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Holistic Approach to Strategy, Policy Development, and Planning — Part 3
Understanding Planning from the Top Down
Place or Essence Sourced Planning: Now we switch starting points and move to the top. This nature of planning begins with defining the whole for which we will be planning. A nature defined whole. If human defined, it is creating a bounded enduring whole such as a family or corporation. A nation or part of a nation is less effective because people identify with places where they live more readily and less with jurisdictional boundaries. Human spirit identifies with valleys and deltas and ranges of mountains or biologically bounded places that give them a sense of life and spirit.
When jurisdictions are used it is often in chauvinistic or ideological ways which open us to a different set of energies and experiences that do not lead to wholeness. In fact the best way to overcome jurisdictional disputes through history is to find something that is valued by all parties with all feeling a need to steward it. In St. Mary’s Maryland Watershed in the USA, decades of legal and policy battles were extinguished when they are understood that for many of them to have healthy place to live, they all had to care for it. It came from identifying with the place and not the water over which they had been battling.
