State To Conduct QDDR
Town Hall Meeting to Announce the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, July 10, 2009. Excerpt follows:
… We don’t have the luxury of deciding which issues to deal with. We need a framework and a vision that will allow us to address all of them; to, in effect, multitask to get the results and outcomes that we’re seeking. And we have to work simultaneously on the urgent, the important, and the long term. Now I have been fighting for the resources that we need to do our jobs. We cannot send diplomats and development experts into the field underfunded and underequipped. But unless we make better use of the talent and tools at our disposal, we’re not going to succeed. We need to align our resources with strategic priorities to direct our funds and to maximize our impact. As individuals, as an organization, we need to work better, work smarter, and work together with more partners in and beyond our government. And instead of simply trying to adjust to the way things are, we need to get in the habit of looking to the horizon and planning for how we want things to be.
To help us in that effort and to enable the Department and USAID to get ahead of emerging threats and opportunities and to make the case effectively for OMB, the Congress, and the people of our country for the resources we need, today, I’m announcing that we will, for the first time ever, conduct a Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, a QDDR, if you will. I served for six years on the Armed Services Committee in the Senate. And it became very clear to me that the QDR process that the Defense Department ran was an important tool for the Defense Department to not only exercise the discipline necessary to make the hard decisions to set forth the priorities, but provided a framework that was a very convincing one to those in the Congress, that there was a plan, people knew where they were headed, and they had the priorities requested aligned with the budget, and therefore, people were often very convinced that it made good sense to do whatever the Defense Department requested.
Well, I want to make the same case for diplomacy and development. We will be doing this quadrennial review, which will be, we hope, a tool to provide us with both short-term and long-term blueprints for how to advance our foreign policy objectives and our values and interests. This will provide us with a comprehensive assessment for organizational reform and improvements to our policy, strategy, and planning processes. And this will help make our diplomacy and development work more agile, responsive, and complimentary. This is what we mean when we talk about smart power.
I think we need this type of bottom-up strategic review to coordinate our work and to accelerate transitions from old ideas and outmoded programs. A State Department QDDR protocol will give us the strategic guidance we need to help us allocate our resources more efficiently and deploy people where they will have the most impact. I think it’s a new way of doing business that will give us the dynamism that we should have and better equip us to deal with the accelerating rate of change that we confront…
Full text at US Department of State. (H/T Dave Maxwell)