Clément Beaune, High Commissioner for Strategy and Planning: “Planning is a promise: that of giving society a common compass”

[Clément Beaune, High Commissioner for Strategy and Planning, Salomé Saqué, journalist and author, Cécile Wendling, futurist and social science researcher, and Hugues de Jouvenel, founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine Futuribles , will form the team of personalities that we invite you to compete against on Friday, September 19 at 8:30 p.m. during the big quiz of Le Monde , around a series of instructive, funny, serious questions, on the way in which Le Monde was able – or not – to predict the future.]

Planning is an "uncertainty reducer," wrote Pierre Massé, Commissioner General for Planning under General de Gaulle . This requirement is all the more necessary in an era saturated with uncertainties: global rearmament, climate emergency, technological revolutions... However, instead of setting a clear course, public decision-making too often remains a prisoner of the short term. Of urgency. Of instability.

Yet, contrary to popular belief, we plan more today than we did forty years ago. National low-carbon strategy, military programming laws, energy mix scenarios, European commitments on climate or digital technology: France has never had so many strategic documents to set trajectories and frame public action. But, multiplied and juxtaposed, these instruments tend to lose their force, at the risk of being neither followed nor respected. The dispersion of tools and actors, fueled by decentralization and Europeanization, has weakened the planning state.

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