50 years regional planning in malaysia: a review

This article provides a critical overview on regional planning policies and implementation In Malaysia. Regional planning has implemented in Malaysia for almost 50 years, at the first 2 decades regional planning was tool for rapid growth (after independent) but this rapid mere economic and sectoral growth made regional disparities and it caused some part and ethnics be far from the development orbits. So, national government changed the regional planning policies by New Economic Policy (NEP) to tackling imbalanced development between different regions and different ethnics this new thinking and shifting on regional planning in Malaysia tried to Achieving balanced regional development as one of the key objectives of national development during the development Plans in Malaysia. In addition, National Regional planning has continued from Outline Perspective Plan (1971- 1990) (OPP1) Fifth Malaysia Plan (1986-1991) Second Outline Perspective Plan (OPP2) and Vision 2020 but in all of these development plans we cannot see clear and appropriate role for regional planning In Malaysia. As long as this weakness exists in Malaysia planning system the regional goals will be suffered and affected by “power deficit” and when it has not any organic relation with up and down scale of hierarchy, regional planning will continue by lack of tool and power and just we have a name of regional planning in Malaysia