Institute of Development Studies, University of Nairobi

The starting point of this paper is a belief that development planning in practice has achieved few of the benefits that its advocates expected from it. Most reasons given for this poor performance do not get to the source of the problem, which is the naivety of the implicit model of governmental decision-making incorporated in the planning literature. More realistic views of politics and decision-making, familiar in other social sciences and even other branches of economics but largely ignored in development economics, pose the questions whether planning, as it has come to be understood, is feasible at all, and, even if feasible, whether it could be an efficient instrument of economic policy. Suggestions are made on what could be rescued from the debris.