This document provides guidance on participatory planning, which allows market actors to work towards a shared vision and coordinated action plan for their market system. It recommends facilitating prioritized and sustainable strategies that leverage tensions and interests to drive change. Actors should consider difficulty, risk, cost and how actions enable future steps. The document provides guidelines, training materials and case studies to help practitioners effectively conduct participatory planning workshops.

1. Step 7: Participatory
Planning
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2. Participatory Planning
Summary
Participatory Planning explains how to help
market actors move towards a shared vision
of their market systems through
coordinated action and collaboration.
In this step you will find principles,
recommendations and action points that
will help you to harness and leverage the
energy, interests and resources of the
market actors in order to make them the
masters of their own strategies.
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3. Participatory Planning
Rationale
The participatory planning stage will allow you
to:
• Help the market actors move towards their visions
following a “path of least resistance”.
• Help actors to understand how their actions will affect
the rest of the system, and how to prioritise changes
that work with the system rather than against it.
• Channel tensions and interests amongst actors into
concrete strategies and action plans
• Promote and influence the capacity of influential lead
firms and market actor groups to deliver change in the
market system
• Understand common issues that you or the market actors
will face when advocating for policy change
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4. Participatory Planning
Top Tips
• Help market actors to prioritise strategies and actions in an
ascending order of difficulty, risk and cost. However don’t forget
to factor in passion and interest!
• Where two actions have similar levels of difficulty, risk and cost,
encourage actors to prioritise the one that will make future actions
easier, less risky or cheaper to implement
• Help market actors to recognise areas of tension as a great
starting point for creating change
• Challenge actors to plan each action with a long term, sustainable
strategy in terms of which actors will be responsible for carrying
out the action, and who will fund it (“who does, who pays”)
• Help actors prepare for the unexpected, and sometimes negative
effects of change – help them to adapt to these rather than be
dissuaded, and to use failures as opportunities for learning
• Engage influential actors such as lead firms and multi-actor groups
as a means to create and drive change
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5. Participatory Planning
Guidelines
Download a detailed set of notes describing
our past experiences, recommendations and
action points on how to help market actors
move towards a shared vision of their market
systems through coordinated action and
collaboration.
• Step 7 Guidelines – Participatory Planning
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6. Participatory Planning
Training
Before you start training practitioners
on how to facilitate workshops, make
sure you have covered the Facilitation Skills
and Attitudes module.
This module enables participants to be more
confident and competent in putting the tools
and principles of PMSD into practice.
• Facilitation Skills Training Materials – Facilitator Guide
• Facilitation Skills Training Materials – Slides
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7. Participatory Planning
Training
Download training materials that can be used
in workshops to train practitioners how to
facilitate participatory planning, through
games, exercises and discussions.
• Step 7 Training Materials – Facilitator Guide
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8. Participatory Planning
Templates
Download the templates from the
participatory planning guidelines:
• Step 7 Template – Participatory Planning
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9. Participatory Planning
Case Studies
Read case studies of how other projects have
facilitated participatory planning:
• Transforming Livestock Markets in Zimbabwe
• Young Rural Entrepreneurs in Peru
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10. Participatory Planning
Further Resources
• Defining Lead Firms - The FIELD Facilitation
Working Group
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11. 1 Market System Selection
2 Preliminary Mapping and Analysis
Participatory Planning
3 Strategic Design and Planning
4 Empowering Marginalised Actors
5 Engaging Key Actors
6 Participatory Market Mapping
7 Participatory Planning
8 Facilitating Change
9 Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning
10 Communicating Evidence for Uptake
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