under many titles, perhaps its current functions are best described as a policy overview and analysis secretariat, which sets it apart from the work of other bureaus in the Department. Its ultimate effectiveness depends on its ability to do, and be seen to be doing, essential work that is not being performed elsewhere in the Department. When this has not been done, as in the past, it ran into trouble with other jurisdictions, as the original Policy Analysis Group did with the Academic Relations Division over research contracts and as the Policy Planning Secretariat did with some geographical divisions before its agenda was set by the Under-Secretary. Its unique contribution was to be found in its ability to provide senior management with timely analysis of policy that could be used to fill in the gaps in broad policy overviews or frameworks and thereby improve the quality and consistency of the Department’s policy statements. In this regard, other sections of the Department could and have utilized its skills to advance their own interests.
Without line responsibilities to attend to and being responsible to deputy ministers, it should be better able than the line divisions to do the intellectual spade work associated with the development and articulation of their ideas. This was what happened in the development of the central agency concept and the design of the bureaucratic mechanisms for its implementation. Today, it could be seen in thinking about the nature of the foreign office that will be required to meet the challenges of the 1990s and the impact of demographic changes on policy making and articulation.
In the past, the unit’s chairman or director-general has sometimes been used as the Under-Secretary’s spokesman in revising the work of others, or as his intellectual gadfly among senior managers. Such a role is fraught with danger, however, and can only be exercised in rare or exceptional circumstances because of its potential for disrupting the good relations which need to prevail among the Under-Secretarial Group. Ultimately, it will be the inclination of the deputies that will determine when a gadfly role is required. But the basic question of policy-making remains. Does the Department require a unit that will look beyond the traditional molds of foreign policy and who in the Department is best suited to fulfil such a role?
When it comes to the preparing and writing of policy overviews and reviews, the Department has usually turned to gifted individuals. Only in the last few years have the policy planners been intimately involved in these exercises, as in the drafting of the Government’s response to the report of the Special Joint Committee. Their credibility for doing so depends upon the quality of their work being acknowledged by other units. Seldom do other units, or for that matter senior managers, have the combined time nd perspective reoured for undertakin uch tasks. When. in the course of such worl it becomes necessary for events and issues to be viewed from a perspective that transcends that of the functional and geographical bureaus, as in the case of sovereignty, the unit must be able and prepared to swing into action. While the various geographical and functional divisions can reconcile their differences through compromises, it is the planners who have to take the lead in rationalizing their perspectives within the broad Canadian policy framework. Within the increasing complexity of External Affairs’ jurisdictions and of international affairs, it is also essential that in doing so they bring more than a departmental perspective to bear on policy development. Recognition that foreign policy has an impact on the totality of Government policies necessitates the closest of relations being maintained with policy thinkers in the Prime Minister’s Office, the Privy Council Office, and the Minister’s staff.
Beginning in 1978, the Policy Development Bureau has been responsible for coordinating and synthesizing the input of other divisions into foreign policy reviews and writing the introductory overviews and themes for the final presentation. Such work gives it a high profile and in turn makes it better able to respond as an intellectual reservoir for other assignments, like the preparation of transition briefing books for Ministers, requiring an overview of policy, the setting of priorities, or the integration of political/ strategic and economic policy. Where else in the Department could such extensive and broad policy exercises be carried out without disrupting other activities?
Much of the challenge of organizing and managing an effective policy planning unit has been contingent on it being able to anticipate long term issues while remaining able to respond to urgent and often important political needs in the short and medium term. During the mid-1970s, in the ’heyday’ of futurism, the Group took an active part in encouraging futures research within the Department. Think-tanks with specialists such as John Kettle, the leading futurologist in Canada, were periodically sponsored, decision-trees were plotted indicating specific foreign policy problems, and several contract studies were commissioned. When futurism passed out of vogue toward the end of the 1970s with the death of its godfather, Herman Kahn, a great deal of steam went out of the movement. By then it was realized that forecasting methods such as dynamic modelling, scenario building, Delphi and cross-impact analysis could not be carried out by the unit, though the information such activities provided was beneficial to its workings. Furthermore, the results of its studies of the future were invariably disappointing as the academic authors that were engaged at that time were not speaking the same language as the Department and their projects too often went astray because they were neither properly defined in the first place nor adequately supervised through to completion. Filing cabinets have been filled with these unused or under-utilized futuristic foreign policy studies.
