Shaping Development Policies for an Island off North East Brazil

Abstract

This is an account of the background and progress of an early strategic choice workshop conducted in 1984 in North-east Brazil. It involved working with a regional planning team that was addressing the challenges of physical, economic and social development of a small offshore island subject to competing pressures of environmental conservation and urban expansion. The workshop was arranged and co-facilitated by Dr. Maria Angela Camelo de Melo, who was then on the academic staff of the Federal University of Pernambuco. Having been awarded her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Eric Trist, she had spent the year of 1981/82 on the Tavistock Institute’s then new Action Research Training Programme. Two years later, she was able to arrange for John Friend to visit Recife for two weeks to co-facilitate this workshop with her, with the support of the relevant regional planning agencies and the British Council. This account provides fuller background to the brief snapshots of progress in the same workshop that were presented in Figures 44 and 69 of Planning under Pressure. The workshop succeeded in demonstrating how planners of different professional backgrounds – the majority in this case women - could sustain strategic progress together in an interactive way, supported in this case by a small multi-lingual facilitation team.