While External Affairs traditional responsive mechanism in policy formulation inclines to the use of short-term adjustments at the expense of the planner’s function on defining and relating a long-term perspective to current operations, this does not negate the value of longer term studies. In an era of fiscal retrenchment, it has been easy to argue that the considerable personnel resources that would be required to mount an effective futures research program are simply not available. In the meantime, the Department has yet to find a satisfactory means for adapting the work of others to its own policy requirements. We still require a group that will think beyond the next crisis if we are to have a constructive foreign policy in what promises to be a very different decade ahead in which the woods must be distinguished from the trees. Perhaps the planners contribution can be most effective when they join with the operators in a task force looking at a specific issue, region or problem.
Over the years, the most controversial work of the planners has been speechwriting. Even now, those who have served in the Bureau are divided on whether the articulation of policy for public consumption is a proper function for the unit. In its earliest years, the unit had tried to avoid speechwriting because demanding deadlines disrupted its program of studies. Since 1970, however, the Bureau has had the primary responsibility for writing speeches on broad trade and foreign policy questions and think-pieces for delivery to selected audiences.
In the past, speech-writing has sometimes suffered from the low priority that it was accorded in the Department. It has not always been appreciated, for example, that a speech, after all, is a statement of Government policy and may be as important as confidential exchanges between leaders in explaining or even developing policy. As such, it requires much thought about its presentation and frequently provokes decisions about policy. Indeed, as Henry Kissinger was wont to point out, it is often in speech writing that policy is made regardless of where it is supposed to have been made. The Policy Development Bureau’s responsibility is in ensuring that speeches affirm and develop the department’s policy priorities in a systematic way.
Work on policy speeches has led the Bureau’s staff to become more involved in the briefing of visiting delegations and public groups on Canada’s broad or macro foreign policy objectives. Such presentations provide important opportunities for public dialogue on policy and presenting such policies to officials in other departments. But the cost in time for such activities must be carefully monitored lest the speech-writers and makers drift so far away from the centre that their texts become irrelevant. They are, after all, only as good as their next draft.
Other foreign offices have experimented with speech-writing units which, being set apart, may experience difficulty in keeping on top of issues unless they are tied into the press office or minister’s office. While the burdens of deadlines sometimes seem intolerable, the great benefit of having speeches written by the planners is the continual access it provides to ministerial and under-secretarial thinking. Thus far, the trade off seems worth it, providing its speech-writing activities are confined to the truly policy pieces and not the dissemination of information which is best left in the hands of the specialists and the Communications Branch of the Department.
Functioning as a policy secretariat responsible to the changing requirements of senior management means that the Policy Development Bureau’s daily functions can never be spelled out as precisely as for a line division. Although its mandate is bound to undergo a shift in emphasis over time, in general terms it has evolved through the application of the lessons drawn from its past to encompass: the analysis of broad economic and political trends in international relations, the identification of the implications for Canada of these trends, and the provision of policy advice on how to deal with them. As the only departmental unit functioning from this broad policy perspective, it tries to provide consistency and continuity to Canada’s foreign policy and quality control and stimulus to the process of policy formulation.
In fulfilling this role, the Policy Development Bureau should provide substantive analysis, review, advice, and forward thinking, including recommendations for alternative courses of action, on a wide range of Canadian foreign policy concerns. By monitoring the inter-relationship between regional and functional issues, analyzing the strategic or longer-term consequences of action, it attempts to ensure that a full range of policy and strategy options is presented. On many occasions, it works as an ad hoc task force or coordinator therof on broad questions, such as Canada’s approach to the political agenda at annual economic summits and input into the political agendas of the Francophone and Commonwealth summits.
Because it is not a line division with easily understood functions, its operations remain a mystery to many in External Affairs. These thoughts about its evolution and mandate are meant to elucidate its present role. They are also meant to stimulate thinking in the foreign service at large about the perennial question that faces policy planners and analysts in every foreign office — how do you deal with the tyranny of the urgent without sacrificing strategic planning? If the world of tomorrow is, as I believe it is, important to today’s operations, then where and under what conditions can we best plan for the road ahead?
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1989), pp. 16–18. Read the rest of this issue →
